Oh, give me land, lots of land

The West is an exquisite corpse. “There was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower,” remarked Georgia O’Keeffe when she first saw the high desert of northern New Mexico. “There were just dry white bones.”

A cow’s skull floating in the sky became the painter’s most enduring image. But there was nothing ethereal about the boneyard. It was the ruinous outcome of Depression-era drought, made all the more lethal by overstocking and overgrazing an arid land.

The hard surfaces and lifeless spaces have always made it difficult to appreciate the fragility of the West. We are desensitized by its lunar complexion and its otherworldliness. We named the landmarks of the Grand Canyon after alien deities: Jupiter’s Temple and Vulcan’s Throne. Later, we tested doomsday weapons in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. It is easy in such an apocalyptic environment to forget that it has nourished life for ages, easier still to forget our complicity in its destruction.

For more than a century, scientists have warned about the carrying capacity of Western lands. John Wesley Powell, who led an expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1868, advised Congress 10 years later that only 3% of the region could support intensive cultivation or livestock grazing. But Powell’s recommendations for limited settlement were ignored, as was the recurring evidence of his prescience: the deaths of millions of cattle during the 1880s, the wholesale failure of early 20th century homesteads and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

“Given the nature of arid lands, cow damaged landscapes are often perceived as aesthetically pleasing, even though ecologically wounded.” So begins an essay by two seasoned environmentalists, Andy Kerr and Mark Salvo, in “Welfare Ranching,” an extravagantly photographed super-size treatise that chronicles the devastation wrought by livestock and argues for its removal from the West’s public lands.

The unhorsing of the cowboy begins with the cover, a near poster size dust jacket of a herd of cattle and a porcine wrangler mounted not on a cow pony but on a far more efficient engine of pollution and erosion, the gas-powered ATV. What follows is a series of critical essays by 30 or so authors, scientists and historians, including the late T.H. Watkins and the merry bandito of Western letters, Edward Abbey.

In many ways, “Welfare Ranching” is the illustrated, fuel-injected version of Debra L. Donahue’s 1999 “The Western Range Revisited.” Donahue reaches back in time to vindicate the contemporary concerns of Western environmentalists. She cites perhaps the most exhaustive study of the Western range ever conducted. Issued in 1936 by the Forest Service, it found that 98% of public rangelands had been severely overgrazed and blamed it on Western stockmen’s reckless pursuit of quick profits, concluding that “care and restraint seemed farfetched and visionary.”

The editors of “Welfare Ranching,” George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson, set out to demonstrate that conditions haven’t improved appreciatively since the 1930s. They use statistics and photography of “cow bombed” landscapes to contrast ranchers’ paltry yields with their gross expenditure of natural capital. A mere 22,000 ranchers today have the run of 75% of Western public lands. Their grazing rights take precedence over other uses on hundreds of millions of acres in the public domain, including national forests and a few national parks. At the same time, cattle ranching contributes to less than 1% of the jobs and income in Western states, including California. The contribution to the nation’s food supply is equally negligible.

The unsuitability of the sparsely vegetated Western range is the main reason, the authors argue, that ranchers have repeatedly relied on taxpayers to bail them out. The federal emergency livestock feed program has cost taxpayers up to $500 million a year.

Then there are the millions that have poured out of the public coffers to pay for the ranchers’ war on wildlife. Since the 1930s, the federal animal damage control program, according to Donahue, has financed the killing of some 4 million predators. The coyote has been the main target, but the subsidized slaughter has also annihilated hundreds of thousands of bears, wolves, bobcats, mountain lions and even prairie dogs.

Historian Bernard DeVoto said the West is a paradoxical place. Conservative lawmakers fall all over themselves to distribute billions of dollars in relief to people renowned for their rugged independence, especially when it comes to resisting government regulation. DeVoto once summed up the Westerner’s attitude toward government this way: “Get out and give us more money.”

Yet, looking out at the growing threats against Western open space -- suburban growth, commercial recreation, the energy industry, snowmobiles and the ubiquitous ATV -- one can’t help being struck by the narrow, obsessional focus of Wuerthner, Matteson and Donahue. The cowboy certainly has earned his place in the pantheon of environmental rascals, but he is growing long in the tooth, fewer in numbers and, for the most part, poorer. Wuerthner, Matteson and Donahue would evict him from the public land. But haven’t we done enough of that, beginning with the country’s original inhabitants? The nabobs of the radical right have already weighed in with a wicked take on the Wuerthner strategy. They call it “rural cleansing.”

