SECOND THOUGHTS

In the mid 1980s, I said something, or maybe several things, during a talk that irritated a rancher in the audience. He stormed up to me after the talk, and we went at each other for awhile. During a lull in the fire fight, he asked, "Why did you new people move here, anyway?"

So I told him: "Because you people can't make a living here anymore." It was rude, but it was what many of us "new people"---at the time I'd only been in Colorado for eleven years---thought. We were here to replace people who didn't appreciate the extraordinary landscape or know how to earn a living without destroying it. In fact, looking at the timber and livestock industries, some would say they don't know how to make a living here even when they destroy the land. So I understand where George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson are coming from with Welfare Ranching, the book they have edited.

Their lavish book---a throwback to the books the Sierra Club pioneered under David Brower---is about the rift between old and new, and you don't have to turn a page to discover that. The cover photo shows cows in the background grazing on a healthy sage-grass range. In the foreground is the target of the book: a beefy rancher-topped with a farmer's cap and encased in a checked shirt-riding a four-wheeler.

Once you turn a few pages, you discover that this gorgeous, standing-rib-roast-heavy book is crammed with photos of devastated landscapes. If the book were about restoring healthy landscapes, any of them would have made a good cover. But if the book is about class and power, then the cover is right on.

The book is also about animus. Douglas Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, writes in the preface that public land ranchers are "little more than a handful of millionaires, corporations and hobby cowboys. The comment indicates that Tompkins, who owns a large estate in Chile, may not have read the book he subsidized. In one of its few scholarly pieces, University of Montana economist Thomas M. Power shows that that 50 percent of ranchers work off the ranch. Millionaires and people getting fat off welfare don't deliver the mail or run backhoes on the side.

Class and economics aside, the book argues that ranching takes a terrible toll on land, water and wildlife. Among the many fine photos by Wuerthner are classic fence-line shots of grazed and ungrazed pastures; once-narrow, verdant streams that are now shallow washes or deep gullies; and expanses of stony, bare ground that will never grow another blade of grass.

We have hiked for thirty-five summers in Colorado's West Elk Wilderness, near Beckwith Pass. We never go in the fall because then the benches are all manure and insects and trampled vegetation. But by the following June, they are again gorgeous. I could prove anything with photos of those benches. Not only does the land change from season to season, but a photo doesn't show trends or history. A bare wash may have been blown out last year by a heavy flood rather than been damaged over decades by grazing. A slumping, eroded meadow may be in recovery, or getting worse. The damage in the Wuerthner photos may have been done at the turn of the last century, when cowmen scoured the West, and since then has been holding its own or even recovering. We don't know, and the anecdotal photos can't tell us.

But we do know that grazing has had a terrible impact on parts of the West. Most seriously, grazing has excluded fire by eliminating the tall, dried grass that used to carry lightning-caused fires. The lack of low-intensity fire has allowed brush and trees to take over grasslands, and thereby damage watersheds. In addition, ranchers, with the help of their federal predator-control sidekicks, have driven to extinction wolves and grizzlies and other predators, as well as the prairie dogs that serve as a prey species for an array of wildlife.

Hovering over the destruction of the land and wildlife is the sorry, continuing story of ranching's political domination of land management agencies, which prevents conscientious agency personnel from doing their jobs. But we also know what this

book refuses to acknowledge: that some ranchers are now strong proponents of using fire on the land. They work to restore streams. They try to figure out how to get along with predators.

More passively, ranching's political grip on the agencies is weaker, and many federal grazing allotments are more closely managed. What we don't know is whether these changes, collectively, are making a difference. And Welfare Ranching doesn't help us know what is happening across almost half a million square miles of land.

Welfare Ranching and the livestock-free movement it is part of are driven by romanticism. The book envisions the re-wilding of the land, with large parts of the West returning to health and wildness if cattle are excluded from 470,000 square miles of federal land. Romanticism is great, at least for the romantics, in the tight focus it allows. The book doesn't ask who will fill the vacuum created once the ranchers are forced off the public lands? Will gonzo recreation, for example, replace the cattle? Why assume a vacuum on the land will be filled by re-wilding? And what of the 170,000 square miles of private lands that now depend economically on the federal grazing allotment? Economically, most ranches depend on their federal allotments. Biologically, these lands are the richest and best-watered parts of the West. But Wuerthner is dismissive toward the argument that private lands will be subdivided and built on once they are severed from the public grazing lands. He writes that only a few places are subject to development, and that the West's land developers are squeezing more people onto less land.

