Revolution on the Range

The Working Wilderness

The only progress that counts is that on the actual landscape of the back forty.
Aldo Leopold

By Courtney White

U Bar Ranch

Silver City, New Mexico

During a conservation tour of the well-managed U Bar Ranch near Silver City, New Mexico, I was asked to say a few words about a map a friend had recently given to me.

We were taking a break in the shade of a large piñon tree, and I rose a bit reluctantly (the day being hot and the shade being deep) to explain that the map was commissioned by an alliance of ranchers concerned about the creep of urban sprawl into the five-hundred-thousand-acre Altar Valley located southwest of Tucson, Arizona. What was different about this map, I told them, was what it measured: indicators of rangeland health. Our tour, in fact, had been designed to study signs of range health, such as grass cover (positive) and bare soil (negative), and what they might tell us about livestock management in arid environments. What they told us was this: the U Bar was in pretty good condition.

What was important about the map, I continued, was what it said about a large watershed. Drawn up in multiple colors, the map expressed the intersection of three variables: soil stability, biotic integrity, and hydrological function—soil, grass, and water, in other words. The map displayed three conditions for each variable—”stable,” “at risk,” and “unstable”—with a color representing a particular intersection of conditions. Deep red designated an unstable, or unhealthy, condition for soil, grass (vegetation), and water, for example, while deep green represented stability in all three. Other colors represented conditions between these extremes.

In the middle of the map was a privately owned ranch called the Palo Alto. Visiting it recently, I told them, I was shocked by its condition. It had been overgrazed by cattle to the point of being “cowburnt,” to use author Ed Abbey’s famous phrase. As one might expect, the Palo Alto’s color on the map was blood red and there was plenty of it.

I paused briefly; now came the controversial part. This big splotch of blood red continued well below the southern boundary of the Palo Alto, I said. However, this was not a ranch, but part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a large chunk of protected land that had been cattle-free for nearly sixteen years. . .

That was as far as I got. Taking offense at the suggestion that the refuge might be ecologically unfit, a young woman from Tucson cut me off. She knew the refuge, she explained, having worked hard as a volunteer with an environmental organization to help “heal” it from decades of abuse by cows.

The map did not blame anyone for current conditions, I responded; nor did it offer opinions on any particular remedy. All it did was ask a simple question: Is the land functioning properly at the fundamental level of soil, grass, and water? For a portion of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge the answer was “no.” For portions of the adjacent privately owned ranches, which were deep green on the map, the answer was “yes.”

Why was that a problem?

I knew why. I strayed too closely to a core belief of my fellow conservationists: that “protected” areas, such as national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges, must always be rated, by definition, as being in better ecological condition than adjacent “working” landscapes.

Yet the Altar Valley map challenged this paradigm at a basic level, and when the tour commenced again on a ranch that would undoubtedly encompass more deep greens than deep reds on a similar map, I saw in the reaction of the young activist a reason to rethink the conservation movement in the American West.

From the ground up.

CS Ranch

Cimarron, New Mexico

My observation received a boost a few weeks later while sitting around a campfire after a tour of the beautiful, one-hundred-thousand-acre CS Ranch, located in northeastern New Mexico. Staring into the flames, I found myself thinking about ethics. I believed at the time, as do many conservationists, that the chore of ending overgrazing by cattle in the West was a matter of getting ranchers to adopt an ecological ethic along the lines Aldo Leopold suggested in his famous “Land Ethic” essay, in which he argued that humans had a moral obligation to be good stewards of nature.

The question, it seemed to me, was how to accomplish this lofty goal.

I decided to ask Julia Davis-Stafford, our host, for advice. Years earlier, Julia and her sister Kim talked their family into switching to planned grazing, a decision that over time caused the ranch to flourish economically and ecologically. In fact, the idea for my query came earlier that day when I couldn’t decide which was more impressive: the sight of a new beaver dam on the ranch or Julia’s strong support for its presence.

The Davis family, it seemed to me, had embraced Leopold’s land ethic big time. So, over the crackle of the campfire, I asked Julia, “How do we get other ranchers to change their ethics, too?”

Her answer altered everything I had been thinking up until that moment.

“We didn’t change our ethics,” she replied. “We’re the same people we were fifteen years ago. What changed was our knowledge. We went back to school, in a sense, and we came back to the ranch with new ideas.”
Knowledge and ethics, neither without the other, I suddenly saw, are the key to good land stewardship. Her point confirmed what I had observed during visits to livestock operations across the region: many ranchers do have an environmental ethic, as they have claimed for so long. Often their ethic is a powerful one. But it has to be matched with new knowledge—especially ecological knowledge—so that an operation can adjust to meet changing conditions, both on the ground and in the arena of public opinion. Of course, a willingness on the part of a rancher to “go back to school” is a prerequisite to gaining new insights. Tradition, however, seemed to have a lock on many ranchers.