The two books give short shrift to a growing reform movement among ranchers, exemplified by a group of not-so-rich Southwestern livestock operators, Arizona’s Malpai Borderlands Group, which won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant a few years ago for protecting wildlife on arid grazing land. Rather than give them credit, Wuerthner and Matteson selected images that dwell on the failures of the new breed.

The Malpai ranchers may be part of a minority. Federal land managers say that widespread overgrazing continues to wound a drought-weakened range. Still, a reasonable case can be made that ranching done right offers a bulwark against forces that would permanently alter the landscape. To buy this argument, you have to accept the messiness of even carefully managed livestock along with the fact that injuries to the land will heal slowly. But consider the alternatives.

The transformation of open space to residential use is occurring almost three times as fast in the Rocky Mountain region as anywhere else in the country. The implications of all this for adjacent wilderness areas and federal land are presented in “Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics,” a measured, hopeful brief for the future of ranching, edited by Richard L. Knight, Wendell C. Gilgert and Ed Marston.

At the core of the book is a discussion of what is lost when a public lands rancher calls it quits. He doesn’t just give up his permit to graze in a national forest. He sells his adjacent private property, his house and barns and the surrounding acreage. Typically, it’s prime land, with reliable water, good grass and expansive views. It’s where the wildlife goes when the high-country forage is frazzled by drought or buried in snow. It’s also what the developers are buying up and turning into subdivisions.

Knight, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, sums up the effects of the suburban transformation. “With more people, more dogs and cats, more cars and fences, more night lights perforating the once-black night sky, the rich natural diversity that once characterized the rural West will be altered forever.” Knight quotes a Wyoming rancher on the conduct of his ancestors: “I cannot change how my relations lived on the land before I came, but I can work to make the land better for my children.”

Clearly, it’s such a change in thinking that will make the difference. Nor is it just the cowboy in need of an attitude adjustment. We, too, are the enemy, careening across country in SUVs, enjoying the view from mountainside ranchettes, teeing up in what was once a hay meadow where elk browsed.

There has always been something un-American and defeatist-sounding about deferring to nature. The Bible exhorts us to subdue the Earth. Hemmed in by forest, the New Englander valued “void ground” and labored to make it so. In his book, “Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History,” Ted Steinberg talks about our relationship with the natural world as an ongoing effort to transform the Earth “ ... its soil, trees and even water ... into a set of commodities.”

In so doing, writes Steinberg, we have put our faith in exploitive systems such as slavery and migrant labor to increase production and boost yields. We have punished the Earth with hydraulic mining, forest clear-cutting, one-crop agriculture and an array of chemicals. Along the way, we came to see the Earth as a factory rather than an organism on whose health we depend. “Commodities have a special ability to hide from view not just the work, the sweat and the blood that went into making them, but also the natural capital, the soil, water and trees, without which they would not exist,” Steinberg writes.

Steinberg is a bit of a scold. Each chapter ends with a lesson. But he is stressing a neglected dimension of our history. So much of what has befallen us -- floods, fires, drought and pestilence, events that have influenced war and depression, that have tested our resolve and shaped our mythology -- were at least partially the result of the way we treated the land. The most lethal forest fire in our history, the 1871 inferno in Peshtigo, Wis., which killed nearly 1,500 people, was kindled by brush piles left behind during a time of ravenous industrial logging.

The Dust Bowl years would have been milder, Steinberg points out, if farmers had not plowed up millions of acres of native grass in favor of more lucrative wheat crops. With a stable ground cover, the wind-whipped erosion of the 1930s would have been less devastating. Instead, it set in motion a migration that emptied out a third of the populations of Southern Plains states.

Then, as now, Washington blamed conditions beyond our control. Today, listening to leaders of both major parties call for more logging of national forests in order to reduce the fire danger, or watching as they withhold conservation funds for farmers and ranchers, one wonders what, if anything, we have learned about the workings of nature.