Forest Magazine • for People Who Care About Our Forests Fall 2004 Notes from the Radical Center By Michele Taylor (javascript:window.print()) Jim Williams is a second-generation rancher in Catron County, New Mexico. He owns 10,000 acres and holds a 15,000-acre grazing permit in the Quemado ranger district of the Gila National Forest. Like other western ranchers, he ’s had his back up against the barbed wire. For years he battled the U.S. Forest Service, which cut his grazing permits by two and a half months per year in 1995 after an unfavorable allotment assessment, and regional environmental groups that are agitating to eject cattle from public lands permanently. Real estate developers cornered him with repeated offers to buy and subdivide his most ecologically damaged lands— about 1,300 acres—for more money than he would ever make as a rancher. By selling out to developers, Williams could have solved the financial crisis caused by the cut in his grazing permit and ended his hassles with the Forest Service and conservation groups. But paving the family ranch was not an option for Williams. Instead, he decided to manage his private rangeland and public allotment more sustainably to win back his grazing privileges. In 1998 he took the unprecedented step of inviting the Forest Service and an environmental organization, the Quivira Coalition, to his ranch to help him figure out how to proceed. The Quivira Coalition, founded in 1997 by two environmentalists and a rancher, was formed to halt the conversion of working landscapes into shopping malls and condominiums. Recognizing that economic hardships that force ranchers to sell their properties to real estate developers are mostly due to unsustainable grazing practices, the coalition has been roping in a new breed of rancher by advocating progressive public land stewardship. At the same time, the Santa FeÐbased coalition has been recruiting environmentalists to its cause. When Quivira pointed out that ranchers are also fighting to keep the West wild, some environmentalists began backing the coalition’s philosophy of sustainable ranching. Quivira invited the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service into the peace circle and called it the Radical Center. This neutral meeting ground allows all stakeholders to voice their interests in preserving the West’ s open spaces. Quivira cofounder Courtney White says the coalition grew out of the thirty-year battles between “hard-headed ranchers [and] hard-headed environmentalists” with an intransigent Forest Service in the middle. “The lawsuits weren’t solving any ecological or economic issues,” he says. “Our whole purpose in the beginning was to call a time-out in the grazing wars and find a different approach.” One of Quivira’s pledges is to keep grazing conflicts within the Radical Center—no legislation and no lawsuits. “We’re trying to foster change at the grassroots level, and I mean both grass and roots,” White says. Quivira’s challenge is clear from the numbers. The coalition employs just seven people. In the western states, cattle graze on nearly 300 million acres of public land and nearly 100 million acres of private land. These numbers are decreasing as property developers snap up 6,000 acres of working wilderness every day, a loss that will equal California’s landmass in less than fifty years. Coalition members believe that ranchers, the Forest Service and environmental organizations cannot combat the concrete sprawl as single soldiers plagued by infighting. Saving a few thousand acres here and a few thousand acres there will not stop the sprawl because shopping malls and condos will invade the unprotected lands in between. To keep the West unpaved, stakeholders must protect hundreds and thousands of acres of unfragmented open space. Janette Kaiser, the Forest Service’s national director of range management, praises Quivira for “rolling up its sleeves to find solutions and not just throwing rocks.” She rejects the view of grazing as an all-or-nothing situation, labeling it a renewable resource industry. She says that non-profits, environmental groups, commodity groups and the federal government must take the responsibility to learn how to use renewable resources wisely. “For the Quivira Coalition to come to the table and be a part of that is the future of public land range management…and the future of national forest land management.” Associate Chief Sally Collins agrees. “What we are trying to do on our part is cultivate leaders that value that kind of collaboration. That’s a big part of the characteristics we’re looking for in line officers—people that facilitate the partnership.” Collins says the agency must foster more partnerships and reward the successful ones to help Quivira expand its reach and sustain its energy over time. “I see huge value in this kind of work,” she says. But the long-term prognosis for the collaboration is not assured. “ The challenge in the future is to make these partnerships pay their own way. ” Ranchers like Williams rely on the Forest Service’s commitment to Quivira to mediate grazing disputes. “There’ve been many, many years of one-sided decisions made by the Forest Service that have not been beneficial to the ranchers,” he says. “The Forest Service cut my permit drastically in 1995 due to an environmental study that I think was done unfairly.” He supported Catron County lawsuits appealing both the decision to cut grazing permits and a Forest Service mandate requiring Gila permittees to fence off riparian areas. The county lost both cases. Williams was facing bankruptcy. After the courtroom battles, Williams felt so threatened by