In Arizona and New Mexico, conservation-minded ranchers are learning about the proper place of humans while they attempt to preserve their way of life and keep their . . . : Home On The Eco-Range

Along the Geronimo Trail, where the fierce old Apache outwitted an army, the notorious Clanton gang waylaid silver miners and a Texas Ranger established the area’s first cattle ranch in 1884, the Wild West has come to this:

Baby-sitting frogs and rattlesnakes.

For the last four years, cattle rancher Matt Magoffin has been trucking water to half a dozen custom-built ponds and tanks scattered across his 17,000-acre ranch--all in an effort to save a disappearing amphibian known as the Chiricahua leopard frog.

Up the road, neighbor Bill McDonald has been guiding a team of herpetologists into the lava-strewn hills above his ranch. They are looking to find out if endangered ridge-nosed rattlesnakes are surviving fires deliberately set to regenerate the sparse desert grass that cattle and wildlife depend on in this arid country.

One hundred miles to the north in the headwaters of the Gila River basin, rancher Will Holder does nothing while a mountain lion kills his calves one at a time, night after night for a week. Determined not to harm any of the wildlife that lives on his ranch, Holder hopes to recoup his losses by marketing a premium line of “predator-friendly” beef.

It’s all part of a new land ethic taking root in far-flung corners of the West, a mixture of altruism and self-preservation practiced by a small but influential group of ranchers who recognize that their own future here is as precarious as that of the creatures they are belatedly trying to protect.

What this new breed of conservation-minded cattleman is trying to pull off may amount to the last stand of a way of life that once defined the West but that no longer contributes substantially to the economy or the culture of the region.

With development closing in and environmental pressures mounting, they hope to win a reprieve, not just for a 19th century occupation, but for the last great open spaces that many believe will vanish with the cowboy.

Armed with science, foundation money and the respect of some prominent ecologists, they are out to prove that the arid range of the Southwest can accommodate a “middle way”--a form of ranching that is both economically viable and environmentally desirable. Their ranks include ranchers struggling to hang on as well as media titan Ted Turner, who devotes close to $1 million a year to conservation on a ranch he owns in southern New Mexico.

The Malpais Borderlands Group, an alliance of about 15 ranchers including McDonald and Magoffin, has raised and spent close to $1 million on strategies to protect a menagerie of rare frogs, snakes, birds and mammals--most notably the elusive endangered jaguar.

“Private efforts like these represent the future of conservation. Government can’t do it all,” said John Cook, a vice president of the Nature Conservancy. The largest nonprofit land stewardship organization in the country, the conservancy has broken ranks with the prevailing anti-ranching sentiment among local environmental groups to offer financial aid and scientific guidance to cattlemen like Magoffin and McDonald.

For those men and their neighbors, the debate echoing through the canyons of the Gila headwaters country south to the Malpais region--which straddles the Arizona-New Mexico border near Mexico--is as much about humans and their place in this environment as it is about livestock.

“Our challenge is to show that we belong here,” said McDonald, “not just because our families have been here for 100 years, but because the land is better off as a result of our being here.”

McDonald, an unrepentant cattleman and winner this year of a $280,000 MacArthur Foundation grant awarded for his efforts, argues that isolated ranches like his represent nature’s last line of defense against society’s destructive impulses.

“Take us out of here and you won’t have anybody to stop all the really damaging things like poaching, target shooting, dumping, illegal mining and joy riding.”

Wilderness Network Sought

Local environmental activists offer a radically different belief: that the best way to preserve Western open spaces and wildlife is to put as much of it as possible off limits to civilization.

“What does it mean to the economy of the world if a handful of ranchers belly up and blow away? Absolutely nothing,” said Jim Cooper, who retired recently after 28 years as a fisheries expert with the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico.

“On the other hand, what does it say about us as human beings if we have to sacrifice the living things around us just so we can live a certain way?”

For several years now, environmentalists have been calling for the creation of a network of wilderness reserves, extending from Canada to Mexico, that would be largely free of human activity and mimic the biodiversity of pre-Columbian America.

The Gila basin/Malpais region--sparsely populated, relatively roadless, teeming with coyote, elk, mountain lion, black bear and bobcat--is a prime candidate for the proposed wilderness system.

“The days of the cowboy moving his herd downriver are about over,” said Kieron Suckling of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson. “It’s going to be tough on ranchers, and I am well aware that some of them may not make it. But it is the best thing for the ecosystem.

“The idea is that as logging and ranching decline in these areas, you can begin restoring endangered species and reintroducing the grizzly bears, wolves and jaguars that used to be here,” Suckling said.

