Q Lawsuits, arson, and explosives? At the tipping point of hostilities between environmentalists and ranchers - how bad did it get and what was the key to compromise?
A It was bad. The tipping point was 1995 when all sorts of hell broke loose. Years of mounting anger and frustration on the part of rural residents spilled over into protest. In Santa Fe, Hispanic loggers marched on the state capital and hung two environmental leaders in effigy. It was a reaction to a lawsuit that had shut down two national forests to the centuries-old tradition of wood gathering. Later, someone placed a pipe bomb in the mailbox of the same environmentalists and lit the fuse- it fizzled, fortunately. A hiking trail in the Gila National Forest was bobby-trapped with an explosive. Cows were shot in southern New Mexico. A Forest Service building was bombed in Nevada. More effigies of environmentalists were hung around the region. The FBI infiltrated a group of environmental activists called Earth First! and made arrests for acts of ‘ecotage,’ including an attempt to down an electrical tower in Arizona. On and on.
Of course, 1995 was the year Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
It was this background of anger and violence that led a number of individuals and organizations to seek a peaceful solution to the natural resource wars that dominated the American West. HOWEVER, we never considered our work to be a “compromise” - in fact, we never used the word. There were ways to manage land and work together, we discovered, that did NOT require giving up cherished goals or ideals - at least for those of us in the ‘radical center.’ Coexistence between wildlife and cattle, for instance, has a long, noble history around the planet, think: Maasai herders and lions in Kenya. There was nothing fundamentally incompatible between domesticated herbivores and wild ones. Both ate grass - and both need the room to roam.
We refused to compromise. Instead, we stepped out from the continuum of fighting, waved our arms, and asked others to come us join us. We called this place the New Ranch.
Q What do you want to teach people throughout the West and anywhere trying to solve environmental problems? Could Al Gore learn a lesson from your story?
A The main lesson I want to teach is that environmental problems will not be solved with purely environmental solutions. That’s because the sources of our environmental ills are economic - the way we live, eat, shop, drive, consume, and overuse natural resources. Every environmental ill has at its core an economic ill. A good example is global warming. Its negative effects on nature are rooted in our economic way of living - burning fossil fuels, for instance. There is no way to reverse the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and thus slow or reverse the damage being caused to wildlife populations, without confronting our economy.
It’s the same thing with ranching. And food production. Or oil-and-gas drilling. Fixing the environmental impacts of these activities without fixing the underlying economic forces at work is like, to paraphrase the famous conservationist Aldo Leopold, “fixing the pump without fixing the well.” What I would tell Al Gore is this: look to progressive farmers and ranchers for true models of sustainability. By producing local food within nature’s limits we can reduce our carbon footprint substantially and have an economy that is renewable.
Q Recently we’re seeing food shortages across the world and prices continue to rise on products like corn and beef. How can the strategies and productivity of progressive farmers today ease these issues?
A News stories about the global food crisis often include an illuminating fact: more and more middle-class people are improving their diet by eating more meat. This is a problem, says the reporter, because it takes 10 pounds of grain to create 1 pound of pork, more for beef. Well, it doesn’t on our ranch - or on many other ranches I know. That’s because our animals are grassfed - they eat nothing but grass their entire lives, which is how nature designed most herbivores to live, by the way. The point is: the industrial food model is largely responsible for the food crisis. We built a system that is almost wholly dependent on inputs of fossil fuels like fertilizer, monocrops of corn, supplemental feed, and diesel, which leaves us at the mercy of higher fuel prices. Simultaneously, we encouraged many countries to abandon local food production in favor of globalization. Haiti, for example. Well, it looks like globalization was a bad idea for a basic necessity such as food.
The main issue globally, in my opinion, is the decline of ecosystem services - the basic gifts of nature on which human-well being depends. This includes food, of course, but it also includes water, wood, wetlands, clean air, topsoil, and so forth. In many places, we’ve overshot the local ecosystem’s capacity to support human well-being, which is one of the reasons so many countries turned to globalized trade for relief. But now this overshoot is spreading far and wide. Therefore, those examples of land stewardship that restore ecosystem functions and deliver basic services, such as local food raised sustainably, can serve as important role models. That’s why those of us who live in cities, which are the vast majority of us, of course, can learn from, and ought to support, the progressive ranching movement described in this book.
Q As the sprawl reaches farther into the West, what can ranchers and farmers do to preserve their livelihoods?
A I have my doubts about the future of sprawl. The models of the future that I’ve seen presented by demographers and geographers never seem to factor in $7-a-gallon gas. Much less $10-a-gallon-gas. At those prices, we enter a new phase in the region, what could be called the “Next West.” Everything will become increasingly local by necessity, especially food production. In fact, I’m sure we’ll eventually regret paving over all that prime agricultural land that went under asphalt over the past twenty years. Who knows, maybe we’ll reclaim some of it in time.
In the meantime, there are a suite of options available to landowners who want to stay in agriculture: conservations easements, diversification of income sources, niche marketing of food products, grassbanking, recreational opportunities, restoration work, and so forth. The chief challenge right now is profitability. Many ranchers are struggling to make ends meet, especially as diesel prices rise. Land is still far more valuable for real estate development than agriculture - though, as I said, I think this will reverse over time. Until it does, however, we need to help ranchers and farmers stay on the land. Ultimately, we will need more ranchers, not less. That means figuring out how to help the next generation as well.
Q We’ve just seen protection for the gray wolves lifted and cougars strolling through Chicago. How can ranchers both protect their cattle and the animal life on their land?
A Ranchers love wildlife. What they don’t like is being forced into an either/or choice between a wild animal and their cattle. Historically, they were forced into this choice by their management style, which dispersed cattle over a vast amount of land, often leading to conflicts with predators. They were also abetted by a utilitarian view of nature that considered it to be subservient to human needs, such as livestock production. But this view has changed, or is in transition in many places. A more holistic vision is emerging where wildlife and cattle can coexist - as they do in many places around the globe. This is not to say there aren’t conflicts still, because there are. But alternatives now exist to the old model and I think this is good news for everyone.
Q If we want to continue to eat beef, see green pastures and native wildlife throughout the west, what do consumers and urbanites need to do today?
A Buy local, grassfed, humanely-raised meat. Support your local progressive agrarian. Ask questions. Visit a farm or ranch. Vote with your pocketbook. Be a part of the solution.
