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Saving the Wide Open Spaces:
Eric Jones of the Institute for Culture and Ecology kindly provided the digital photos associated with this text. The gathering’s goals were to discuss:
As Tom Sheridan, principal organizer of the meeting, said in his introduction, “We cannot buy all the land we need for biodiversity—instead, we need to forge private/public partnerships that work to do this on the ground. We need to get beyond abstractions. Whenever I sit in community meetings all day, it is because I want to preserve Avra Valley—its wildlife, habitats, and people—not because I want to conserve ‘critical habitat’ per se.” Tom Sheridan of the Southwest Center feels there is currently cause for cautious optimism, celebration and convergence: “Across the West, conservationists, ranchers, farmers and forest workers are acknowledging their common ground and joining together to protect the wide open spaces from the economic and demographic forces that are fragmenting landscapes much like Avra Valley. A new vision is arising that perceives conservation of biodiversity and sustainable resource use as compatible and symbiotic, not antithetical.” Rob Marshall of the Nature Conservancy reported that grasslands are one of the richest but most vulnerable landscapes in the West, and they are not well inventoried. A recent study in Arizona and southwest New Mexico revealed that while 27% of the region’s grasslands have been lost—-roughly 4 million acres—4.7 million were in good ecological condition and 7.5 million acres could be restored. Roughly 30% of the restorable grasslands of Arizona and New Mexico exist on private lands, presenting opportunities for public/private cooperative ventures in grassland restoration. Additional results are found on the “grasslands” page of www.azconservation.org. Peter Warren, who has worked for the Nature Conservancy in collaboration with the Malpai Borderlands Group, added that, ”For a long time, conservationists have not been acting effectively on a scale that will protect biodiversity in the long run. Now we’re looking at the remaining large intact landscapes, and the most vulnerable ones are mid-elevation grassland valleys and their riparian habitats. Peter observed that here is a high correlation between where we’ve lost the hydrological function of grasslands, and where we’ve lost perennial streams. To keep grasslands functional, you have to keep them in big pieces. The challenges are that you have to succeed in both keeping the land in one piece and actively managing the land through fire and grazing.” Nathan Sayre from the University of California at Berkeley reminded us that the issues regarding rangelands are very locally specific—-there is no formula. However, we can compare different localities with respect to what factors make it easier or harder to achieve conservation goals, such as land ownership patterns, land use, proximity to urban areas, and presence of endangered species.
There are five primary tools we can use to encourage sustainable ranching: money, people, knowledge, flexibility and fire. Currently, ranching is being sustained largely by the private money of ranchers, by resisting developing despite high incentives and subsidizing their operations with off-ranch jobs or wealth. A survey of federal land lessees in the West found that 50.7% of ranchers earn less than half their income from ranching. He noted five findings from comparing eight sites in the Southwest:
Ross Humphreys, rancher and publisher, spoke of his own involvement in ranch conservation in areas of rapidly changing land uses. He then suggested that we seek out analyses of Arizona land ownership which indicate that only six percent of the land base remains in private hands, with two-thirds of that already being subdivided. Tom Sheridan added that we need to better understand the economic trends driving such rapid land use changes. Susan Charnley compared forest issues with rangeland issues: “Here in the West, two thirds of the forest is in public (federal agency) stewardship, but the other third is in tribal, non-industrial private and industrial private forests. With the latter, there are still many challenges to managing private lands sustainably, such as the current uncharacteristically severe risk of fire, invasive species, and habitat fragmentation. Susan Charnley of USDA Forest Service offered a warning: “As we lose working forest lands run by private individuals, we lose a way of life and local knowledge that has been in Western communities for over a century.” Susan encouraged us not to underestimate a “new” emerging class of stewards: timberland investment management operations. Timber industry employment in the West is now half of what it was in the 1970s, and as former forest practitioners move out of rural landscapes, amenity migrants have moved in who are not tied to local uses. However, the tools for conservation of private range and forest lands are much the same. Eric Jones of the Institute for Culture and Ecology reminded us that non-timber forest products have been a bio-diverse source of income that residents in low income Western communities have always depended upon during periods of high unemployment. They are in ways the eyes and ears of the forest, but they remain invisible at most public meetings and in the formulation of forest management plans. Eric Jones also noted that we currently have no idea of how much the harvesting of this biodiversity contributes to the rural West. There are environmental justice issues with this industry that depend on undocumented laborers and immigrants that currently have little voice, and their activities are often criminalized. We need to encourage means for them to be stakeholders in management, not merely be treated as extractive harvesters. Bill Durham noted that as fire suppression reduces non-timber forest products, we have one group of local users increasingly disengaged with the forest, skewing the management of the forest toward timber harvested by non-locals rather than multiple products harvested by locals. This is a huge positive feedback loop through time. Lois Stanford from New Mexico State University noted that farmers and ranchers no longer have their former political and economic power in the Four Corners states to shape overall U.S. policies affecting their destinies—-they now contribute significant percentages of the national harvests, and seldom drive significant adjustments in national land and agricultural policies anymore. Therefore, they need to make broader alliances involving producers, conservationists and consumers if they are to advance their own sustainability, especially through alternative (direct) marketing strategies and policy.