The same thing is true of many conservationists. Tradition was just as much an obstacle in the environmental community as it was in agriculture. It wasn’t just the persistence of various degrees of bovine bigotry among activists, despite examples of healthy grazed landscapes like the U Bar, either. It was more the stubborn belief in a hands-off relationship between humans and nature expressed in the long-standing dualism of environmentalism that said recreation and play in nature were acceptable while work and use were not.
If conservationists went back to school, as the Davis family did, what could we learn? Aldo Leopold had a suggestion that can help us today: study the fundamental principle of “land health,” which he described as “the capacity of the land for self-renewal,” with conservation being “our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”

By studying the elements of land health, especially as they change over time, conservationists could learn that grazing is a natural process. The consumption of grass by herbivores in North America has been going on for millions of years—not by cattle, of course, but by bison, elk, deer, (and grasshoppers, rabbits, even ants)—resulting in a complex relationship between grass and grazer that is ecologically self-renewing. We could learn that a re-creation of this relationship with domesticated cattle lies at the heart of the new ranching movement, which is why many progressive ranchers think of themselves as “grass farmers” instead of beef producers.

We could also learn that many landscapes need periodic pulses of energy, in the form of natural disturbance, such as fires and floods (but not the catastrophic kind), to keep things ecologically vibrant. Many conservationists know that low-intensity fires are a beneficial form of disturbance in ecosystems because they reduce tree density, burn up old grass, and aid nutrient cycling in the soil. But many of us don’t know that small flood events can be a positive agent of change too, as can drought, wind storms, and even insect infestation. We also may not know that animal impact caused by grazers, including cattle, can be a beneficial form of disturbance.

We could further learn, as the Davis family did, that the key to healthy “disturbance” with cattle is to control the timing, intensity, and frequency of their impact on the land. The CS, and other progressive ranches, bunch their cattle together and keep them on the move, rotating the animals frequently through numerous pastures. Ideally, under this system no single piece of ground is grazed by cattle more than once a year, thus ensuring plenty of time for the plants to recover. The keys are regulating where cattle go, which can be done with fencing or a herder, and the timing of their movement, in which the herd’s moves are carefully planned and monitored. In fact, as many ranchers have learned, overgrazing is more a function of timing than it is of numbers of cattle. For example, imagine the impact 365 cows would have in one day of grazing in one pasture—now imagine what one cow would do in 365 days of grazing in the same pasture. Which is more likely to be overgrazed? (Hint: have you ever seen what a backyard lot looks like after a single horse has grazed it for a whole year?)

We could also learn, as I did, that much of the damage we see today on the land is historical—a legacy of the “Boom Years” of cattle grazing in the West. Between 1880 and 1920 millions of hungry animals roamed uncontrolled across the range, and the overgrazing they caused was so extensive, and so alarming, that by 1910 the U.S. government was already setting up programs to slow and to heal the damage. Today, cattle numbers are down, way down, from historic highs, a fact not commonly voiced in the heat of the cattle debate.

A willingness to adopt new knowledge allowed the Davis family to maintain their ethic yet stay in business. Not only did it improve their bottom line, it helped them meet evolving values in society, such as a rising concern among the public about overgrazing. Rather than fight change, they had switched.
As the embers of the campfire burned softly into the night, I wondered if the conservation movement could do the same.

Kaibab National Forest

Flagstaff, Arizona

My friend Dan Dagget likes to tell a story about a professor of environmental studies he knows who took a group of students for a walk in the woods near Flagstaff, Arizona. Stopping in a meadow, the professor pointed at the ground and asked, not so rhetorically, “Can anyone tell me if this land is healthy or not?” After a few moments of awkward silence, one student finally spoke up, “Tell us first if it’s grazed by cows or not?” In a similar vein, a Santa Fe lawyer told me that a monitoring workshop at the boundary between a working ranch and a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque had completely rearranged his thinking. “I’ve done a lot of hiking and thought I knew what land health was,” he said, “but when we did those transects on the ground on both sides of the fence, I saw that my ideas were all wrong.”

These two instances illustrate a recurring theme in my experience as a conservationist. To paraphrase a famous quote by a Supreme Court justice, members of environmental organizations “can’t define what healthy land is but they know it when they see it.”