Led by his group and Forest Guardians in Santa Fe, environmentalists have filed at least 70 lawsuits in this area during the last few years that invoke the Endangered Species Act on behalf of the loach minnow, another fish called the spikedace and a tiny, melodic bird, the southwestern willow flycatcher. The activists have won many of the lawsuits, forcing the U.S. Forest Service to fence out thousands of cattle from rivers and streams in southern Arizona and New Mexico to protect the imperiled species.

In the successful lawsuits, the environmentalists argued that the agency for years had neglected its legal responsibilities to protect the land and wildlife.

For the ranchers, losing access to the only naturally occurring water in the region has cut their herds as much as 80%, a figure cited by both environmentalists and the New Mexico Cattle Growers Assn.

The West’s changing economy exerts the other great force squeezing ranchers out here. Barely 100 families are scattered through the Malpais region, most of them on small cattle ranches like McDonald’s. They didn’t have telephone service until the 1980s, and many still generate their own electricity.

Spread across a million acres of coarse bunch grass, thorny underbrush and black volcanic stubble, the Malpais--meaning badlands--encompasses the San Bernardino Valley and the Peloncillo Mountains where the borders of Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico meet.

But even here, 100 miles southeast of Tucson, as subdivisions sprout on the ruins of old homesteads, the forces reshaping the West are clearly visible and threaten to engulf ranchers and environmentalists alike.

Encroaching development cuts off wildlife corridors and brings smog, polluted runoff and weekend crowds. There is often pressure to build roads and resorts, and to divert water to growing communities. Even loose dogs take a toll.

Those pressures will mount as land prices rise--as they have in rural southwest New Mexico, where an acre valued at $2,000 in the 1980s is worth $15,000 or more today.

‘Environmentalists Are Our Enemies’

A century ago, there were close to 20 million cattle scattered across the vast public rangelands of the American West from Canada to Mexico. Today, the number is closer to 2 million.

Historically, most Western stockmen grazed their herds on public lands, but now only 25,000 such ranchers are left, 25% fewer than a decade ago. The drop reflects casualties of drought, rising taxes, low beef prices, population growth and laws such as the Endangered Species Act.

Those still in the livestock business insist, as ranchers always have, that self-interest compels them to take care of the land.

But there are countervailing pressures--debt, for example--that drive ranchers to abuse the land for the sake of near-term profit. A century of poisoning, trapping, polluting and overgrazing undercuts claims of sound stewardship.

Moreover, the grazing fees that ranchers pay for access to public lands have not been nearly enough to cover the cost of damage done by livestock, especially along Southwestern rivers where, environmentalists say, overgrazing has driven several species of fish and birds to the edge of extinction.

Raging against the forces of ecological reform, some ranchers describe what is happening to them as nothing short of a rural jihad.

“The environmentalists are our enemies as surely as the Nazis were the enemies of the Jews,” said Hillsboro, N.M., rancher Jimmy Bassin, who added that the Forest Service has ordered him to reduce his cattle herd by 78%. “They want people like me off the land we love, and they don’t care if it kills us.”

Others seem less angry than resigned to an increasingly precarious fate.

“The culture we’ve been a part of is in jeopardy,” said Sam Luce, who lives in semi-retirement with his wife and daughter on a small ranch along the Blue River in eastern Arizona.

A retired physician, Luce has been taking care of sick people and animals on remote ranches in the Southwest for 40 years.

On this summer day, he is in an especially gloomy mood, having just buried the family dog, which was killed on a nocturnal raid by a wolf--one of several reintroduced this year into the surrounding Apache National Forest.

“Maybe it’s not worth continuing,” Luce said. “There are certainly easier, more economical, easier ways to raise beef cattle.

“But something will be lost when people no longer have an intimate relationship with the land,” he said, “when they don’t raise and cook their food and build their own shelter.”

Environmentalists contend that the history of the interaction here between people and natural processes is revealed in the ecological degradation--in the bald stream banks, blowing topsoil and loss of wildlife habitat.

But in the Southwest’s canyons and deserts, it’s also possible to make a case for human presence.

Deep in the Malpais, the 2,300-acre San Bernardino Valley National Wildlife Refuge would not exist today were it not for a pioneer homesteader who drilled nine artesian wells to provide water for his cattle and crops. In the process, he created a vast marsh that today attracts flocks of migratory birds.

“People have been grazing cattle in this area for over 100 years,” said McDonald, standing outside the faded yellow ranch house his great-grandfather built in 1907. “I think it’s fair to say we have done something right.”