Tom Sheridan asked, “What are the roles of land grant universities in helping this along? Can we ask them to shift some of their resources to attend to smaller and middle scale solutions? If we have this much restoration of range and forest lands to do, how can we make sure that such work is contracted to local communities rather than to outsiders so they help generate wealth in those communities? How do we build a political voice to this common ground/radical center movement?” Rancher Mac Donaldson argued that the “people part” of the land/people equation is the part driving the detrimental changes in land quality, but that most research focuses on documenting the physical changes. We need to deal more directly with the social drivers and impacts of rural residents, so social scientists should help elucidate this dynamics and give us a sense of where the tipping points might be. Barron Orr has noted that there has not actually been a decline in agricultural acreage in Arizona, but tremendous structural shifts. He suggested that we be cautious in assuming that unidirectional declines are occurring, and noted that there is really a lot of heterogeneity—including hopeful signs—out in working landscapes at this moment. The next morning, Tom Sheridan reminded us to underscore proposals during the day that advance our collective agenda either through providing policy initiatives, more funding, or more publicity and support that might help keep rural communities healthy. Martin Goebel suggested that we don’t necessarily need more websites or conferences, but a better understanding of what generally works in rancher/environmentalist collaborations and what has failed, or what is not transferable. Nathan Sayre suggested that we need to smoke out the links between ecological degradation and rural community degradation, so that the public at large realizes the connections that contribute to rural poverty. Gary Nabhan of the Center for Sustainable Environments suggested that we need to better train both ecological and social scientists to more directly address the critical management issues that ranchers are facing, rather than merely doing academic research in their midst that has no ultimate impact on the integrity of the landscape or the way it is managing on the ground. Kim Hedrick suggested that ranchers are under so much public scrutiny today that some no longer feel they have the slack to experiment with a management strategy for two to three years to see where it takes them. Barron Orr noted that there is an even more fundamental disconnect here in the U.S.: that this is the only country in the world that assumes that people living on the land don’t have the traditional ecological knowledge to know how to care of it. Both Barron and Lois Stanford emphasized the need to see scientists as part of networks of people with a variety of skills, talents and communication styles that are essentially constructing new communities to get things done on the land. Bill McDonald then highlighted the development of the Malpai Borderlands Group as it brings together stakeholders, including 30 ranchers, in efforts to maintain the integrity of a million acre landscape on the Arizona/New Mexico boundary with Mexico. Although 98% of the land there has had cattle on it for over a century, until recently, the public didn’t understand that livestock management was one of the few economic means of keeping that open space intact. Informal meetings between environmentalists and ranchers over a year and a half found much common ground, especially with regard to concerns about subdivisions, fire suppression, and shrub encroachment. Ironically, as the Clinton Administration attempted to define its strategy for ecosystem management, it used as one of its key examples the collaborative efforts of the incipient Malpai Borderlands Group, later incorporated in 1994 to be able to hold conservation easements. Burning showed their desire to do on-the-ground efforts. They’ve since accomplished the largest successful controlled burn in the U.S., the Baker Burn. Malpai rancher Bill McDonald urged this gathering to stay focused on the land itself, keeping the maintenance of Western ranching traditions and other issues secondary. Without this singular focus, Bill said, the Malpai Borderlands Group efforts would have gotten too diffuse to maintain the integrity of its large landscape. More recently, Malpai pioneered the concept of grass banks, of which there are now at least six others around the West, and has signed safe harbor agreements for endangered species. It has developed a fund to pay for any cattle losses from jaguar predation, and to study jaguar movements. The group has also used philanthropic funds to buy conservation easements, but Bill is cautious not to become too dependent on grants to keep its other activities afloat. The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan has relevance to these issues, noted Bill Shaw of the University of Arizona. Its scale is great, since it influences an area greater than the size of Massachusetts in terms of its capacity to harbor biodiversity, largely by preventing further land fragmentation. Along with public lands, 2.4 million acres are included in a conservation system, with a half million in habitat conservation priorities. A large bond issue for $170 million of land purchases has been passed to implement the plan. According to Bill Shaw, one of principal shapers of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, they specifically opted to protect more than just listed endangered species, but also to track other more common species that are surrogate indicators of biodiversity overall. They also opted to develop a land use and protection plan that has an explicit goal to maintain the rural traditions of the West, valuing ranching as a traditional cultural heritage of long-term public value. The question Bill Shaw posed is how do we internalize the costs of this effort so that stewards of the land get some economic benefit of their activities?
