Ecologists and Ranchers Try to Mend Fences

Bumping down the streets of this high country tourist mecca this summer, a pickup hauled a large cardboard model of a condominium being chased by a herd of stampeding cows. Titled “Cows Not Condos,” it was the sort of statement you might expect in a fast-changing Western town where cowboys feel like they’re the ones being stampeded.

Cowboys, however, had nothing to do with the model. This was the work of the High Country Citizens Alliance, a 16-year-old environmental group that until now has devoted its efforts to fighting mining and logging interests and campaigning for wilderness preserves along the western front of the Colorado Rockies.

The 350-member Alliance is one of several environmentally minded groups, journals and scholars across the West who have begun to rethink a decade-long animosity toward cattle and their keepers. Just as the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other urban-based environmental organizations are applauding higher grazing fees and other range reforms proposed recently by the Clinton Administration, groups such as the High Country Alliance are having second thoughts.

Many environmentalists who live in the rural West say Clinton’s approach to range management lacks incentives for ranchers to stay on the land. And despite the ravaged range that is part of the cowboy’s legacy, environmental revisionists warn that if ranchers leave, the future of the open spaces and the wild species who inhabit them will be bleaker than in the past.

Increasingly, the cowboy, that tarnished icon of American mythology, is being viewed as a potential ally against the relentless encroachment of subdivisions, shopping centers, golf courses and mass tourism.

“No one is denying the impact that overgrazing has had on native grasses, or water quality or wildlife,” said Susan Lohr, a member of the Alliance and director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a 60-year-old nonprofit institution that studies the region’s plants and animals. “But what cattle do to the ground is renewable. A building boom is not. You don’t go back to nature after the roads are in and the houses are up.”

For the past three years, the Rocky Mountain region has led the nation in population and employment growth and in housing construction. Even before the boom, there were indications that ranching was in decline. Across the West, the amount of land devoted to farming and ranching shrunk by about 5% during the 1980s, and the number of ranchers grazing cattle and sheep on federal land dropped by 15%, said range economist Fred Obermiller of the National Cattle Assn.

In Gunnison County, surrounding Crested Butte, officials estimate that 20% of private ranchland was gobbled up by new subdivisions during the past decade.

The changing landscape is prompting some environmentalists to break ranks with a movement that has sought to drive cattle off the western range. “I guess you could say I subscribed to the ‘Cattle Free by ‘93’ mentality, when I moved out here,” said Gary Sprung, president of the High Country Citizens Alliance. “I don’t hold that view anymore.”

An avid mountain biker, Sprung moved to Colorado from Chicago 17 years ago. Now, he says, he worries as much about the impact of bicyclists careening through the nearby Maroon Bells Wilderness as he does about cattle. Sprung’s attachment to the West also distinguishes him from environmentalists who tend to focus on ecosystems. “I like the old, abandoned cabins, the piles of rusting farm machinery, the manure and the beat-up pickups,” he said.

The High Country Alliance is one of a handful of environmental groups that have begun to work with their rancher neighbors in an effort to find mutually acceptable approaches to range reform. Discussing their efforts, members of the Alliance make it clear they want to protect the makeup of rural communities as well as look after the land.

“Human diversity is as important as biodiversity,” Lohr said. “Drive the ranchers out and you’re left with a monoculture--recreationalists and affluent second-homers who are rarely here long enough to get to know the land, let alone take care of it.” (Second homes are so widespread around Crested Butte, say county officials, that 60% of the tax assessment bills are sent to out-of-state addresses.)

Officials at the U.S. Department of the Interior defend the new set of range management proposals--which more than doubles grazing fees for ranchers using public land, preempts ranchers’ traditional ownership of water rights on public land, and cuts leases from 10 years to five for ranchers who do not follow federal range management guidelines.

“We think that this is a fair deal for the rancher and one that isn’t going to drive everybody off the land,” said Geoff Webb, an official of the Bureau of Land Management who helped frame the grazing proposals. Webb pointed out, for example, that the proposed grazing fees are virtually identical to what ranchers paid in 1980--when adjusted for inflation--before fees were reduced by the Reagan Administration.

Webb acknowledged that the new policy, unveiled last month by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, “does not pay enough attention to emerging economies and their impacts on the West.”

But the first order of business, Webb said, is to promote the healing of federally owned rangeland. Half the acreage still suffers from overgrazing, according to government studies.

Many ranchers have decried the proposed fee increases, arguing that in combination with the loss of water rights, they will drive marginal operators out of business. And there are plenty of ranchers on the edge. One study conducted by New Mexico State University found that most public-land ranchers in that state net under $20,000 annually.

But the most widely heard criticism is that Babbitt’s range plan applies uniform fees and standards to a region with widely varying ecologies and economies.

