Ranchers Put Environmental Ideals to Work

In the spare, dry hills of eastern San Luis Obispo County where the horizon is unbroken by trees or shrubs, rancher Eben McMillan’s home, a lush, deep green preserve overlooking a small valley, stands out like an oasis.

More than 20 types of trees that he planted surround his house, and thick sage and salt bush provide cover for wildlife. Dozens of species of birds roost in the trees, cottontails hop around the yard and hundreds of quail dot the property.

McMillan, 80, who has lived on ranches in the area all his life, and his wife are virtually self-sufficient. A windmill pumps their water, and a solar panel heats it. Their garden provides vegetables, their chickens provide eggs and their cattle provide meat.

In an era when ranchers and environmentalists are frequently at odds, McMillan and his brother Ian, 83, who owns a neighboring ranch, are anomalies--they are environmentalist ranchers.

Both are nationally recognized naturalists, mentors to a generation of young conservationists. They dropped out of school in the ninth grade but have such an extensive knowledge of plant and wildlife in the area that they often are consulted by professors and field biologists conducting research.

Ian McMillan is the writer. He is the author of the well-received book, “Man and the California Condor.” He has published dozens of articles for wildlife and environmental journals on subjects ranging from agricultural accountability to the whooping crane and the California quail. And he writes hundreds of letters a year to local and state

agencies regarding environmental issues.

“There were a lot of important issues I wanted to fight for, and to fight for them properly I had to learn to write,” Ian McMillan said. “I started with letters, to get my point of view on the record, and it went from there.”

His Own Walden Pond

Eben McMillan is the philosopher. He has created his own Walden Pond at his ranch, his own secluded Utopia for contemplation. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the birds and vegetation of the area, and he has made six wildlife documentary films for the Audubon Society that have been shown throughout the country. And he frequently takes visiting Audubon groups and school classes on field trips, interspersing his lectures with rambling discourses on the deterioration of the ecosystem and the havoc technology has inflicted on the land.

“The way we have mismanaged our environment is a tragedy,” Eben McMillan said. “Greed is the motivating factor today. We’re planting more crops than the land can support, grazing more cattle than the land can provide. We’re going into environmental debt, and the capacity of the land to support people is lessening all the time. Technology is only compounding the problems.”

Both are activists. They were among the first to protest the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, and Ian McMillan, 71 at the time, spent five days in jail after a demonstration.

They have lobbied against the use of off-road vehicles on the Pismo Beach dunes; against the quarrying of majestic Morro Rock, a wintering spot for dozens of bird species; against the use of chemicals to control ground squirrel populations; against development of recreational parks in wilderness areas. And today both are fighting a proposed pipeline to transport water from the San Joaquin Valley to San Luis Obispo.

Dresses Like a Rancher

Ian McMillan is a big, beefy man who dresses like a rancher--cowboy hat, faded jeans, boots and Western shirt with pearl buttons. Eben McMillan is small and wiry and wears a battered gray fedora and an Army surplus jacket. Both are still active ranchers, and their agricultural methods are consistent with their environmental concerns.

Neither uses any chemicals, inorganic fertilizers or pesticides, yet, both said, they produce as much as their neighbors.

“I’d rather eat an apple with a worm in it than have to spray my trees with pesticides,” Eben McMillan said. “Worms aren’t nearly as bad for you as what people use to try to prevent them.”

Both call their theory of ranching and farming “sustainable yield.” They are interested in long-range production and only take from the land what it will yield without depleting it. Both raise only as much cattle as the land will support. But most ranchers, they said, have larger herds and “overgraze” the land, which eventually diminishes the yield of the pastures.

A Crop Every 3 Years

Ian McMillan divides his 1,360 acres into three sections--cattle grazing, barley farming and fallowing--and rotates them so he has a crop every three years. Most ranchers in the area, he said, fallow every other year, douse the land with chemical fertilizers and harvest a bumper crop the next year.

“Most farmers ignore the future,” Ian McMillan said. “The land eventually is depleted of its organic content, becomes less productive and is exposed to erosion. Then it requires more and more chemical fertilizer to get a decent yield. This is what’s happening all over the world. We’re denuding the earth and selling out our future.”

Richard Krejsa, a professor of biological sciences at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said he frequently asks Ian McMillan to lecture his classes about ecology and conservation.