agency personnel that he wouldn’t enter the Quemado district ranger’s office alone to sign his permit papers. Three years after the agency cut his permit, Williams heard that an environmental group was planning a community meeting. Other ranchers suggested he show up to learn the enemy’s next battle plan and find out where the next attack would come from. But White presented Quivira’s mission, and Williams came away from that meeting shaking his hand and asking for the coalition’ s help. White enlisted the Forest Service. John Pierson, the range staff member at the Quemado ranger district, visited Williams’s land. “When I came on board and reviewed the allotments,” Pierson says, “I saw some flaws from previous grazing prescriptions. I tried to start building relationships back with permittees.” Pierson, Williams and Kirk Gadzia, a Quivira-funded range consultant, assessed the soil condition and the diversity of warm-season and cool-season vegetation on his allotment and private lands. They devised a management plan to promote rehabilitation. “The biggest change was that we incorporated the Forest Service lands and the private ranch into one ranch unit,” Pierson says. “This has reduced the amount of time that the animals stay within a pasture because Williams went from a three-pasture system to a twelve-pasture system.” Changing the animals’ frequency, intensity and seasonal access to pastures allows more time for plant recovery on both public and private lands. Strategies to promote plant recovery go beyond grazing rotations. With the agency’s help, Williams is building up both Largo Creek and Loco Canyon floodplains, which run through his property. Using rocks, dirt and willow and sumac cuttings, they are erecting baffles, weirs and vanes to increase the creeks’ meandering and ultimately restore riparian vegetation. Additionally, Williams and the Forest Service have thinned pi–on and juniper from nearly 300 acres within the Largo Creek floodplain, eliminating fire suppressionÐcaused woody encroachment and enhancing groundcover. To monitor recovery, Williams and Pierson meet with Gadzia twice a year. Although Williams’s property is suffering from drought conditions, Pierson says that groundcover has increased in all pastures and within restored riparian zones. Williams’s assessment is more cautious. Partly because of the drought, he sees little improvement on his lands. He points out that the Forest Service has not fully restored his grazing privileges. “But we’ve been able to work out changing some of the ways we’re grazing our cattle instead of this real strict across-the-board directive from the Forest Service that Ôyou’ll be off all the forest lands for two-and-a-half months every year… regardless of conditions.’” He says the biggest improvement has been his relationship with the Forest Service. He calls Pierson “open-minded, willing to work with others” and praises Quivira for opening the communication lines. “The Quivira Coalition might be what we’ve been in dire need of for too many years—a third party that can deal with both sides.” The coalition is about to diversify its ranching interests. In the next few months, the Conservation Fund, a non-profit organization based in Virginia, expects to transfer 240 fee acres of ranch base property in northern New Mexico and grazing privileges on the adjacent 36,000-acre Valle Grande allotment in the Santa Fe National Forest to Quivira. The lands form the Valle Grande grass bank. The Conservation Fund, the Northern New Mexico Stockmen’s Association, the New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service and the Pecos-Las Vegas district in the Santa Fe National Forest started the grass bank in 1998 and currently manage the land. While cattle graze at Valle Grande, anywhere from one to three and a half seasons, the agency works with ranchers to rehabilitate home allotments. Common improvements include prescribed burning, riparian fencing and forest thinning. “The uniqueness of the project is that a grazing permit was issued to the Conservation Fund for the purpose of operating a grass bank to assist family ranchers in northern New Mexico,” says Dave Stewart, the Forest Service’ s director of rangeland management in the southwestern region. “The Forest Service had full knowledge that the Conservation Fund did not intend to purchase and place livestock on the allotment as normally required by Forest Service policy in order to hold a grazing permit.” In defense of this policy exception, Stewart says, “I don’t know how a federal bureaucracy can do creative things or create innovation if we aren’t willing to bend our procedures a little bit, take some risks and extend ourselves in the interest of testing new and different ways of managing natural resources.” In 2001, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck recognized Stewart’s vision. He awarded the in-service National Range Management Award to the Santa Fe National Forest. The grass bank’s three other stakeholders won the out-service award that year. After six years of operation, the grass bank has served forty-two permittees from seven grazing associations. Collaborators have carried out prescribed burning on nearly 6,000 acres, hand-thinned more than 4,000 acres, removed excess trees and brush on 500 acres, built seven miles of riparian pasture fences, and rested more than 500,000 acres. To extend the partnership, next year the Forest Service will provide Quivira with financial support to run workshops and conferences to attract more ranchers to conservation-oriented grazing approaches. Quivira’s partnerships are also benefiting watersheds in the Carson