“The fee is a hip-shot average,” said Ken Spann, a Gunnison rancher. Spann concedes that many ranchers have been poor range stewards. But he argues that Babbitt’s approach makes no allowance for those who have spent thousands of dollars of their own money taking care of their leased grazing land.

Brad Phelps is an example. Phelps operates a small ranch in Gunnison with the help of his mother, father and two sisters. This year, he has spent close to $7,000 installing a water system in a remote basin to lure cattle and wildlife away from an overgrazed creek bed. The $7,000 is about one-fourth of the annual income his family derives from their ranch.

For his range improvement efforts, Phelps was one of two ranchers in the country in 1991 to receive the BLM’s “Partners in Public Spirit Award.”

Ernest and self-deprecating, he is a big man who worries that his heft is too hard on his horse. He also admits that he didn’t always take such good care of the land.

“Every time I picked up the newspaper, someone was damning the cows,” he said. “Finally, I went out and looked at what my cows were doing. I didn’t like what I saw. Some of the bottoms (stream beds) were pretty chewed up.”

Many environmentalists say the federal government ought to provide more incentives to responsible public-land ranchers like Phelps.

“I don’t think the emphasis of the government’s proposal is on incentives, and I think guys who are doing a good job ought to be rewarded,” said Rose Strickland, a Sierra Club official in Reno. But Strickland also says the government must do a better job of monitoring how the range is treated: “Right now, there is little enforcement of existing regulations. There is really no way to tell who is doing a good job.”

Ed Marston, publisher of the High Country News, perhaps the most influential environmental journal in the mountain West, recently editorialized against Babbitt’s range reform proposal.

Later, speaking from his office in Paonia, Colo., Marston said there “is an inherent contradiction in the idea of charging people higher fees and expecting them to be better stewards. You don’t start by knocking the only caretakers you have off the land.”

Marston and others argue that the damage being done by development and tourism already rivals anything a cow can do.

As subdividers carve new roads, they promote erosion that dumps acres of sediment into streams. In Crested Butte, High Country Alliance members have been monitoring rising levels of ammonia in streams--the product, they say, of a sewage treatment plant that cannot keep pace with demand. As development sprouts on what used to be pastureland, elk herds are displaced from traditional wintering ground.

Outside Durango, in Colorado’s southwest corner, the construction of a golf course on traditional winter range squeezed an elk herd onto the grassy fringe of a heavily traveled highway. “Cars were killing them at least one a night,” said Susan Yager, a biotechnician with the U.S. Forest Service in Durango.

In southern Utah, Moab’s population of 5,000 triples with the spring onslaught of mountain bikers. Their makeshift encampments have inflicted more harm to fragile sagebrush and lichen growth in 10 years than did a century of cattle grazing, said Jim Stiles, a former National Park ranger who edits a monthly environmental journal.

“When a 1,000-acre ranch is divided into 35-acre ranchettes,” said Rick Knight, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, “you go from a single livestock operator to scores of urban escapees with their dogs and cats and Jeeps and trail bikes, all of them with back-yard access to the national forest.

“You scare the game and beat up the ground, just like the cows.” But something else is lost, something the cattle didn’t threaten, Knight said. “It’s the ever-loving solitude of the place that people ruin.”

Much of the growth is concentrated amid the dramatic mountain scenery that gives the region its special character.

In Colorado, Crested Butte, with a population just more than 1,000, still is a wide spot in the road compared to places like Aspen or Telluride. But fancy new houses that locals here call “trophy homes” are dotting the hillsides above town, and on holiday weekends, the population can swell to 8,000.

Sensing their community beginning to slip away from them, a group of ranchers and Alliance members started meeting in Ken Spann’s 65-year-old ranch house early this year. Their goal was to come up with their own range reform plan--one that would promote better range stewardship without pressuring ranchers to sell out.

Their plan, completed in June, would raise grazing fees modestly, require public-land ranchers to attend range management schools, and allow groups of ranchers, environmentalists and other citizens to determine local range-management standards.

The Alliance submitted the plan to the Interior Department and is continuing to push for its adoption as federal officials review Babbitt’s range reform policy. The final shape of that policy will not be known until after a series of public hearings around the West this fall.

Crested Butte’s novel affiliation of old enemies required compromises on both sides. Ranchers had to get over the idea that the environmental movement is a Trojan Horse that conceals a spandex army of mountain bikers who want the backcountry to themselves. Environmentalists, said the Alliance’s Susan Lohr, had to get used to the notion that cattle grazing represented “a lesser evil and a tolerable one, if done right.”

As Marston of the High Country News sees it, such compromises are necessary for the survival of the West.

“It could be that no matter what we do,” he said, “all of the West is going to look like Southern California. But if ranchers and environmentalists can’t get together, there is no hope for the West that most of us here want to hold onto. Not just the open spaces, but the small towns making their living off the land and not off recreation or mass tourism.”