More Difficulties for Ranchers

Officials at the Southwest Center acknowledge the efforts of McDonald and his neighbors, but nonetheless the environmental group recently petitioned the federal government to put the Chiricahua leopard frog on the endangered species list, arguing that the government has ignored the amphibian’s decline. In the Malpais, where ranchers have spent $100,000 to rehabilitate frog habitat, a listing could force them to keep their cattle away from any tanks or ponds with frogs in them.

“In arid country like this, it would be a death warrant,” said Malpais rancher Wendy Glen.

Creating another difficult adjustment for ranchers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began reintroducing Mexican gray wolves to the Gila headwaters region last winter. It was one of those wolves that killed Sam Luce’s dog.

Environmentalists heralded the reintroduction as the first step in establishing what they are calling the Gila-Sky Islands National Conservation Area. “Sky islands” refers to the Peloncillos and other isolated mountain ranges of the Malpais.

But some naturalists don’t share the environmentalists’ zeal for a system of pristine reserves. Moreover, they say history offers scant evidence of a pre-European Eden.

“If history tells us anything, it’s that for thousands of years before Europeans got here with their cows and sheep, there were vast herds of grazing animals and people manipulating the landscape,” said James H. Brown, a biologist at the University of New Mexico and a past president of the Ecological Society of America.

And after a century of cattle ranching in the area, there is still a greater variety of reptiles and amphibians than in any other region in the country and more mammals than in most national parks, he said.

“Far more habitat has been destroyed to provide water for cities, subdivisions and irrigated agriculture than by even the heaviest grazing pressure,” Brown said.

“The most serious challenge facing the West,” he said, “is keeping ranches intact.”

No one would agree more than Holder and his wife, Jan, a pair of Western iconoclasts who are trying to make their small Arizona ranch into a sanctuary for mountain lions, bears and wolves as well as a healthy place to raise cattle.

Five years ago, Will Holder gave up a career in advertising to take over his late grandfather’s turn-of-the-century homestead on Eagle Creek, a tributary of the Gila near the New Mexico border.

“I wanted an outdoor life. But I didn’t want anything to do with the brutish ranching culture I grew up around,” he said.

“It’s the attitude that if an animal doesn’t do what you want it to do, you throw a rock at it or muscle it some way. Or if it is a wild animal, you shoot it.”

The Holders don’t use pesticides, don’t inject their livestock with hormones or antibiotics, and don’t use cattle prods. They have cut the size of their herd to go easy on pastures that were overgrazed in the past.

When the wolves were reintroduced in February, Holder was the lone rancher to show up at the ceremony in support. Along with U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, he helped carry a crate holding one of the wolves to the release site.

If Holder is not worried about the wolves, he is quite concerned about the campaign by local environmentalists against livestock in the Gila basin. He is trying to raise $140,000 to develop new water sources so he can move his cattle away, at least temporarily, from the streams that flow through the Forest Service land he leases.

But there is pressure now to fence off those streams permanently, and Holder said he could not live with that.

“I share a lot of the same goals as the environmentalists. I’m not wedded to cattle ranching. I’d just as soon raise antelope, if I could make a living from it. But I can’t, and I can’t stay out here if I’m not able to get my cattle to water.

“We’re barely making it as it is.”

A lot of ranchers are in precarious financial shape.

“I’ve been lending money to ranchers for 17 years, and I have to say their future does not look bright,” said G.B. Oliver, who represents a bank holding company responsible for 80% of the federally insured mortgage loans to New Mexico ranchers.

“These people live out there like coyotes, scratching by on margins you and I couldn’t imagine. But, until recently, I’ve never had to write off a loan. If they weren’t there with the monthly payment, there was only one explanation: They were dead.

“But it’s different now. They can’t stay in business if they have to cut their herds. The average outfit clears $75 to $100 profit per cow, and I only know of a few outfits with more than 400 cows.”

Many are getting out, lured by the burgeoning market in rural real estate.

Some are even taking grim satisfaction in the idea that although they are bowing to pressure from environmentalists, their land won’t form the nucleus of a new wilderness.

“I’ll get the last laugh,” said Bassin as he explained how he planned to develop the most isolated portions of his ranch.

Sitting in a saloon in his hometown of Hillsboro, Bassin sipped a bourbon and Coke and sketched on a napkin what he plans to do with the 600 acres he owns in the middle of Gila National Forest land.

“There will be roads and houses where there is nothing now. The environmentalists will have 100 people to contend with instead of just one.”

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New Ways in the West

Ranchers in the Malpais region east of Douglas, Ariz., and in the Gila River basin along the New Mexico border are taking steps to protect wildlife, seeking to prove that cattlemen are the best hope for preserving the West’s open spaces.