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Sunday, September 19, 1999
Public Lands Reinventing Role for Next Century
By Mike Taugher
Journal Staff Writer
The American West was still new to the tide of European settlers who had pushed in from the East.
It was the turn of this century, and the West had been declared settled just a decade earlier by the U.S. government. The trappers had come first. Then the miners, the ranchers and the farmers.
To get all those people to move West, the federal government had provided incentives of all kinds -- it had given away land to homesteaders, sold its minerals cheap to miners who could find them. It had subsidized the railroads to lay their lines across the sprawling continent, and, in just a few years, it would begin developing reservoirs to provide farmers a dependable supply of water.
Many of those policies, which Colorado law professor Charles F. Wilkinson has dubbed "the Lords of Yesterday," still hold influence over the shape of the West. Mining companies still buy minerals cheap, for example. Federal water and grazing leases also come cheap.
And conservationists' push to change those policies, which they say encourage wasteful use of the natural resources on public land, is certain to continue into the new century.
But the 20th century was not a century marked only by expansion.
First, there was a drive to conserve natural resources in order to ensure a sustainable supply of timber, water and forage. There were also movements to preserve some of the West's most beautiful, and commercially inaccessible, places.
All the while, the vast public lands of the American West were beginning to help define the region. Today, the West's public lands inheritance includes hundreds of millions of forest, desert and range acres. The federal Bureau of Land Management manages 270 million acres across the West, and the U.S. Forest Service has 191 million acres of national forests and grasslands. That is in addition to national parks and state public lands.
At the start of a new millennium, conservationists, building on the nation's decision to preserve land in the public domain, are turning their attention to increasing protection for some of that public land and restoring land that has been damaged.
"The last century can be called the public land century because we've been going about a century with keeping public land, instead of it being disposed," said Dave Foreman. He is the Albuquerque-based chairman of the Wildlands Project, an ambitious drive to remap large chunks of the West, the nation and the globe with the intent of designing habitat cores, buffers and corridors between habitat centers for large animals.
It is an ambitious proposal to be sure, but Foreman says even if it is never fully implemented the idea is a good target.
"We'll never come to fruition because we have such a long-term approach," Foreman said. "But I think the concepts of the Wildlands Project are so widely accepted that that's the direction we'll be going."
Foreman is among those who believe the next century will see the practical end of commercial logging and livestock grazing on public lands. Though he believes a few ranchers will survive, it will be only those who are willing to try bold new approaches.
"The smarter ones are going to adjust," Foreman said. "The rest, it's over for them."
Surprisingly, perhaps, the cattle industry does not entirely disagree with conservationists who believe the end is near for public lands ranchers.
"For the short term they may be right," said Caren Cowan, executive secretary for the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. "I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility."
Cowan, however, believes that if ranchers are put out of business on public land, it will only be temporary. She said the government might decide in the future to pay ranchers to get back into business in order to take care of public lands.
"I think it will come full circle," she said.
Sustainable grazing
John R. Kirkpatrick, the U.S. Forest Service's deputy regional forester for resources, said he thinks there will always be a place for some logging and ranching on public lands.
Timber production on national forests, which has declined about 70 percent in the past decade, has probably stabilized, he said.
And ranching on public land, Kirkpatrick said, also will continue.
"I believe there is still going to be some kind of demand for some boards," Kirkpatrick said. "And there's still going to be some demand for some production of red meat."
Kirkpatrick said he believes livestock-grazing levels in the Southwest are declining near the point where they are environmentally sustainable. Consider that around the turn of the century, government officials counted about 700,000 head of livestock on public lands on the national forests of New Mexico. And that number was low, Kirkpatrick said.
Today, that number is around 100,000 and dropping.
"It will be at a healthy level in four or five years," Kirkpatrick said. "I think the question is: Can those people make a living at those levels?"
If what the Forest Service considers environmentally sustainable grazing levels makes ranches uneconomical, the state's public land ranching industry will plummet further, Kirkpatrick said.
Particularly vulnerable, he said, are those ranchers who still owe money on their ranch property. Public lands ranchers own relatively small "base" properties that are connected to grazing leases on vast swaths of surrounding public forest or range.
Other ranchers might find that they could maintain their businesses but still might decide to sell their base property to developers, Kirkpatrick said.
He said more and more people with differing views on how public lands should be used in the future will only make managing public lands more difficult.
"It's hard to even imagine where that's going to take us," he added. "But you know it's going to be just enormous pressure on public lands -- not just the national forests, but the (Bureau of Land Management lands) and state lands, too."
Early warnings
Once, the West seemed inexhaustible. But visions of the region as a vast cornucopia of natural resources proved a myth in the face of the new nation's voracious appetites. First, the fur ran out. Then the gold turned out to be harder to find than advertised.
By the turn of the century, the region's newest and most prolific tide of immigrants was settling in and looking for more product. The land itself -- the timber and the forage -- it seemed, would last forever.
But millions of livestock were busy stripping the ground bare, eroding streambanks and otherwise causing environmental damage that is still visible today.
There were prophetic voices of caution dating back to the 19th century, and their warnings would form the basis for 20th century efforts to conserve national resources.
George Perkins Marsh, in his 1864 book "Man and Nature," warned that clear-cutting forests would ruin watersheds. The book was credited as beginning the conservation movement.
Two decades later, John Wesley Powell, the first to explore the entire Colorado River and run a boat through the Grand Canyon, cautioned that the West's potential would be limited by its water supply.
Those voices would be followed by the likes of Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson.
In 1891, Congress created the first forest reserves. In 1897, by which time the reserves covered 40 million acres, Congress singled out plentiful timber and clean water as the reserves' purposes by declaring that, "No national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States."
Finding new uses
Today, the de-emphasis on such traditional commodities as timber, meat and minerals has caused public lands agencies to refocus on other values society places on those lands.
Landscapes once treasured for their timber, minerals and forage are now valued more for the solitude they offer and the biological diversity that lives on them.
"You have these wide-open spaces. You have large, unfragmented habitats and water sources for communities," said Chris Wood, an aide to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. "These are the commodities."
"In an increasingly urban society, outdoor recreation is their way of connecting with the land," Wood added.
And that is creating new challenges for public land managers.
"The recreation interests and industry is where the timber industry was 10, 15 years ago," Wood said.
In the 1980s, Wood said, the timber industry had a chance to compromise, to reduce the amount of wood it was taking off national forests in the Pacific Northwest. Had the industry done so, more dramatic timber reductions in the name of endangered species and the environment might have been averted.
Now, Wood said, recreational users of public lands are facing a similar situation. With increasing numbers of off-road vehicles buzzing through public forests and range, and conflicts increasing between snowmobilers and skiers, and jet-boaters and rafters, Wood said there could come a time when recreational interests face restrictions.
Managing recreation more effectively is one of three areas that Forest Service managers in the Southwest say they will concentrate on more in coming years.
The other two areas are fire and water -- or, more precisely, better fire management where national forests meet urban areas and better management to protect streams and rivers.
Stream protection is under way, with reductions in livestock numbers along them.
The Forest Service wants to continue planned fires in the hopes that by doing so the agency can reduce the incidence of out-of-control, catastrophic fires -- particularly in those areas where homes continue to go up along the edges of national forest boundaries.
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