National Forest’s Valle Vidal Management Unit. Through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act, the New Mexico Environment Department awarded Quivira two grants, totaling more than $250,000, to restore Comanche Creek, which is plagued by excess sediment and high water temperatures. The 29,500-acre watershed flows entirely through the Valle Vidal. Quivira is coordinating efforts to keep the Comanche’s native Rio Grande cutthroat trout off the endangered species list. They are protecting the creek’s existing cutthroat populations and restoring the fish to other portions of the creek. Historically, the Pennzoil corporation owned the land. Virtually every acre in the Comanche Creek watershed was logged or over-grazed. Hundreds of miles of logging roads and thousands of cattle and sheep caused tons of sediment to wash into the watershed. Native trout populations were under severe stress when Pennzoil donated the land to the Forest Service in 1981 as part of a tax deal. In 1999, New Mexico Trout forged a partnership with the agency to improve cutthroat habitat in Comanche Creek. Two years later, when progress was moving too slowly, New Mexico Trout contacted Quivira. White turned to George Long, a Questa ranger district staff wildlife biologist, who suggested that the groups address water quality issues. “We could take some of our limited Forest Service budget and maximize it with their interest,” Long says. “ It fit within our context of priorities to improve watershed conditions and restore native fisheries habitat on national forests…With the vested interests of New Mexico Trout, we already had public acceptance.” To reduce the creek’s sediment levels, Quivira hired specialists to identify and reinforce unstable patches on the 300 miles of roads that supported logging operations. Quivira also brought in Gadzia to negotiate with the Valle Vidal Grazing Association, a group of forest permittees with full-time grazing privileges, to keep their cows out of Comanche’s riparian zones. When biologists realized the creek’s temperature was too high to support cutthroat trout, Quivira funded a local youth corps to help volunteers from conservation groups erect exclosures near the Comanche’s banks. These prevent elk from nibbling on willow trees, which shade the creek. Future work includes putting up barriers at the mouth of the stream to keep out invasive rainbow trout and white suckers. Long said that Quivira’s commitment to the Comanche Creek restoration has “accelerated a hundred-fold what we’ve been able to do in the past.” Quivira’s cooperative spirit hardly makes it a maverick operation. Five years before White cofounded it, a group of ranchers in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico launched the Malpai Borderlands Group. It seeks to protect 800,000 acres of private and federal lands in the San Bernadino and Animas valleys. Ranchers there faced many of the same problems of those using the Valle Grande grass bank—rapid increases in woody vegetation with rapid decreases in grasslands caused by 100 years of fire suppression. They were equally concerned by accelerating subdivision growth on three sides. Personnel from the Coronado National Forest have cooperated with Malpai since its inception, providing ecosystem management planning. In 1994, the Rocky Mountain Experiment Station granted Malpai a five-year, $500,000-per-year grant for ecosystem monitoring. In 1995, former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas awarded Malpai the National Range Management Award. Ten years later, the organization has listed its milestones: 50,000 acres of conservation easements attached to private lands, prescribed burns on 250,000 acres that have subsequently shown an increase in desert grasses, a 400,000-acre grass bank and conservation programs protecting Chiricahua leopard frogs, Cochise pincushion cactus, jaguars and bighorn sheep. But Andy Kerr, director of the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, rejects the notion of sustainable grazing on public land. His organization is lobbying Congress to approve the Voluntary Grazing Permit Buyout Act, which proposes that the federal government pay permit holders to retire their allotment from commercial grazing. Kerr says that most ranchers he’s talked to would accept the buyout package and restrict their livestock operations to private lands. He believes the buyout is a better option both ecologically and economically. Some sustainable ranching practices may improve the health of ecosystems, but removing all livestock would undoubtedly promote recovery at a faster rate. The Buyout Act would cost taxpayers $3.1 billion, while future grazing subsidies obligated to taxpayers are worth $15.6 billion. Kerr says it’s a myth that supporting the livestock industry will stop ranchers from selling their lands for subdivision because properties will inevitably be sold or handed down to new owners who may sell to developers. Kerr ’s buyout plan would give ranchers the option of selling their permits to the government. Finances to purchase properties and convert them to wildlife preserves or conservation easements would come from ending taxpayer-funded grazing subsidies. White rejects the buyout plan as too expensive. Helping ranchers achieve economic stability won’t cost billions of dollars, he says. “They don’t need tons of money; quality of life is more important. Jim Williams’s improvements cost only a thousand dollars.” -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[RC] [ RC ] Forest Magazine / Notes from the Radical Center
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:02:50 -0800