Ray Powell, former New Mexico Land Commissioner, now at Valles Calderas, reminded us that it has never really been a question of “people controlling nature,” but powerful people controlling others to extract something out of nature. We’re now trying to make land conservation more socially equitable. “Grass banks is a physical place as well as a voluntary collaborative process where forage is exchanged for conservation benefits on neighboring or nearby lands,” explained Courtney White of the Quivira Coalition. Bill DuBuys tried to set up the first on public lands in 1997, exchanging grass of an unstocked federal grazing allotment in exchange for the use of fire and thinning for restoration. It can especially work for small-scale ranches which account for 82% of all ranches in New Mexico, where there are deep cultural roots going back to Onate’s time. He detailed Rowe Mesa Grass bank begun by DuBuys, now run by Quivira’s fulltime manager on the mesa, which has triggered nine restoration treatments on the lands of Forest Service permittees who use the grass bank. The goal of Rowe Mesa is to eventually turn it over to northern New Mexico stockholders after landscape-scale restoration, then disseminate the grass bank concept as widely as possible across the West. It will also become training grounds for the herder tradition. In Montana, a private ranch offers grass banking for $20 per month per animal unit, but discounts that down to $5 per month depending on the conservation benefits pledged. Few other options exist for placing your cattle when you want to restore particular grazing allotments that they would be using otherwise. Nevertheless, no grass bank is fully financially solvent yet. “You can’t just move cows around from one ranch to another. They’re not marbles you can shoot around, they have to be adapted to survive in a particular place,” rancher Dennis Moroney reminded us. The ultimate word is not yet in on the long-term benefits of grass banks. “But if you aren’t measuring the impacts resulting from the grass bank, you are doing faith-based management and nothing else,” Courtney reminded us, paraphrasing a quip from Greg Simmons. Several respondents suggested that it would be important in the long-term to change federal land policy to provide incentives for more grass banking. Diane Snyder from Wallowa Resources discussed how these issues play out in a remote rural county “with a seventy-mile long on-ramp” to the nearest interstate. However, nearly everyone in Wallowa County wanted to maintain a natural resource-based economy. Diane’s group has treated ten thousand acres of conifers and a thousand acres of aspen, as well as 600 acres of fire-prone wild lands/urban interface lands, using seventeen local contractors who are employing even more Wallawa residents every year. Now thirty-five full time family wage jobs are available in the county. They now produce from small diameter timber watershed restoration structures, and are diversifying the earned income of Wallawa Resources to make the entire community effort less dependent on philanthropic funds from the outside. Diane Snyder of Wallawa Resources had these recommendations for saving the wide open spaces:
In the afternoon, Tom Sheridan brought us back to goals that work for maintaining the integrity of large landscapes through collaborative efforts guided by local communities; he suggested that the economic development of sustainable ranching is but one means. Tom Sheridan made this key statement: “Ranchers will lose the battle unless they convince 99.6 percent of Americans that the land will be better off if the ranchers remain on the land. The ecosystem services will degrade unless ranchers’ active management maintains them.” Martin Goebel stated that the government either regulates and halts poor practices or incentivizes the adoption of certain best practices, but that communities need both the lowering of hurdles and the funding of adoption of best practices. Nathan Sayre cautioned against focusing on imperfect regulatory mechanisms that force stakeholders to come together. John Heaston argued for emphasizing the multi-faceted approach to fostering protection of large landscapes, not just one species or one goal. Gary Nabhan noted that in the last decade we’ve been forging the “radical center,” the “agriculture of the middle” has dramatically declined in the West. That is unfortunate, for it is what produces much of the food and maintains much of the cultural heritage of the West. To support or revive it, he focused on getting urban consumers to be “co-producers” or “investors” that help pay for the maintenance of conservation values on ranchlands that are embedded in their products. Nabhan gave examples from the Center for Sustainable Environment’s Canyon Country Fresh Network that demonstrate how rapidly the market for grass-fed natural beef and heritage foods is growing. It relies on telling ranchers’ stories of their relationship to the land, culture and to particular heritage foods.
