Sacred Cows

A $100 million voluntary buyout bill for ranchers across the West, introduced by Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), only sounds like a public rip-off. “The federal grazing program loses a quarter-billion dollars a year,” says Andy Kerr, director of a consortium of public-lands grazing activists called the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, who thinks the GAO's estimate of $123 million is way too conservative. “So the $175 per AUM price in our [Grijalva's] bill is a fabulous deal for taxpayers. The reductions in the cost of managing the system will pay back the upfront costs of buying out ranchers in a few years, and the ecological benefits will be huge.” While Kerr admits the bill appears dead in the water, he points out that at the request of wildlife advocates and ranchers, Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) is preparing legislation to purchase grazing allotments in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. “I'm optimistic that there are going to be site-specific buyouts legislated by Congress,” Kerr says. “The National Cattlemen's Beef Association opposes buyouts, but on the Cascade-Siskiyou they're neutral, which in DC means: ‘Do what you have to do, and we'll look the other way.' ” The association's local affiliates are supporting the buyout, as are the Jackson County Commission, the governor, local state legislators, and the county's two daily newspapers.

But Kerr cautions that buyouts can happen only if the ranchers want them, and that they will want them only if NEPA limits the number of cows they can run on public land. The current attack on NEPA is giving them second thoughts. What's more, talk of large-scale federal buyouts is making private buyouts more difficult. “Stupid,” is how the National Wildlife Federation's Hank Fischer describes legislation like Grijalva's. “Every deal I negotiate now starts at $175 an AUM, twice what the grazing is worth. I've never paid that much, and I've retired 21 allotments in the Yellowstone ecosystem—300,000 acres. I think bills like that are pushed by people who are well intended but politically naive.”

While many imperiled species don't have time to wait for the political change that will allow large-scale government buyout legislation, that change is under way. “Big federal buyouts won't happen quickly,” says Lucas. “But they might happen over a 10-year period. At some point the ranching community needs to say: ‘We're old; our sons are not taking over; we're not making money—let's have a buyout program.' ” Jon Marvel, director of the Western Watersheds Project, agrees. “If ranchers want this, it will happen,” he says. “We had thought [Representative Grijalva's] legislation would be specific to Arizona because 150 ranchers were clamoring for it after the prolonged drought obliged the Tonto National Forest to stop all grazing.” But in 2005 the drought broke, the forest reopened, NEPA came under increased attack, and the hopes of ranchers sprouted along with the grass.

“I understand those kind of complaints [like Fischer's],” declares grazing-reform activist and Arizona State University law professor Joe Feller, who assists conservation groups with buyouts. “But for this to really happen on a large scale, we'll need a federal program.” Although he's dealing with willing sellers and buyers, Feller encounters opposition to buyouts, especially from property-rights barkers. “People believe in ranching even though they're losing money,” he says, “and they don't like to see their neighbors bought out.” Feller reports that the Grand Canyon Trust used to get some cooperation from the Bush administration (which likes buyouts because they're a popular way of dispensing pork to Republicans), but that all the noise from public-lands ranching preservationists has frightened it away. According to sworn testimony by Richard Nicholas, former public-lands chairman of the Utah Cattlemen's Association, BLM director Kathleen Clarke encouraged his group to sue her agency after failing in her own clandestine efforts to nix a large grazing buyout in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.

Kerr says this: “The public-lands ranching industry is going extinct, and [a federal] buyout is a fair way to address this inevitability. It's a politically elegant solution—the golden saddle. I tell my enviro friends, ‘Hey, it's only money.' We environmentalists are always saying there is more to life than money, so why get hung up on giving these ranchers a generous deal?”

Kit Laney, whose 145,000-acre wilderness grazing allotment in New Mexico's Gila National Forest I inspected in 1994, considers himself a victim of NEPA, and in a way he's right. Egged on by the livestock industry and financially backed by his fellow New Mexicans and a property-rights outfit called the Paragon Foundation, he consistently ignored Forest Service citations and permit cancellations. There was endless litigation, all of it won by the Forest Service and environmental groups, using NEPA documents as evidence. Laney's in-our-face outlaw ranching ended in March 2004 when the Forest Service finally ran out of patience, rounded up his trespassing cattle, and sold them at public auction. For assaulting federal law- enforcement officers during the roundup, Laney was jailed for six months. Proceeds from the sale of his stock went to the government as partial reimbursement, leaving taxpayers about $150,000 short.

In 2006 Black Canyon Creek runs clear and cold through a rapidly recovering riparian forest. The mongrel trout have been removed and the pure Gilas restored. The east fork of the Gila River looks like a cover of Trout magazine. And while middle Diamond Creek isn't running water quite yet, the grass component is back, knee-high last spring. The Nature Conservancy has acquired permits to five allotments (four of them at least partially in wilderness), by buying the ranches that held them; and it and its rancher tenant have voluntarily reduced cattle from 1,688 head to 230.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service has reduced the number of cattle on the old Laney allotment from 578 to the exact number this dry, fragile, beautiful land and its fish and wildlife can safely handle: zero.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

NEPA provides for public comment on grazing plans and permits. Contact the BLM or Forest Service office that presides over rangeland you want restored, and make yourself heard. Urge your legislators to protect NEPA from congressional and administrative attack. For more information, visit the website of the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign (www.publiclandsranching.org).