A few years back, a biologist proposed building 12 miles of fence on federal land here to protect creeksides that cattle had trampled and stripped of cover for trout and wildlife.
Rancher Fred Otley protested. The fence would block movement of cattle across his 8,000-acre Bureau of Land Management grazing allotment. The BLM backed off.
Otley, a burly, fourth-generation rancher, recalls the phantom fence as an example of how bureaucrats are increasingly meddling with his allotment. But Joy Belsky, range scientist for the Oregon Natural Resource Council, calls it typical of how ranchers have had their way with federal land.
“Why shouldn’t the government protect public resources while leasing its lands?” she asks.
Indeed, government’s efforts to do that have set off yet another range war.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s rangeland reform, which took effect in August, is hastening a historic shift of emphasis for 280 million acres of grazed federal lands.
Federal managers are viewing them less as remote feedlots and more as habitat–not just for cows, but for fish, wildlife and recreational vehicles.
The transition is boosting costs for Western cattle ranchers who already are struggling to compete with Midwestern feedlots.
Alarmed, ranchers have been trying to drive a bill through Congress to reverse Babbitt’s reform, which they brand as part of a Clinton administration “war on the West.” But the drive appears to be faltering, while Babbitt is carrying out his plan.
At stake here are ego and politics, as well as policy. The winner may set the pattern of federal grazing-land management for decades.
The debate also tests ranchers’ bids to have their federal grazing allotments recognized as property rights and to give grazing fees a small but symbolic boost that would pre-empt pressures for a major increase.
The ranchers’ bill has been slowed by growing Republican hesitance to take a hard line against environmental rules. Ranchers also suffer a strategic disadvantage.
In an earlier battle, Babbitt was defeated by Western senators who sidelined his legislative package to jack up bargain-basement federal grazing fees. He now is proposing to proceed with administrative measures and needs only to block pending pro-rancher legislation to prevail on rangeland reform.
Of course, range managers’ shift of focus from forage to ecology didn’t start with Babbitt or Clinton. For decades, as the West has urbanized, land managers have felt growing pressures from environmentalists, fishers, hunters and other back country recreation interests.
In southern Oregon, environmental groups based in Bend and Portland appeal many BLM actions. The Oregon Natural Desert Association wants to make a park of the top of Steens Mountain. The Malheur Wildlife Refuge, a wetland about 30 miles from here, attracts 40,000 visitors a year, mostly bird watchers.
The U.S. Forest Service and BLM gradually have increased demands that ranchers, loggers and miners protect water quality, fish and wildlife habitat and recreation. In some places, they have cut or eliminated herds grazing on federal land. More commonly, they have fenced off damaged areas, limited seasons of use, and forced ranchers to move cows regularly so grasses, brush and streams can recover.
Though many overgrazed areas have begun to revive, environmental groups say it has not been enough, and Babbitt agrees. His department estimates that continuing past management practices would doom 20 million acres of BLM land to long-term decline.
As in the 19th Century range wars between cattlemen and sheep herders, each side in the current fight casts the other as bent on its destruction.
“The cost of compliance with unnecessary regulations would put a lot of ranchers out of business,” Bill Myers, a spokesman for the National Cattlemen’s Association, said of Babbitt’s reforms.
Babbitt mounted a media counterattack, charging ranchers with trying to turn back the clock to days when they controlled the range.
The cross-fire is hot here in the high desert of southern Oregon, where you easily can drive through a hundred miles of brown, sage-dotted hills without seeing anything like a town. The hard, dry country flows seamlessly past car windows, broken by an occasional green, irrigated field.
On the canyons and dusty plateaus of Steens Mountain, land that is partly his and partly the BLM’s, Otley grazes about 530 head of cattle.
As president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, he also spends time watching congressional debates on CNN, talking about legislation and battling against his arch-enemy, Babbitt.
Otley contends that controlled grazing can benefit rangelands, and even streams. He shows off thickets of young willows on grazed portions of Kiger Creek here.
Babbitt’s reform calls for each ecological region to set specific goals for such things as local wildlife habitat, water quality and stream structure. If grazing keeps an area from making sufficient progress toward those goals, the rules call for adjusting it within a year.
Otley sees rangeland reform as a bureaucratic jungle. He says it exposes him to unreasonable demands imposed by outside experts.
“If you don’t meet all the components of the regional standards and guidelines, you are going to be arbitrarily reprimanded with a cut in use,” he complains. “I don’t see how we can continue to operate.”
In contrast, Otley is compatible with Jim Buchanan, the range conservationist who has been overseeing his allotment. Otley says he’s learned a lot from Buchanan, who in turn describes Otley as one of the more progressive ranchers. Where they disagree, Buchanan is flexible.
Current rules make it hard to impose grazing restrictions on reluctant ranchers. To demand rest for a field, Buchanan would have to produce years of monitoring data on grass trends. If Otley fought him, it might take him 10 years or more to wade through appeals and lawsuits.
Buchanan is willing to do that on occasion. But being responsible for one million acres of range, there’s no way he can take on many battles. He picks his fights carefully.
Many of today’s range problems date to between 1870 and 1930, when sheep and cows blanketed federal lands in the West. Unrestricted grazing ground down native grasses and allowed invasion of nonnative plants, many of them unpalatable to cattle or wildlife, while loggers cut the biggest trees.
In 1934, after a spate of floods and cattle starvation, Congress began regulating federal grazing. Since then, controls have cut the number of cattle in half, to about 10 million. But a legacy of damage persists.
Here in the high desert, continued grazing has slowed the return of the willows, snowberries, cottonwoods and alders that once held together banks, stemming erosion, and provided habitat for wildlife and shaded streams for trout and salmon.
That leaves many unshaded streams that have dug deep, eroded channels or fanned out into broad, braided trickles.
Many run brown with silt and are too warm for threatened and endangered Snake River salmon or even the redband trout, a tough species adapted to the high desert.
Federal managers have reduced damage in many areas by rotating cattle from one pasture to the next and resting some areas.
Though the Oregon Natural Resources Council wants grazing banned from all public lands, most grazing critics just want more land rested.
Scientists for the Columbia Inter-tribal Fish Commission found a “low probability” that anything less will allow streams to recover.
Agencies actually lose money on grazing in many areas. Current grazing fees of $1.61 for one cow and calf per month are a fraction of private pasture costs in the area.
Even some conservatives complain about “cowboy socialism.” Karl Hess Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, estimates that federal agencies are losing up to $200 million a year on grazing.
Environmentalists complain that the government is paying many ranchers to degrade the environment.
“How much ecosystem damage do we commit over time as we subsidize grazing?” asks Jim David, a Forest Service soils scientist.
To prod land managers, Babbitt’s reform has buttressed their authority. He has disbanded rancher-dominated grazing advisory boards, which had talked over management problems with the agencies.
In their place he is forming “resource advisory councils” and requiring them to include hunters and fishers and miners, and members from environmental groups, off-road vehicle groups and tribes.
Sen Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) has drafted a bill to put ranchers back in the saddle. It would revive their grazing boards, eliminate environmental review of local grazing permits and exclude most people from taking part in agency deliberation on how to manage an allotment.
“The bill would severely limit public involvement in the management of the public lands,” BLM chief Mike Dombeck told a Senate panel last summer.
It “focuses public rangeland allocation and management on the single use of livestock grazing and de-emphasizes other uses and values of the public lands such as mining, hunting, recreation and wildlife.”
The bill stalled in late summer, so Domenici has toned it down. But there is no sign his compromises have won the support he needs.