The principal problem is that we are “land illiterate.” When it comes to “reading” a landscape, we might as well be studying a foreign language. Many of us who spend time on the land don’t know our perennials from our annuals, what the signs of poor water cycling are, what leads to deeply eroded gullies, or, simply by looking, whether a meadow is healthy or not.

For a long time this situation wasn’t our fault. What all of us lacked—rancher, conservationist, range professional, curious onlooker—was a common language to describe the common ground below our feet. But that has changed.

In recent years, range ecologists have reached a consensus on the definition of health: the degree to which the integrity of the soil and ecological processes of rangeland ecosystems are sustained over time. Components include water and nutrient cycling, energy flow, and the structure and dynamics of plant and animal communities. In other words, when scarce resources such as water and nutrients are captured and stored locally, by healthy grass plants, for example, then ecological integrity can be maintained and sustained. Without these resources—if water runs offsite instead of percolating into the soil, or grass plants die due to excessive erosion of the topsoil, for example—this integrity will likely be lost over time, perhaps quickly.

This is the language of soil, grass, and water.

Taking it the next step, range ecologists echo Aldo Leopold’s famous quote, “Healthy land is the only permanently profitable land.” Producing commodities and satisfying values from a stretch of land on a sustained basis, they insist, depends on the renewability of internal ecological processes. In other words, before land can sustainably support a value, such as livestock grazing, hunting, recreation, or wildlife protection, it must be functioning well at a basic ecological level. Before we, as a society, can talk about designating critical habitat for endangered species, or increasing forage for cows, or expanding recreational use, we need to know the answer to a simple question: is the land healthy at the level of soil, grass, and water?
If the answer is “no,” then all our values for that land may be at risk.

Or as Kirk Gadzia, coauthor of Rangeland Health, the pioneering work published in 1994 by the National Academy of Sciences, likes to put it, “It all comes down to soil. If it’s stable, there’s hope for the future. But if it’s moving, then all bets are off for the ecosystem.” It is a sentiment Roger Bowe, an award-winning rancher from eastern New Mexico, echoes. “Bare soil is the rancher’s number one enemy.”

It should become the number one enemy of conservationists as well.

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This was the message I tried to communicate to the young activist under the tree hot summer day—that a rangeland health paradigm, employing standard indicators, allows all land to be evaluated equally and fairly. By adopting it, the conservation movement could begin to heed Aldo Leopold’s advice that any activity that degrades an area’s “land mechanism,” as he called it, should be curtailed or changed, while any activity that maintains, restores, or expands it should be supported. It should not matter if that activity is ranching or recreation.

Bandelier National Monument

Near Los Alamos, New Mexico

The passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 was a seminal event in the history of the American conservation movement. For the first time, wilderness had a legal status, enabling the designation and the protection of “wildland” that had been under siege in that era of environmental exploitation. Energized, the conservation movement grabbed the wilderness bull by both horns and has nor let go to this day. But the act’s passage also had an unforeseen consequence—it set in motion the modern struggle between value and function in our western landscapes.

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Furthermore, the dualism of “protected” versus “unprotected” creates a stratification of land quality and land use that bears little relation to land health. As conservationist Charles Little wrote, “Leopold insisted on dealing with land whole: the system of soils, waters, animals, and plants that make up a community called ‘the land.’ But we insist on discriminating. We apply our money and our energy in behalf of protection on a selective basis.” He went on to say, “The idea of a hierarchy in land quality is the tenet of the conservation and environmental movement.”

Since John Muir’s day, the conservation movement has based this hierarchy on the concept of “pristineness”—the degree to which an area of land remains untrammeled by humans. As late as 1964, when not as much was known about ecology or the history of land use, it was still possible to believe in the pristine quality of wilderness as an ecological fact, as Leopold did. Today, however, pristineness must be acknowledged to be a value, something that exists mostly in the eye of the beholder.

Biologist Peter Raven put it in blunt ecological terms: “There is not a square centimeter anywhere on earth, whether it is in the middle of the Amazon basin or the center of the Greenland ice cap, that does not receive every minute some molecules of a substance made by human beings.”

I believe the new criterion should be land health. By assessing land by one standard, a land health paradigm encourages an egalitarian approach to land quality, thereby reducing conflicts caused by clashing cultural values (theoretically, anyway). By employing land health as the common language to describe the common ground below our feet, we can start fruitful conversations about land use rather than resort to the usual dualisms that have dominated the conservation movement for decades. We can also gain new knowledge about the condition of a stretch of land, knowledge that can help us make informed decisions.