Martin Goebel of Sustainable Northwest spoke of the creativity and energy that local communities already have to achieve solutions by linking wealth generation to ecosystem stewardship. “Over the next decade, sustainable development will be one of the greatest opportunities ever in the history of commerce,” Martin Goebel reminded us. He noted that Sustainable Northwest has seen three keys to success in local community development projects fostering sustainable uses of biodiversity:
Goebel detailed that the Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities Partnership was set up to market the by-products of ecosystem restoration, from watershed to woodshop to market. The strategy is to market rural communities’ services in managing the environment and rebuilding workforce capacity. It is working and creating synergies. Oregon Country Beef—-now Country Natural Beef—-is another example of a consumer-driven marketing strategy based on “Grazed-Well” principles as a core of a new certification system. Country Natural Beef now includes 75 ranches of 4 million acres with $30 million in sales expected in 2005, and is one of the most successful de-commoditized businesses in the U.S. It tells the story that “this product is more than beef, it’s the smell of sage after a thunderstorm.” Eric Jones introduced collaborative community-based forestry coalitions. Penny Frazier talked of community-based pinyon harvesting in the U.S., since there is now an 8 million pound shelled pinyon pine nut import from China. She’s now organized the purchase of 19,000 pounds of soft-shelled Nevada pinyons. Just a few years ago, harvesters got only $2.50 per pound, and now she’s offering roughly three times that. She also outlined the potential for diversifying economic uses of forests through sustainably managing diverse non-timber forest products from rural Western landscapes. She is drawing on the knowledge of local ranching and Native American communities. Nita Vail of California Rangeland Trust emphasized that we need to remind the American public that “When we lose the local ecological knowledge, we lose the integrity of the ecosystem.” In Colorado, John Crumley told us that the Front Range is being called the Third Seashore, being settled after the Eastern and Western Seaboards filled up. We jokingly decided to tell the story of the Third Seashore in this way: “No Sustainable Ranching, No Rocky Mountain Oysters.“ Sunday morning, Connie Falk of New Mexico State University told the story of OASIS, "Organic Agriculture Students Inspiring Sustainability." It works across cultures, classes and incomes to promote community gardens and community supported agriculture. A CSA on campus is used to train students in organic production and CSA management. Recent student efforts included a garden at a pregnant teen center and a women's weaving cooperative in a colonia. In the first three years, OASIS has grown 366 vegetable, herb, and flower varieties, averaging 18,000 pounds per year from 2/3 acre, and in the third year, grossed $26,000. They also have sourced beef, pork, eggs, and nuts, and now have several affiliated grant and community projects underway. "I just don't understand why there aren't more efforts to support agricultural diversification in southern New Mexico. Certainly the public is hungry for it." Bill Durham from Stanford noted that there are obvious parallel processes going on in ranch, farm and forest lands. We need to understand these unifying themes, and the feedback loops that drive local economic systems in one direction or another. “There are powerful feedback loops (with negative consequences) keeping these economic systems spiraling down,” Stanford’s Bill Durham reminded us. These driving forces generated from the outside include rising real estate values, climate change, fire suppression, invasive species. They result in lower resource productivity, fewer jobs, lower income and investments, greater out migration with loss of local knowledge retained. These all ultimately lead to degraded communities where people feel politically disenfranchised, economically powerless, and then weakened institutions. Positive linkages are being broken. But you can use this same model positively: higher biodiversity and productivity create more economic options that generate greater wealth and reduced out-migration–-with greater investment and ultimately more cohesion in the community.” Courtney White reported on the new ranch network associated with “We Can”—Western Collaborative Assistance Network—an embryonic collaborative community conservation effort. It involves the National Forest Foundation and Resources for Community Collaboration, Sonoran Institute, Sustainable Northwest, and Quivira Coalition. He then shared the Invitation to join the Radical Center, available on Quivira Coalition website. It links collaboration conservation to land health and models of sustainable use, through education, adaptation and knowledge. He also reported on the Dan Kemmis proposal for a Western Congress on land and community. Courtney White of the Quivira Coalition noted that “projects which set obtainable land health targets, use the best practices for collaborative conservation, and refine their models for sustainable use keep their momentum, and create enough heat to positively change policy.”
