Storm Over the Rockies

The West at war with itself

Karl Hess Jr. from the June 1995 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Worse yet, in Catron County, New Mexico, county leaders have threatened to outlaw big-game ranching because, they claim, it would undermine the custom and culture of cattle ranching. And county commissioners have passed an ordinance requiring environmentalists--who are rightly perceived as enemies of the county's custom and culture--to register at the county courthouse. At the same time, the county has petitioned Bruce Babbitt to transfer federal funds intended for the Forest Service directly to county coffers so that county commissioners can manage and control the public domain.

Once again, government is fine so long as the reins of control are in the right hands. That explains why stockmen, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, are using county government
to limit property rights to raising cows and free-speech rights to the advocacy of a ranching way of life. It also explains my profound disappointment after spending a year working with Catron County residents and speaking to communities throughout the West in an effort to put the county movement on a free-market track.

The West is indeed at war, but not with the federal government. It is tragically at war with itself, for beneath the glamour of the Marlboro Cowboy is an unsettling demographic fact: The West, paradoxically, is the most urbanized region of the nation. It has a sparse and tiny rural population; Nevada, for example, has 90 percent of its population in its three major urban centers. The bulk of the people of the West, whether living in cities or rural areas, are urban men and women. Their custom and culture is defined by the automobile, not the horse; by the finely sauteed filet, not the steer; by the shopping mall, not the local rodeo; and by the virtual reality of the computer, not the communal reality of a back-slapping, rural western bar. In contrast, the custom and culture of ranching is hanging on by a slender thread, and the Sagebrush Rebellion may well be its last hurrah.

A hundred, or even 50 years ago, federal institutions and subsidies that kept cattle king were acceptable to westerners. City and country folk alike shared common values and a common regard for government's role in the region's economy. That commonality is gone today. What the urban West wants from the region's public lands is not what the rural West is willing to give. The economies of the urban West are sufficiently diversified that the desire for federal programs and subsidies will likely diminish with time (and with the political reality of a Republican Congress).

Yet the rural, ranching West remains immune from change; it remains by law and tradition tethered to the federal trough and stubbornly resistant to the market signals that emanate from the urban West crying out for something other than the status quo. But the more the sagebrush rebels defend the old system of privilege and subsidies, the more glaring its inequities become, and the more apparent it is to all but them that it is corrupt and beyond salvage.

Is it any wonder that western environmentalists, sportsmen, and outdoor enthusiasts have fought ranchers so hard for so long? They, like the rest of the urban West, can't buy grazing permits and then use them for their own purposes. They can't use the marketplace to reach outcomes that are noncoercive. What they can and must do, however, is pay the taxes that sustain grazing at its current levels; they must finance the subsidies that generate non-market outcomes, that raise their blood pressures, and that severely restrict their options for action.

Urban and nonranching westerners have no choice but to play politics with half the West's land if they are to influence its future use. They are constrained by law and tradition to demand more and more government so that their voices can carry more and more weight in a public never-never land bereft of markets, private property rights, and voluntary channels. That's how multiple-use management works. It's the law of the West, the legacy handed down to all Americans by a century-and-a-half of federal social and environmental engineering.

This is why the West is at war with itself. One half of it, the landed part, is entrenched in federal protection and the other half, the urban part, is powerful enough to turn the federal might against the vastly outnumbered cowboy. But all the federal might in the world cannot and will not unravel the Gordian knot of how best to allocate the West's resources--the rivers, rangelands, and mountain peaks that are the sources of its livelihood, happiness, and identity. Well-intended government has failed to do so in the past, it is failing now, and it will fail in the future.

That explains, in part, the ubiquitous rise of intolerant environmental groups like Earth First! who have come to the public-lands scene with radical agendas to shoot cows and, if necessary, to shoot ranchers. They are simply the mirror reflections of the rabble-rousing rancher with a .44-caliber Magnum tucked in the back of his jeans. With markets nonexistent, land uses monopolized, property rights in limbo, subsidies suspect and challenged, and government an abysmal failure, what alternative is there to war in the West? Is it not amazing that to date only words have shattered the fragile calm of deserts, prairies, and canyons?

Clearly, until ranchers and environmentalists--the rural and the urban West--see the origin of internecine warfare for what it is, a storm will continue to gather over the Rockies. Nothing will change, there can be no peace, unless and until ranchers say no to government in principle, until environmentalists say no to government in practice, and until both warring parties willingly embrace markets and true self-governance for a freer, Next West.