Hope for the West's open lands
by Paul Larmer
Eighteen months ago, High Country
News kicked off a series about the West’s
ranchlands with a cover story titled "Who Will Take Over the
Ranch?" That first story laid out in stark terms the rapid loss of
the West’s wide-open spaces to the real estate economy that
now so fervently grips the region.
In the last 30 years,
nearly a quarter of the West’s private ranchlands have been
converted to other uses, according to the American Farmland Trust.
And the pace is quickening due to a host of factors, including
aging ranchers, uninterested heirs, poor commodity markets, high
taxes, ranchette development and soaring land values.
What can be done to preserve the West’s private lands, with
their wide-open spaces and rich wildlife habitat? Our first story
described one promising development: the region’s rapidly
growing network of land trusts, which use easements to put some
cash in ranchers’ pockets in return for keeping the land
undeveloped (HCN, 3/29/04: Who will take over the ranch?).
Since then, we’ve covered collaborative work among
conservationists, ranchers and the federal government to conserve
unplowed prairie in eastern Montana (HCN, 8/2/04: The Greening of
the Plains). We profiled a rancher in the growing "healthy beef"
movement, which encourages more sustainable grazing and, because it
cuts out the meatpacker middlemen, allows ranchers to make a decent
profit (HCN, 3/21/05: Colorado couple turns healthy profit from
healthy beef).
We also covered a growing movement to pay
ranchers to permanently remove their cows from ecologically
sensitive public lands — a process that, ironically, could
allow them to keep their private lands whole (HCN, 4/4/05: The Big
Buyout). And we didn’t shy away from the conservation
movement’s warts: One cover story detailed how conservation
easements can be misused due to a lack of formal protocols (HCN,
5/30/05: Write-off on the Range).
This issue’s
cover story is the final installment of the series, and we’re
asking another tough question: Can progressive ranchers work
together to become a force strong enough to ensure their own
survival in the West of the 21st century?
Veteran
reporter Tony Davis takes a hard look at the nonprofit Quivira
Coalition, a group that has quickly become the nucleus of the
growing "New Ranch" movement. The coalition gives ranchers the
tools to become better land managers, filling a vital role that
ranching’s traditional organizations — the
cattlemen’s associations — have largely ignored in
their determination to fight grazing fee increases and
environmental regulations.
But it’s one thing to
get people to come to a conference or attend a stream restoration
workshop, quite another to forge a movement that has political
clout, backs up its practices with science, and is able to keep
ranchers on their feet in an economic stampede.
Can we
preserve the West’s invaluable private lands? Yes, but it
will take a level of collaboration and organization that groups
like Quivira may aspire to, but have yet to achieve.
The
ingredients for a progressive ranching movement are scattered out
there, among the land trusts, the conservation groups, the
agencies, the ranching community — even in the cities and
suburbs, where many of the next generation of ranchland owners will
come from. What’s needed now are creative cooks who can bring
those ingredients together.
If that happens, then decades
from now, after the passing of the largest wave of ranchland
transfer since the Homestead Act, the region’s ranchlands
will endure, a home not only to the West’s rich wildlife, but
also to a new, eclectic breed of rancher.