The same publisher-Island Press-also put out Welfare Ranching's evil, or good, twin. It is called Ranching West of the 100th Meridian, and I'm one of its editors. The lead editor is Richard Knight, professor of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University. The other editor is Wendell Gilgert, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University.

Unlike Welfare Ranching, this book's writers want to reform and thereby save public land ranching. Nevertheless, both books agree that ranching is squeezed by the increasing cost of land and labor and the cheapness of imported beef; that ranching did a lot of damage to the land in the past; that ranchers are not heroic conservation figures; and that the average rancher is old and getting older.

There the similarities end. The Knight book says our conversion of land to urban uses is growing much faster than our population. Even if the land consumption tracked population growth, it would be serious. Arizona's population grew 40 percent during the 1990s, and Colorado's and Utah's grew 30 percent. These are Third World rates. But land conversion to development outran the population growth: It grew at several times those rates. Why move to the West if you can't at least live on a ranchette? No matter where the ranch, someone is willing to pay more for the land than the rancher can economically justify with cows. Ranches are always worth more dead than alive. Close to urban areas, the buyer is likely to be a developer of subdivisions or condos. Farther out, the demand is for ten- to twenty-acre ranchettes. And in the plain-Jane boonies, far from pretty mountains and rushing streams, demand comes from end-of-the-roaders looking for forty acres for a trailer, outbuildings and sheds.

Like galaxies in the outer reaches of the universe, sprawl is accelerating, covering more and more land at greater and greater speeds. Far from using land more stingily, we are fragmenting it faster and faster. The two books also disagree on the science.

The heart of Ranching West of the 100th Meridian is Knight's essay, "The Ecology of Ranching." In 1994, Knight writes, the National Academy of Science surveyed the scientific literature and concluded that it was impossible to say whether the ecological health of grazed land is trending upward or downward. Welfare Ranching says that grazed land continues to decline in biological health.

Knight, in the talks he gives, uses a sound bite to tie together the land's biological health and development: "The worst ranch is healthier ecologically than the best subdivision." Even trails, he argues, let alone thirty-five-acre ranchettes with their roads and dogs and cats, drive away sensitive wildlife such as neotropical birds, leaving us cowbirds and crows and robins and deer and skunks. Sprawl and recreation and row-crop agriculture all create more threatened and endangered species than livestock. (Exotic species are the number one cause.) Only ranches, with their large, unfragmented chunks of land, have a chance at preserving biodiversity.

So the forces that don't matter to Welfare Ranching---ranchettes and leafy spurge and roads and hikers and off-road vehicles-matter immensely to the Knight book. Knight's is not the only voice in this book. The other sixteen essays are about sprawl, how ranchers see the natural world, and how to strengthen the economy of ranching. There is also a touching essay by economist Tom Field, who describes the transformation of a hay meadow into a Wal-Mart:

"Then one day the cattle were gone, the fences cut, and the earthmovers roared across the meadow until it was no more. In less time than a single season of the calendar, the hulking, gray square trademark of a Wal-Mart emerged."

Field wants to understand a nation that pays lip service to the "idealistic image of the family ranch but shop[s] at the superstore of Wal-Mart. "Like the small store and the family ranch, Knight's book is at a disadvantage. Its authors are obsessed with complexity: with sprawl and globalization and the paucity of comprehensive scientific data. They embed public land ranching in the world, rather than sever it from everything but eroded streams and overgrazed meadows. They have no romantic, sure-shot vision of a pristine future. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian is Churchillian, promising only blood, sweat and tears.

Knight's twenty-four authors are not even united in affection for ranching. But all agree that cattle can be at least a short-term defense against asphalt. On the other side, Welfare Ranching is dedicated to taking away the planning time the surviving ranches give us. The ban-grazing-now forces are not the only ones taking away what little time we have left. The Western politicians, the National Cattlemen's Association and many federal land managers allow some ranchers to continue to graze in illegal and destructive ways. Those continuing violations of the land and of the law create a blinding rage that fuels the cattle-free movement. Western senators like Idaho's Larry Craig and New Mexico's Pete Domenici may not be listed among Welfare Ranching's authors, but they helped write it.

Companion Story: A Cow-Free West? By George Wuerthner