High Country News has done a disservice to the West
by publishing the article, “Riding the middle path” (HCN, 12/8/03:
Riding the middle path).
The article and its fawning
photographs fail to fully describe the condition of the Owyhee
landscape or the costs to the public of maintaining ranching there.
It sadly reinforces HCN’s reputation of supporting cowboy
mythology at the expense of public lands.
HCN has also
missed a great opportunity to focus attention on a critical failure
of the Wilderness Act itself: the legislative compromise which
permits livestock grazing to continue in designated wilderness and
the denial of national environmental groups to come to grips with
that failure. Livestock grazing in designated wilderness is an
oxymoron, and HCN could have helped initiate a long-overdue debate
about it.
It is irresponsible for supporters of the Owyhee
Initiative and HCN to claim that the values enumerated in the
Wilderness Act will be protected in Owyhee County by designating
500,000 acres of wilderness in exchange for special privileges for
the precise users who continue to degrade the natural condition of
the lands with their livestock.
By letting the cowboy myth
smother land-use realities, HCN has failed to serve any purpose
except the perpetuation of that myth.
Jon Marvel Hailey,
Idaho The writer is executive director of the Western
Watersheds Project.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline HCN still mired in cowboy myth.
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