If you’re a lover of wilderness, wildlife, the American West and the public lands on which they all depend, then journalist Christopher Ketcham’s new book is required — if depressing — reading.
In This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, Ketcham weaves together 10 years of reporting and decades of adventuring in the West into a deeply political and deeply personal call to save the West’s public lands.
“It is still possible in this country to find wild, clean, open spaces, where the rhythms of the natural world go on as they should, relatively undisturbed by industrial man,” he writes. “I fear the opportunity, though, could disappear in our lifetime.”
And the reason is pretty simple: Government agencies tasked with protecting our lands have failed. But how this happened is complex and has taken decades to unfold, as he explains. “The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government,” he writes. “The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only.”
This is clear in Escalante, Utah — home to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — a crucial battleground in the fight over public lands. Ketcham writes about the biggest scourge on public lands there and across the West: cattle.
“Grazing is today the most widespread single use of the public domain, occurring on 270 million acres of national forest and BLM land,” he writes. The grazing of privately owned cattle on public lands has polluted streams, decimated native plants, and turned a biologically diverse ecosystem into a monoculture of grassland.
But in areas where cows have been removed, wildlife has returned with great abundance. Raptors and songbird populations jumped 350 percent after eight years without cattle, according to one study he cites.
That’s only possible if we take drastic steps. “How can you preserve a wild and unspoiled landscape with a ruinous alien bovine on it?” he asks. “You can’t. It’s an impossibility, an absurdity.”
And this gets at one of the book’s key points: Government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service manage for “multiple uses,” which includes logging, mining, grazing and drilling — activities that are at their core incompatible with conservation and wildlife protection. “The BLM and Forest Service are schizoid,” Ketcham writes. “With one hand they protect; with the other they ravage.”
While grazing gets a lot of ink and ire from Ketcham, he also writes about the harm from roadbuilding. We now have 400,000 miles of roads through our national forests, facilitating the profits of private companies from oil and gas drilling, timber sales and other extractions. “Roading was the means by which all other industrial development could proceed, the crucial first step in the domination of the wild,” he writes.
Ketcham also explores the role of Wildlife Services, the USDA program that uses “an arsenal of poisons, traps, and aerial gunships at a cost of tens of millions of dollars annually” to kill wildlife perceived as a threat to ranchers. “During the twentieth century, the agency was probably responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of animals,” he writes, “…including twenty species of carnivores and twelve taxa of mammals listed as endangered, threatened, or as candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act.”
It’s not just Wildlife Services failing endangered species, of course: Ketcham writes about the government-industry collusion that has betrayed the grizzly bear and sage grouse, among other species.
While the Trump administration’s anti-environment agenda has ramped up some threats, including slashing vast amounts of protected public lands, the wheels of this machine were set in motion long ago and supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was Obama’s administration, he writes, that “perpetrated the worst offenses, removing protections for some of the most charismatic species in the West, the veritable last vestiges of the wild West. In so doing, it was Democrats who set up for evisceration the Endangered Species Act, a law crucially important for the future of biodiversity on the public lands.”
So-called “Big Green” groups, those large national environmental nonprofits that get most of the money and media, also take considerable fire from Ketcham for their willingness to compromise away environmental protections and countless acres of wilderness, like with the 2014 Rocky Mountain Front legislation, which was celebrated for creating 67,000 acres of new wilderness south of Glacier National Park, but opened up 200,000 acres of roadless areas to industry.
If there’s any failure in Ketcham’s well-researched and engaging prose, it’s that it’s 400 pages of brutally bad news. And it’s hard to know what to do with it all, which he readily admits.
“Sometimes I’m glad my job as an investigative reporter is mainly to lay demolitions under corrupt structures, blow them up, walk away, and let you people deal with the rubble,” he writes. “I’m no policy wonk. Frankly I have no idea how to save the public lands from a system that marches on inexorably, not in a way that’s politically doable in the near term.”
He does have a few thoughts, though, and calls for ending the federal timber sale program, beginning a vast decommissioning of roads, and what he calls the “single most important action we could take for the public lands, for wild plants and wild animals” — evicting cattle.
And while there’s no grand plan for how we save our public lands, he does present a clear case for why they’re under assault, who’s responsible and what’s at stake. And there’s a rousing call to action.
“What’s needed is a campaign for the public lands that is vital, fierce, impassioned, sometimes dangerous, without hypocrisy, that stands against the tyranny of money, coupled with a campaign of public education that explains in the simplest terms what the lands are, the glorious extent of them, the ecosystems they encompass, the wild things that live in them,” Ketcham writes. “We need to bring the good news to every citizen, the news that he or she has a say in what happens on the public lands. This land is our land.”
This post originally appeared at The Revelator.
It’s a shame to hear that the author is taking such a hard line on cattle. As a conservation professional and researcher, I have spent a considerable amount of time on this topic. There is no blanket answer to removing livestock wholesale across “the West”. The idea that grazing, at its “core” is incompatible with the protection of public lands is just inaccurate. Coming to that conclusion would require a notable lack of modern research on the topic.
There are places where they can and do play an important ecological role on protected lands and private lands alike. Grand Staircase may not be a good fit for it – but “the West” as a whole? – ugh. There is an incredible geographic diversity in the West. The worst thing we can do is pretend otherwise with sweeping claims and prescriptions.
Cattle weren’t part of the natural ecology so I don’t agree that they “can and do play an important ecological role on protected lands and private lands alike”.
Cattle have significantly changed the western ecosystems, and not for the better.