“People come from all over the world to see the way he employs conservation practices on his land,” Krejsa said. “You can go out to his property and see the difference in land use between him and his neighbors. There are a lot of areas where his land has cover on it, and the land around his is barren.

“A good example was during the drought of 1976 and 77. His land was green, and his crops were coming in. But five minutes down the road everything was brown. It looked like a desert.”

Work With Condors

While the McMillans have been environmental activists for decades, they have received the most attention for their work with the California condor.

During the 1930s, after Eben McMillan bought his 640-acre wheat and cattle ranch, he recalled frequently sitting down to lunch and then spotting enormous shadows crossing the lawn. Eben McMillan and his family would run outside and watch the majestic image of a condor in flight: a jet-black, prehistoric-looking bird with an enormous wingspan--up to 9 feet--soaring effortlessly, barely moving its wings, floating above the hills like an enormous butterfly.

Up until the 1950s, Eben McMillan said he could spot a condor every other day. Today only 27 are left--all in captivity. During the last five years all remaining wild condors have been captured and transported to the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos for breeding. The McMillans oppose the zoos’ program partly because the emphasis, they said, should not be on condor breeding but on the larger issue of what is precipitating the bird’s demise.

The McMillans, whose ranches are on the northern edge of condor country, have probably spent more time watching the birds than anyone else alive. And for decades they have been warning about their gradual extinction. But it was not until the 1970s that the issue attracted widespread attention.

Plight of Condor

The demise of the condor is only a symbol, like a miner’s canary or the red temperature gauge in an automobile, Eben McMillan said. It is a warning that there is a serious problem.

“We better stop and pay attention to that warning,” Eben McMillan said. “We can’t just work on saving the condor. We have to work on what’s causing the condor’s extinction--and that’s the deterioration of the environment. If we don’t do anything about that, other species--including man--will be in line to suffer a similar fate.”

During the 1940s the McMillans assisted scientists who conducted condor research. And in 1963, the National Audubon Society asked the brothers to do the field research for a condor study. They found that only 40 condors remained, a reduction by a third since the previous study conducted 15 years before.

They concluded, after 18 months of research, that the condor’s two main causes of death were from shooting and from poison planted by ranchers to kill coyotes, ground squirrels and rodents.

The McMillans recommended that one type of poison that had killed numerous condors be banned and other poisoning programs coordinated to avoid condor feeding cycles. And they asked for stricter enforcement of shooting laws and recommended that the shooting of a condor be declared a felony.

Recommendations Ignored

None of their recommendations were implemented, Eben McMillan said.

“Because we weren’t professional scientists I don’t think our recommendations were taken seriously by the scientific community,” he said. “Our research showed that the scientific community had been rather lax in the way they allowed an endangered species to grow almost extinct. So we faced a pretty cold response.”

The McMillans have also been active in preserving the California quail--the state bird--in the county. In the 1940s when the numbers of quail began to diminish, Ian McMillan developed a well-respected system of preservation at his ranch.

He planted native shrubs, built artificial roosts and designed basins for catching and collecting rainwater. When he bought the ranch in 1936, only six quail were left. Now there are more than 1,200. And Eben McMillan cares for another 200 quail on his ranch.

The McMillans, who were raised on a cattle and wheat ranch in the county, refined their knowledge of wildlife when they were teen-agers and spent summers scouring the remote barren hills with a local character named Kelly Truesdale, who hunted birds eggs and sold them to museums.

Education on Wildlife

“It was like an advanced education in all the natural sciences,” Eben McMillan said. “It progressed from bird watching, to biology, ecology, environmental sciences. For two to three months every summer all we talked about and learned about was wildlife.”

Years later, when the McMillans bought their own ranches, they incorporated their conservationist ideals into their agricultural methods. Although the McMillans have been successful on their own land, their methods, they said, have been rejected by the outside world. Most ranchers refuse to “sacrifice economics for preservation,” Ian McMillan said. And he is pessimistic about the impact of his environmental activism.

“If I’d have spent all my time fishing or working with my bird dogs, I’d have been just as effective,” he said with a tired smile.

When asked why he continued to fight for the environment, he nodded as if waiting for the question, and then raised a forefinger. “It’s not our prerogative to determine whether or not we’re going to become involved; it’s our commitment. We have to do it. We have to see that the legacy of life is passed on as full of life and survival as when we’ve come into it.”