The End of the Grazing Debate

Abstract

Welfare Ranching: the Subsidized Destruction of the American West. Wuerthner, G., and M. Matteson , editors. 2002 . Island Press , Washington, D.C . 368 pp. $75.00 (hardcover). ISBN 1-55963-942-3 . $45.00 (paperback). ISBN 1-55963-943-1. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics. Knight, R. L., W. C. Gilgert, and E. Marston, editors. 2002. Island Press, Washington, D.C. 280 pp. $50.00 ( hardcover ). ISBN 1–55963–826–5. $20.00 ( paperback). ISBN 1–55963–827–3. The grazing debate is over, at least from any intellectual perspective, and we have the folks at Island Press to thank—whether or not they intended it. By bringing out two apparently contradictory books on the same subject, in the same year, they have staged a kind of battle royal. One side attacks public lands grazing so incoherently and disingenuously as to discredit its position once and for all, whereas the other persuasively shows that “the debate” is in fact part of the problem. The loser, in the end, is the simple-minded notion that conservation of biological diversity on western rangelands can be reduced to the issue of federal grazing policy. The land, its inhabitants, and its problems are too diverse for that. Welfare Ranching is a product of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which apparently funded both its creation and its publication. ( Island Press describes itself in emails as merely the distributor of the book, although its name anchors the title page. ) More than a board foot in size, it is really a coffee-table book, dominated by Mr. Wuerthner's photographs, all but a few of which fall into one of two groups, “cow-damaged” or “livestock-free.” These are the only terms, it appears, in which the book's editors understand rangeland ecology. The photographs are dramatic, of course, and they may be persuasive to audiences unfamiliar with the subject. But are they credible? In this case, there is reason to suspect they are not. Of the six photos of areas with which I am familiar, four involve gross errors of fact or interpretation or are seriously misleading. I will give just two examples here. In one, a photo purporting to show vegetation grazed “down to dirt” ( p. 90 ) in fact shows an area where bear grass (Nolina microcarpa ) had been harvested by nonranchers for use in broom production. In another, the caption for a satellite image of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge boundary (p. 165 ) misidentifies both which side is which and ownership of the nonrefuge side. It then offers a contorted and spurious interpretation of the contrast. Whether the other photos in the book are equally prone to error, I am not in a position to judge. But it is clear that every effort has been made to find scenes where cows coincide with apparently damaged land, without bothering to look into the details. In the text of Welfare Ranching, science is strongly invoked but weakly represented. Literature citations are abundant but highly selective. Of the book's 40 essays, only 6 are by scholars, and most of these only restate findings previously published in peer-reviewed journals. Individually, the essays range from cogent ( e.g., Carl Bock's on birds ) to utterly ridiculous ( e.g., the editors' on “The Iron Pentagon,” a conspiracy theory in the worst sense of the term ). Collectively, they are a frustrating read. Many have a single-species focus, and the editors fail to synthesize the various strands into a coherent whole. The volume is rife with redundancy, as each author rehearses every possible anti-livestock argument related to his or her topic. Contradictory arguments are common between essays; for example, one insists that ranches would adjust and persist if stripped of their grazing leases ( p. 267 ), whereas the next suggests that ranches would default on billions of dollars in loans (p. 272 ). Ostensibly, the book advocates ending range livestock production on Western public lands, but the target of the argument shifts constantly. In places it expands to include activities on private lands (e.g., feedlots and crop production), dams, water projects of all kinds, U.S. livestock production (and consumption) generally, and even arid and semiarid pastoralism anywhere in the world. Many of these activities are indeed interrelated, but removing livestock from public lands will not address them all, and it may make some of them worse than they are now. For example, frequent reference is made to the statistic that only 3% of U.S. livestock feed comes from Western public rangelands. Yet on the subject of water pollution, the book cites figures for the entire national herd's waste production—and conflicting figures at that ( pp. 191, 196 ). Does the manure not come out near where the feed went in? Perhaps the major water pollution problem comes from the feed, much of it grains, fed to confined animals—which would only increase if the book's platform were enacted. Most crippling to Welfare Ranching's argument is the asymmetrical way it evaluates land uses. The “ecological” essays ask only about the presence or absence of livestock, as though no other constituency seeks to ( or already does ) use the lands of the West in competition with ranching. In the “economics” section, however, competing land uses suddenly appear as evidence of ranching's insignificance. Thomas M. Power's essay, for example, makes its case purely in terms of income. Thus, if a ranch is the only use of an area made up of public and private