Dear HCN,
George
Wuerthner is a skilled photographer and a committed activist, but
he’s a lousy economist. His letter (HCN, 2/17/03: Condos or
cows? Neither!) and his recent book, Welfare
Ranching, amply testify to this.
Wuerthner
asserts that “ranching isn’t preventing sprawl now, nor
will it in the future.” Yet he also states that high land
values mean “that anyone not already a millionaire cannot
even dream of entering the (ranching) industry.” Curious,
isn’t it: Ranches cost far more than returns on livestock can
justify because the private land is so valuable as potential
ranchettes, yet ranchers continue to ranch, and millionaires
continue to buy ranches, without subdividing. This isn’t
news. Economists have been struggling to explain it for more than
30 years, and the best conclusion they’ve reached is that
ranchers and millionaires are willing to absorb the massive
opportunity costs of ranching despite the economic
“irrationality” of doing so. In other words, ranching
is preventing sprawl now, has been for several decades, and will
probably continue to do so for some time.
The problem
with Wuerthner’s argument is that, while demand may drive
subdivision, it’s not the ranchetteers who actually subdivide
land; it’s big landowners, whether they’re ranchers or
developers. The general pattern of subdivision occurring
“near urban centers and resort communities”
doesn’t account for ranches that have subdivided in remote
areas during periods of speculative madness — such as the
early 1970s and late 1990s — and have in many cases left
bladed, eroding roads, unmanaged land, and delinquent taxes when
the demand has failed to materialize. That there are still as many
big, wide-open spaces out West as there are is largely the result
of ranchers — some of them very wealthy, some not —
declining the overtures of speculators hell-bent on fragmenting the
deeded land for a quick profit.
Wuerthner’s call
for “zoning, conservation easements and outright fee purchase
to protect landscapes” is naive. Zoning has been in place
throughout the 50-odd years that sprawl has ruled. Easements and
fee purchase are quite simply inadequate to the task. Private
ranchers own an estimated 107 million acres of private land
attached to federal grazing permits. That’s less than half
the acreage of the permits, but the deeded land is far more
important ecologically than the higher, drier, less fertile public
lands — as conservation biologists have recently documented.
If we use a rough, probably conservative figure — say, $400
per acre — it would take more than $40 billion to
“protect” this land, not to mention the costs of
managing it indefinitely. Conservation organizations will never
have enough money, and the cost will only rise as time passes.
Taken in aggregate, ranchers do have it — it’s invested
out there right now in big, unfragmented properties.
Sure, some ranchers aren’t great managers, but some are very
skilled, and many are at least as good as the public agencies that
might replace them in Wuerthner’s fantasy. Even under
mediocre management, I’ll take one cow every 40 acres, over
one house, any day.
Nathan Sayre
Tucson,
Arizona
The writer is the author of Ranching, Endangered Species and Urbanization in the American Southwest: Species of Capital.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Ranching is preventing sprawl.
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