John Heaston of the Nature Conservancy offered this perspective: “We need to say this to rural communities: Quit chasing smokestacks. We’re here to show you how being stewards of biodiversity through sustainable ranching and forestry can be true, lasting economic development.” Dennis Moroney urged us to return to the celebration of the rural village as essential to life in the West, making that celebration economically viable through incentivizing participation in the processes that keep it viable. Gary Nabhan suggested that we secure for those rural villages and landscapes a certain percentage of each watershed’s water supply to be used exclusively for food production. In other words, we can't guarantee the West food security unless water allocations are guaranteed into perpetuity. John Crumley and Ross Humphreys emphasized the need to get gifted individual innovators from one rural community to visit groups elsewhere, on the land and at the kitchen table.
Peter Warren and John Heaston
noted that there are new funding mechanisms to foster exchange
networks between collaborative ranching groups, controlled burning
groups, forest restoration groups, etc. Suggestions for Future Actions:
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Between
May 13th and May 15th, 2005, three dozen Westerners met at White
Stallion Ranch in Avra Valley, Arizona to discuss and promote
working landscapes in the American West that conserve biodiversity
through incorporating sustainable ranching, forestry and farming.
The gathering was co-sponsored by the Southwest Center of the
University of Arizona (host), the Center for Sustainable
Environments of Northern Arizona University (web-scribe), the Desert
Southwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, New Mexico State
University, the Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest
Service, the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American
Anthropological Association, the Nature Conservancy and the Quivira
Coalition. 
Nathan
reminded us that our national policy model for managing these lands
was created way back in 1905, when the land was considered valuable
only for grazing. Now the land value for development trumps other
values, but we still hold onto an anachronistic set of assumptions
in our federal land management policy. 
A
majority of the farmers in the Southwest make less than $50,000
annually from on-farm income, and are near retirement. Rural life
ways persist even though 20-25% of rural dwellers live at or below
poverty level. Fortunately, the organic market is growing 12% a year
in the U.S., although the growth in the Southwest lags behind the
rest of the country. It may be that extreme temperature shifts, poor
soils, competition for water, etc. challenge the sustainability of
agriculture in the Southwest more than elsewhere.
In
the meantime, Bill asked, how do we keep the various resident
subcultures from continuing their tribal warfare? How do we move
from a static perception of the landscape to active management? By
building in as little as $500/acre/per year revenue for management
from an endowment set up at the time of public purchase of ranches
or their conservation easements, it can be run into perpetuity.
Dennis
Moroney suggested that not all ranchers today are of
multi-generational heritage, with their experiences confined to a
single landscape, or exclusively raised in rural settings. They are
not all white, or trained in agricultural economics. Instead, he
argued that the degree to which you can pay simultaneous attention
to “environment, culture, genetics and economics” will make or break
ranching. He now has to live or die by the success of his successes
in what he calls home brewed marketing. The other key ingredients he
mentioned are tolerance for risk, craft and creativity. 
Nina
Vail suggested that there needs to be tangible financial incentives
for private land stewards to be involved in restoring biodiversity.
Landowners should be compensated for growing endangered species and
restoring their habitat. Gary Nabhan said this should be extended to
involving private landowners in maintaining agro-biodiversity on
heritage landscapes, since they can grow seeds and breeds more
efficiently than the USDA can. Eric Jones noted that there is a new
market tax credit program from the Internal Revenue Service for
non-profits to sell tax credits to businesses to invest in land
sustainability. In the past, only community development corporations
could obtain the credits. Bill McDonald notes that most niche
marketing efforts of ranch and farm products are undercapitalized,
so we need to get more capital underwritten to reduce risk. 