Column by George Sibley
Grazing – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
AT THE WESTERN STATE COLLEGE Spring Environmental Symposium — titled “The Future of Public Rangelands” — Arizona rancher Bill McDonald raised an interesting challenge: the challenge to build “the radical center.”
McDonald is a third-generation rancher down near the Chiracahua Mountains on the Mexican border — a rancher on land so marginal that the stocking capacity is measured in terms of “acres per cow rather than cows per acre.” He and his ranch are part of an unusual consortium of ranchers, public land managers and environmental organizations in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona that are working collaboratively on a unified management plan for more than 800,000 “de-fragmented” acres of rangeland.
This consortium of ranchers, public land managers and environmentalists — the “Malpai Borderlands Group” — is what McDonald calls “the radical center.”
“The controversy which has arisen over livestock grazing in the West has been characterized by extreme rhetoric and extreme actions,” McDonald says. “Traditionally the antagonists have been identified as ‘ranchers vs. environmentalists’ or ‘extractionists vs. conservationists’… Those who graze livestock and their supporters have been expected to line up on one side of the issue, while the environmental community and their supporters line up on the other. Stories in the news media, together with the current spate of litigation over land use, has further solidified the grazing issue in the West as one which is black and white, us against them.
“What is being lost in the rhetoric,” McDonald continues, “is the only thing that matters — the eventual consequences for the land.” And he emphasizes “all the land,” noting that “in most of the West, the character of the public land depends in a large part on what is taking place on the surrounding and intermingled private lands.”
In arid and semi-arid lands, most of the water sources and productive areas (both important to wildlife and the natural regimes) have come into private hands over the years, and many of the big private land owners are ranchers who depend on the public lands for grazing.
Denied that grazing, many ranchers would no longer be able to ranch, and “the alternative, in many cases, has been to sell the land to developers” — leading to the exurban “ranchettes” and subdivisions that are the fragmented “sprawl” we all love so much.
So more than a decade ago, a small group of skeptical ranchers from the “malpai” (badlands), including McDonald, were persuaded to sit down with some environmentalists, including The Nature Conservancy which owned a large local ranch. A growing threat from sellout and subdivision in the area was one of the things that brought the ranchers to that “radical center.” Another was their growing frustration at the traditional public-land fire suppression policies, which they believed contributed significantly to the loss of grassland to woody species like the creosote bush which, once it gets established, spreads strong water-grabbing roots out into an area twice the size of the bush itself.
Most of the ranchers probably still believed that environmentalists who wanted to restore natural regimes were enemies, as were public land managers who were unable to listen to local individuals whose needs countered national mandates, but that wasn’t a war they were winning, so some — not all — of the local ranchers decided to give the collaboration a try.
What is the Malpai Borderlands Group doing? They are working on a lot of the little incremental things that are what large ecosystems seem to be all about. One of the biggest things is a fire management plan that lets wildfires burn when they would have been extinguished previously as a matter of course, and that provides for prescribed burns intended to return the system to the grassland that may have existed before Smokey the Bear.
RATHER THAN FIGHTING that bane of the traditional West, the Endangered Species Act, they are trying to help it work. A threatened species of leopard frog has been embraced as a Malpai project. The Group is working with the Arizona Game and Fish Department to establish new water sources for the frog — water sources that incidentally benefit the ranchers. The public schools in Douglas, Arizona, have been incorporated into the effort, raising tadpoles under the supervision of herpetologists from the University of Arizona. That kind of positive cooperation reduces liability for landowners under the ESA.
Probably the strangest idea of all involves the introduction — are you ready for this? — of the prairie dog. There’s the idea that prairie dogs, with their constant underground activity in difficult soils, might be beneficial to grasses, in places where the cows would symbiotically keep the grass pared down to where the prairie dogs could see over it. Not everyone is convinced that this is the case — but they are trying it out.
And that’s the essence of the “radical center.” Cultural protagonists are edging up to the middle rather than staying comfortably out at their extremes. They’re diversifying their thinking and nurturing what might be the most survival-oriented trait of all: an open-minded willingness to try things out.
There are situations in Central Colorado where people might be moving toward the “radical center,” although I haven’t heard McDonald’s term used here. In coming issues, we’ll look at some of those — down on the ground.
George Sibley lives in Gunnison, where he also teaches and organizes conferences for Western State College.