I know a chunk of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land west of Taos, New Mexico, that will never be a wilderness area, national park, or wildlife refuge. It is modest land, mostly flat, covered with sage, and very dry. In its modesty, however, it is typical of millions of acres of public and across the West. It is typical in another way too: it exists in a degraded ecological condition, the result of historic overgrazing and modern neglect. A recent qualitative land health assessment revealed its poor condition in stark terms (lots of bare soil, many signs of erosion, and a lack of plant diversity), confronting us with the knowledge that more than forty years of total rest from livestock grazing had not healed the land. Some of it, in fact, teetered on an ecological threshold, threatening to transition to a more deeply degraded state.

Fortunately, as humble and unhealthy as this land is, it is not unloved. The wildlife like it, of course, but so do the owners of the private land intermingled with the BLM land, some of whom built homes there. The area’s two new ranchers also have great affection for this unassuming land and want to see it healed.
These ranchers are using cattle as agents of ecological restoration. Through the effect of carefully controlled herding, they intend to trample the sage and bare soil, much of which is capped solid, so that native grasses can reestablish again. The ranchers are calling this act of restoration a “poop-and-stomp,” and its effects are being carefully monitored using the new land health protocols.

Using cattle as agents of ecological restoration is not as novel as it may sound. In fact, in his 1933 classic book Game Management, Aldo Leopold wrote more generally that wildlife “can be restored with the same tools that have hithertofore destroyed it: fire, ax, cow, gun, and plow.” The difference, of course, is the management of the tool, as well as the goals of the tool user.

West Elks Wilderness

Near Paonia, Colorado

Wanting to learn more about the compatibility between well-managed ranching and wilderness values, I had the privilege one summer of riding a horse into the West Elks Wilderness, high in the mountains above Paonia, Colorado, with rancher Steve Allen and Forest Service range conservationist Dave Bradford, whom I met at the herding clinic I organized in 1999.

After buying a ranch in the late 1980s, Steve, like the Davis family, went “back to school” to learn the principles of progressive cattle management, including the details of low-stress livestock herding. Upon “graduation” he convinced five other neighboring ranchers with grazing permits in the West Elks to form a pool and begin herding their cattle as one unit through the mountains. They convinced the Forest Service to let them give it a try.

Pool riders guide the thousand-head herd of cattle through a long arc in the mountains with the aid of border collies and the occasional temporary electric fence. They move the herd every ten days or so, which allows the land plenty of time to recover. Because traditional fences are no longer necessary the ranchers voluntarily removed hundreds of miles of barbed wire fence in the wilderness, a boon to wildlife and backpackers alike.

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Also joining us that morning was Tara Thomas, the new executive director of a Paonia-based conservation organization, whom I had invited along. The support of her predecessor for the West Elks herding experiment had been crucial to its early success, and I was curious what she thought as an heir to the project. She was curious too; she explained that she had recently backpacked the very trail we were riding that morning.

What we saw shocked us at first. The herd of cattle had moved along the trail just days before, beating it into a muddy pulp. It looked like a tornado had touched down; shattered brush and trampled grass were ubiquitous, as was the cow poop. It certainly was not your standard Sierra Club-calendar image of wilderness.
“This looks great!” yelled Dave, as we climbed a steep hill on horseback. “Look at all this disturbance. Come back here in a month and you would never know the cattle went through here, it’ll be so lush.”
I turned to Tara. “People call me all the time and complain,” she said. “They’re hikers. They don’t think there should be cows in the wilderness.”

“What do you tell them?” I asked.

“I tell them it’s a working wilderness,” she replied, spurring her horse forward.

Steve led us to a high meadow where we found a small herd of cattle that had broken off from the main pack. After lunch we would spend the rest of the day driving the cattle back down the mountain in a chaotic rush of snapping branches, surging adrenaline, and hard work.

Before we began, however, we all sat in the green meadow and ate lunch among the blooming wildflowers, admiring the view. Each of us, rancher, federal manager, and activist, shared the same thought: what a treasure this land is! Sitting there, I was reminded of why I became a conservationist—to explore the solace of open spaces; to look and learn, and teach in turn; to celebrate cultural diversity alongside biological diversity; and to revel in nature’s model of good health.

And to try to understand, as John Muir did, that every part of the universe is hitched to everything else.

From Revolution on the Range by Courtney White. Copyright © 2008 Courtney White. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. You can buy the book here.

Courtney White is cofounder and executive director of The Quivira Coalition, a non-profit conservation organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, public land managers, and others around the concept of land health. Courtney has written numerous essays on the West. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his family and a backyard full of chickens.