Jr, I appreciate your point of view – I really do. We need nuance to this discussion, not this or that. Cattle may not be native to the western US, but a whole host of grazers are and were. The annual grasses that make up vast tracts of land are also non-native – yet they also provide habitat for numerous T&E species. I have witnessed both poorly managed and well-cared for rangelands. Livestock, and specifically cattle, can benefit soil health, reduce and eliminate non-native invasive plants, and help restore diversity to grasslands that have been damaged. They can also do the opposite.
Cattle can cause both harm and good – the question isn’t whether they belong in the west, it’s where and how. We need more people to be open to the nuance and hard work of deciding how to manage these landscapes and test different tools – cattle included. Exclusion may be very beneficial for recovering vegetation and habitat in one area, but it can also lead to the spread of invasive plants.
Cattle are not native to the West so of course they are incompatible with the flora and fauna that exist out here. Human actions have gone unchecked in the name of capitalism. It is capitalism that is incompatible with the West. Deregulation and lack of oversight are the greatest threats. And regardless if you agree or disagree with me, we are choking the life out of the West and ultimately ourselves.
Very disappointing that AJ ran this article, Steve and crew. It should be explicitly noted at a minimum that the source outlet, The Revelator, is a project of the Center for Biological Diversity, a group with a nice name that is perhaps the most divisive, litigious, and uncompromising advocacy organization in North America—the de facto heirs to Earth First! leading with lawsuits and leaving behind scorched earth in the communities of the West.
As a conservation professional, I look forward to reading Ketcham’s book. Given the quality of his reporting, I’m sure it includes many valid points and arguments that deserve greater spotlight and consideration. I hope it’s a constructive piece of the discourse on conservation in today’s 21st century Anthropocene, just as the beloved rants of Ed Abbey were during the last century.
But in practice, nature conservation and public lands management is not done through one-sided rants or forced legal outcomes. Long-term progress comes through careful deliberation, including respect and appreciation for the values of rural communities, even ones we conservationists and recreationists don’t see eye-to-eye with. And in the end, some reasonable compromise.
This difficult work is all the more critical in today’s divided and partisan reality. If it wasn’t for this collaborative approach and the so-called “Big Green” groups working on-the-ground every day for pragmatic progress, far more of our natural heritage would have been lost to apathy, gridlock and disillusioned radicalism.
Sitting down with our Western neighbors and hashing out a balanced approach to steward our shared natural heritage, with all its values, is the real radicalism in today’s Anthropocene. This article, and the org behind it, miss that fact.
Chase,
I would hope that you disagree with the story but not us running it. A review of a book is by nature an opinion, and AJ has always been a place for varied perspectives, many of which don’t align with my own. As always, I encourage you and anyone else to point out specifically what you think is in error in any given piece, but I hope you will be supportive of AJ being a venue like this.
Thanks for the reply, Steve. The opinions in the article are valid, as I hope mine are. Modifying the attribution at the end would be a start:
This post originally appeared at The Revelator, a project of the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy nonprofit organization based in Tuscon, Arizona.
Chase, if you read the book you’ll find that many of the ranchers and communities profiled in it have zero interest in “hashing out a balanced approach to steward our shared natural heritage” as you put it. To suggest they do so will likely end up with a gun pointed in your general direction. They believe it’s their god-given right to do with the land as they please.
Tom, that may be the case for a few, but it’s certainly not for most or even many.
I’m proud to work with many rural Westerners hashing out such a balance. Independent ranching and farming is darn hard work, requiring sense, pragmatism and adaptability to be successful. Many of the folks I work with in states like Washington and Montana see the ranges in the rural West as clearly as we conservationists or environmentalists too, and are willing to adapt to retain a viable places in our evolving region for their kids and grandkids. Frequently, at the core their values and love of wild landscapes is much the same as ours, if seen through a different lens.
Even if we don’t always see eye to eye, these folks must be our allies and partners. It’s their West too, and the policies governing it won’t be changed without the input and even support of local people. That’s the point I felt this article misses, though I still look forward to reading the book.
The alternative scenario is endless division, litigation and adversaries whose backs are up against the wall, economically, socially and culturally. That’s a very dangerous place for both sides, and for our wildlife and wild places, and one that can be avoided while still conserving our Western heritage.
Cattle are not essential for life, they are a primary source of air pollution, they degrade our water and soils, they are an inefficient source of protein, and we “need” them because we like the taste of hamburgers.
The single most important change that humans can make to improve the natural environment is to reduce our consumption of meat.
This!
Just read the book… In 5 years of running a bookstore in Central Oregon, no book has ever made me so angry about the state of things on our public lands. Half measures and compromise is exactly what got us to where things stand. I dont know what the answer is but if we continue on our current path, there wont be much worth a damn left for us or the animals that need these places to survive. All in the name of entrenched, monied interests who are definitely not you or me.
For those looking for a balanced counter-point to “This Land” on the complex issue of grazing, I’d like to suggest an excellent read titled “Cows Save The Planet” by Judith D. Schwartz. One aspect I found interesting is her citing of successful grazing practices exhibited in different areas of the world where the divisive politics of our culture have no say.
Another relevant resource for insight on successful grazing practices is Range Magazine. While definitely a conservative publication, articles by the late Michael S. Coffman, PhD provide ample evidence that grazing is definitely beneficial to the land and its many flora and fauna.
As Chad pointed out, there are no easy, one-decision-fits-all methods to address the complexity of our Western lands and the proper care and management required to keep them healthy. Some areas may not respond as well to grazing as others for various number of reasons. This is where the hard work and understanding of the inherent nuances will pay off.
More sound science and less agenda-driven politics is a good place to start. Let’s get ‘radical’ and hash out those balanced approaches that are showing the best way forward.
I meant Chase, not Chad. Apologies.