lands, the economic importance of the public forage is high; but, if nonranchers move in and build houses on some of the private land, the value of the public forage declines in proportion to the newcomers' income contribution to the area's economy. This may be how politicians view the world, but Power's statistics amount to a self-fulfilling apology for subdivision, with no regard for ecology. Back in the ecology section, meanwhile, a study is cited because it found grazing to be the fourth-greatest cause of species endangerment in the United States ( Flather et al. 1994 ). No mention is made, however, of that study's other findings: that residential and industrial land development is the third-greatest cause of species endangerment, for instance, and that the public lands are insufficient by themselves to conserve endangered species. In short, Welfare Ranching presupposes and encourages ignorance in its audience. Nowhere is this more blatant than in its ultimate “ecological” argument, namely, that the intermountain West is unsuited to grazing because it lacked large grazers over most of the past 10,000 years. That the evolutionary history of grasses is roughly 4000 times longer than that and that grazing-adapted grass species are in fact native and present in the area are facts the editors either do not know or do not wish to mention. In terms of ecological theory, the book is mindlessly Clementsian, transfixed by the notion that rest equals restoration. By its sloppy editing, selective consideration of facts, meretricious photographs, and general intellectual disingenuousness, the book discredits its own position and its editors, if not its contributors as well. It is neither deep nor ecological. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian is the outgrowth of a conference organized by two wildlife biologists and the publisher of the environmental newspaper High Country News. It consists of 17 essays by ranchers, writers, riparian restoration experts, employees of The Nature Conservancy and the American Farmland Trust, and professors of biology, geography, and natural resources. The professors are confident but understated in their scholarship, and the book as a whole does not seek to overwhelm the reader with “facts” but to encourage a kind of informed reflection. Ten essays include no references to other sources, several are more personal and literary, and each of the book's five sections begins with a poem. Photographs and other figures are minimal, although effective. Ranching West does not deny the damage done by excessive, ill-managed grazing throughout the West; it does not dispute that ranching, along with the rest of agriculture in the United States, benefits from public subsidies; and it does not plead for regulatory relief, property rights, or devolution of federal lands to states or counties. Rather, it approaches the issue of Western ranching from the observation that “At both ends of the spectrum, far left and far right, we find a degree of intransigence that is paralyzed by orthodoxy” ( p. 17 ). Antigrazing activism is not really leftist, but the point is well taken: “pristine” nature versus “pure” property rights has reached a political stalemate, a hyperbolic impasse that has not offered much in the way of practical solutions to the problems of the Western range. With a handful of well-supported facts, the book quickly exposes the myopia of obsessing about public lands in the manner of Welfare Ranching. In the eight intermountain states, about half the rangeland is privately owned, and almost one-third—roughly 100 million acres—is private land tied to federal grazing permits. Throughout the region, rapid population growth and rising per capita land consumption are driving the conversion of agricultural land to subdivisions at rates of hundreds of thousands of acres per year per state ( pp. 25–27 ). Given that private lands tend to be located where there is more water, more fertile soil, and a longer growing season, the potential impact of this trend on biological diversity is staggering (cf. Scott et al. 2001). Wuerthner and Matteson dismiss this as “myth,” but anyone who lives in the region need only look around to witness it. Ecological studies of subdivision are regrettably scarce, and Ranching West chooses other means to convey what is at stake: the complexity of the Western landscape and its ecosystems, including the fabric of its human culture. Eschewing the worn-out tropes of the mythologized cowboy and the moralism of the extremists, the book gives voice to a new and refreshing perspective on the West, one that values nature and culture, art and science, people and wildlife, public and private lands. In a couple of places the prose gets a bit purple, and some scientists may object to the essay by Allan Savory, whose claims about animal impact and “over-rest” have not found much experimental support. But most of the essays are very well written, and it is at least clear, by the end of the book, that simply removing livestock is neither necessary nor sufficient for conserving biodiversity on western rangelands. The belief that rest will restore rangelands “is nearly a century old,” Richard Knight notes, but it “has seldom proved to be the solution” ( p. 127 ). What's over, then, is not debates about grazing ( and water, and land use, and wildlife habitat ), but the grazing debate, with its implication that one solution can be found and imposed, top-down, across the West's immense and varied lands. Nathan F. Sayre