Storm Over the Rockies

The West at war with itself

Karl Hess Jr. from the June 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

To make a long story short, under the rules set by politicians and ideologues in Washington, the West was never completely settled. In fact, not much more than a third of the West ever made it into private ownership. The bulk was kept by the federal government, with smaller parcels handed out to Indian reservations and state governments. By 1900, what was kept out of private hands by the feds teetered on the brink of environmental collapse: Forests were stripped of cover, rangelands were razed to the ground, and wildlife was decimated. On both private and public properties in the West, land and life (human and nonhuman) suffered immeasurably from decades of ecologically and economically perverse and destructive federal policies.

Today, the public-land West, the cause and cause célèbre of the region's standing war, is the ward and the mistress of the Forest Service and the BLM. But federal ownership, as one might guess, has not cured the ills that have plagued the region since first settlement. Defying the power of markets and logic, Congress and the land agencies have evolved a system of deficit logging and grazing that matches the worst excesses of centralized planning in the old Soviet Union.

Forests that gods themselves would find difficult and unprofitable to harvest are flagged and marked by Forest Service timber cruisers. And rangelands that have a market value of $30 per acre, and a forage value measured in cents, are treated like Manhattan real estate. Billions have been spent to turn them into Cadillac grazing fields, all for the sake of pushing the public lands' beef contribution to the nation from a paltry 3 percent to a skyrocketing 3 percent plus a small fraction. In the process, forests and rangelands with marketable values for recreation, water, and wildlife have been mindlessly clear-cut and overgrazed in the name of multiple-use management--the federal ruse for centralized planning.

This is where things begin to get sticky, and where the sagebrush argument starts to fall apart. When viewed in retrospect, the West has done remarkably well at the trough of federal beneficence. Not only did the feds pave the way for western settlement and industry, they also paid most of the bill for making the West livable and desirable.

They built the most inefficient and costly fire-fighting force on the face of the earth--that of the Forest Service--to protect individuals and communities foolish enough to build in the paths of natural fire. They constructed a system of water-holding and power-generating dams that in size and cost are among the great monuments to and wonders of the modern nation-state. Dams destroyed the legendary salmon runs of the past and turned the mighty Columbia, Colorado, Missouri, and Rio Grande rivers into shining examples of federal regulation and control, bringing subsidized crops to lands that were once desert and subsidized cities to places where once only buzzards dared to dwell.

The American West in all its magnificence was built on federal dollars. The interstate highway system that connects one patch of desert to another happened only because federal dollars flowed easily. Employment in the West skyrocketed because waterless shipyards were built on the arid plains of Colorado, because air force bases, scientific labs, and federal centers mushroomed overnight, because a slew of federal bureaus provided enough jobs to keep rural outposts from becoming ghost towns, because 10 times as many defense dollars were spent in the West as in the rest of the nation, and because 10 western states representing 9 percent of the nation's population controlled a fifth of the votes in the U.S. Senate.

What has happened to the West as a region has also happened to the public lands, though in more exaggerated proportions. The men and women who now lead the western rebellion against big government, and who openly defy federal authority on their ranches and in their communities, have built their empires on federal protection and federal dollars. For the better part of this century, the public-land West has been a government-created land-use monopoly reserved for less than 1 percent of the nation's citizenry. Outside of a recreational hike in the woods or a sporting hunt in the great outdoors, most Americans are precluded from using federal lands in an economic way. Simply put, private individuals can make money from public land only by turning its grass into beef, its trees into lumber, and its mountains into mounds of processed rock.

Since most of us don't want to be ranchers, loggers, or miners, we're stuck. We can't compete with traditional uses and users on public lands by doing nontraditional things like marketing recreation, wildlife, and wilderness for a profit. It's the law of the old West--the rule of beneficial use that dictates that government, not markets, should set what can and cannot be done with western resources. Applied to public-land ranchers, the law of beneficial use has made grazing the dominant use on federal lands and, for some people, the most hated use.

Public-land ranchers can't be entrepreneurs; they must be stockmen. Whether they want to or not, they must graze their grass to hold onto their grazing permits. They can't fence off a desert stream from cattle to grow trout and collect fees for fishing; they can't use the grass they lease to raise bull elk to meet the insatiable demand of sportsmen for a once-in-a-lifetime trophy hunt; they can't set aside wildflowers to attract a variety of rare birds for paid bird watching; and they can't turn their grazing allotments into centers of potentially profitable eco-tourism.

By law, ranchers must treat federal lands as bovine buffets and livestock watering holes. "Use it or lose it" is the axiom here in the West. But that's not what rankles some people the most. What stirs the ire of environmentalists, recreationists, and sportsmen is that the federal government not only mandates grazing as a quasi-monopoly land use, but it helps ranchers to do it at levels that nature in its wisdom and economics in its prudence would never allow. Through myriad programs and subsidies, the federal government has made sure that cattle stay king on the western range, that free markets and the wishes of consumers do not get in the way of a century-long experiment in the social and scientific engineering of the American West.

Pampered Cows

Only government in its infinite wisdom and resources could have created the means to make livestock raising in an inhospitable land a venture that is all but sanitized of risks. This has nothing to do with the so-called low, subsidized grazing fees charged to public-land ranchers. By spending $10 million since 1985 to study "fair-market grazing fees," the Forest Service and the BLM have lavishly yet inadvertently proven what reasonable people have known for several centuries--that government-set fees, however disguised as market equivalents, are still political, not market, outcomes. They are worth no more than the stock we place in the wisdom of the political process.

Pampered cows on the public range come about because of other, more real and harmful subsidies--federal programs that protect stockmen from both nature and themselves. Many of the programs apply to all ranchers, public and private, but their ecological impact (in terms of overgrazing) and their political significance (in terms of understanding a West at war) are most revealing in the federal domain.

Keep in mind that all federal-land ranches are made up of both public and private parts. A grazing permit--a stockman's license to graze federal property--requires commensurate private property. This condition links, indeed entangles, private and public lands in the West. It explains why grazing permits are economically valuable (but only, by law, to other stockmen): The private lands have the water to make dry federal lands usable and the public portions have the extra grass needed to make ranching operations economically viable.

For starters, government has seen fit to shield ranchers from all creatures, great and small. Federally funded trappers have worked for decades to purge the western range of wolves, bears, cougars, and coyotes that prey on domestic livestock. Not only must taxpayers shoulder the costs (about $30 million a year), but they must also pay a bill that is sometimes far greater than the value of the livestock that is lost. Thanks to government efficiency and the USDA animal damage control program, it's possible for you and me to pay $1,000 or more in places like New Mexico to shoot or poison a single sheep-eating coyote.