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Ranchers form a 'radical center' to protect wide-open spaces
Fire, modified fencing and a "grassbank" are rejuvenating rangeland. Where
woody weeds once grew, the grass is stirrup high
* By Jake Page
* Smithsonian magazine, June 1997
Some people didn't think it was a good idea that Warner Glenn photographed
the jaguar instead of killing it. Conventional wisdom in ranch country,
after all, said that announcing the presence of an endangered species on your
land meant even more restrictions on what you could do with it--so the
best thing to do was to go by the dictum: "Shoot, shovel, and shut up."
But when Glenn spotted the jaguar on the morning of March 7, 1996, high up
in the Peloncillo Mountains of Arizona, he didn't shoot. Instead, he came
home with a lot of photographs--believed to be the first ever taken of a
free-ranging jaguar in the United States.
(http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues97/jun97/jaguar_jpg.html)
It was just one way that ranchers have been working with
environmentalists, and federal and state land agencies, to radically redefine
the way they
deal with the still vast tracts of open country in the West.
The Malpai Borderlands Group, of which Glenn is a member, has staked a
claim to this "radical center." In 1994, with an awareness that ranchers were
"losing ground socially and politically," some residents of the Borderlands
(an area of about one million acres that stretches across the New Mexico
and Arizona border, just north of Mexico) banded together to make something
of the common interests shared by ranchers, environmentalists and
government agencies--a concern for open country.
(http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues97/jun97/cattle_jpg.html)
Some of the group's initiatives are already paying off. Much-needed fires
are being allowed to burn, keeping woody species like mesquite and cholla
cactus from spreading at the expense of grass. A cooperative effort between
a local ranch and the state wildlife agency has engendered some new
populations of Chiricahua leopard frogs. And a unique "grassbank" idea allows
ranchers to rest their pastures in periods of drought to prevent overgrazing.
Writer Jake Page traveled to the Borderlands to witness how local ranchers
are working to preserve not only their "ranching way of life" but the
region's diverse, fragile ecosystem as well.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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