Treasure of La Sierra

Colorado's embattled Taylor Ranch is the West writ small. Here's how capitalism may conserve it.

Karl Hess Jr. & Tom Wolf from the October 1999 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

But La Sierra's forests are not virgin and they are not being plundered. Most of the Culebra watershed burned to the ground in the late 1800s. Both before and after those conflagrations, the people of San Luis cut and hauled away a generous share of La Sierra's timber, just as Jack Taylor felled his abundant share in the 1970s. Moreover, the current timber practices on the Taylor Ranch meet the standard of best-management practices, as the Colorado State Forest Service has testified. The Culebra watershed is intact, the Rio Culebra runs clean and cold, and the ranch's wildlife is healthy and diverse.

If Taylor is to be faulted, it is for the rate of his cut, a rate that can only be sustained for a few years. Yet his decision to cut more now and less later is not without cause. Besides his tax burden and the high price for timber, there is the real chance that an endless stream of lawsuits and protests might rob his family of the future benefits that might accrue if he let the timber stand a few more years. That same fear led Taylor to sell the southern end of the ranch in late 1998, a move with far more negative ecological consequences than a simple skimming of La Sierra's more robust trees.

But debate on the prudence and procedures of logging, however reasoned and informed, still begs the larger point: The spruce-fir forests of La Sierra are not the ranch's most valuable ecological or economic asset. Less than 15 percent of the ranch contains commercial timber. The other 85 percent is made up of aspen woodlands, grassland, and low elevation pine and sagebrush. These habitats, not the high elevation forests, are what constitute and will sustain the long-term health of the Taylor Ranch. It is here, not on the dark and sterile evergreen forest floors, that La Sierra's wildlife resides. The future of the Taylor Ranch rests not in its sparse forests, however valuable they may be for the moment, but in its wild animals and the lucrative recreation they allow.

Ted Turner knows this. His Vermijo Ranch, in New Mexico, borders La Sierra on the south; he has pioneered the practice of turning wildlife and recreation into both big profits and big dividends for the environment. Malcolm Forbes knew it, and his sons know it now; Trinchera is a refuge for wilderness because hunters, and attendees at the Forbes conference center, will pay for it. Zack Taylor is just now beginning to see it, especially as the burden of lawsuits and protests recedes.

Ironically, the greatest environmental damage now occurring on the Taylor Ranch has nothing to do with cutting trees and everything to do with the one communal use of the land that has persisted over the years: cattle grazing.

Long before Jack Taylor's tenure, the tradition of open access grazing had taken its toll on the health of the Culebra watershed. William deBuys, the region's most respected environmental historian, is unequivocal on this: "The old ways, while generous to humans, were exceedingly hard on the land. Neither the ejido nor the cultivated [irrigated] tracts received any rest [from livestock] except when they were buried under snow...." (This legacy of devastation is never decried by Ancient Forest Rescue or the Land Rights Council, whose eyes are fixed on the trees of La Sierra.)

DOW's Ranching for Wildlife review team blames the historic condition of the ranch on intensive stock grazing through the first three-quarters of the century, a period that largely predates the arrival of the Taylor family. That grazing degraded rangelands, dried up streams, and accelerated erosion. The better part of Zack Taylor's Ranching for Wildlife contract is an agreement to restore the abused rangelands. Last year Taylor eased back on that obligation, allowing Hispanic farmers hurt by a drought to graze more livestock than they should have. Because of this overgrazing--not logging--DOW barred Taylor from Ranching for Wildlife, effective this fall. He can re-enter the program when he takes action to restore and protect his rangelands, so vital for elk in the winter, from the impact of cattle.

Taylor's suspension from Ranching for Wildlife is a blow to conservation on La Sierra and a blow to the San Luisans who benefit from legal hunting on the ranch. But it is also one last chance to end the property rights conflict that has divided La Sierra between private and communal interests for 50 years. A bold new plan could transform the Taylor Ranch into a model of private conservation across the West and, at the same time, give substance and form to the San Luisans' moral, if not legal, claims to a share of the forage, water, wood, and wildlife resources of La Sierra.

In March 1999, conservationists, scientists, and landowners from southern Africa and the western United States met at Forbes' ranch to discuss private responsibility for private land stewardship. The gathering was hosted by the Thoreau Institute and the Sand County Foundation; its attendees included Zack Taylor and the authors of this essay.

The chemistry was unique. Across from us sat farmers from southern Zimbabwe who had joined with their neighbors to set up the Bubiana Conservancy, a wildlife cooperative dedicated to the private management of animals ranging from rhino to elephant to cape buffalo. Taylor, a neophyte to wildlife conservation, listened to them intently. These farmers were committed to conservation; against all obstacles, including a Marxist state hungrily eyeing their lands, they were fighting for private wilderness and private wildlife. Taylor, too, faced expropriation, but the conservation daring of these Zimbabwean environmentalists was something new, unsettling, yet ultimately alluring.

After that meeting, Taylor was more willing to consider a plan--first suggested months earlier by the authors of this essay--that would reconcile private property rights with historic communal uses, and would do so through the transforming power of the marketplace. Similar to the African initiatives, the plan would turn the Taylor Ranch into a resource bank for both its owners and its neighbors. The bank would provide a continuous flow of resource benefits to San Luisans. Those benefits would then contribute to the profit-making wildlife and timber ventures of the Taylor family.

The Ranching for Wildlife program would be expanded, on a voluntary basis, to embrace the valley bottom farms that border the Taylor Ranch and that contain the elk winter range that the ranch now lacks. Currently, those farms grow grass to feed cattle in winter. Yet the value of those cattle when fed on winter hay is only a fraction of the economic value of elk when raised on the same forage, uncut and unbaled. By adding small parcels of former haylands to La Sierra's expansive summer upland ranges, the total number of available elk licenses in Taylor's Ranching for Wildlife contract would increase significantly. The Taylor family would earn more revenue, the small farms would more than double their profits from their valley meadows, and enough cash would be left over to buy local hay to sustain their displaced cattle for the winter.

During the summer, cattle grazing would continue on the Taylor Ranch, but with two big differences. First, there would no longer be a grazing fee. Second, in return for the free grass, community stockmen would assume responsibility for 1) protecting sensitive areas, such as wetlands, from the adverse effects of cattle; 2) stopping the cattle from trespassing and overgrazing; and 3) herding and holding their livestock in key areas where the stock's activities would help wildlife. (Local Hispanic farmers are already organizing, at their own initiative, a stockmen's association to regulate grazing on La Sierra and to help Taylor meet his obligations to Ranching for Wildlife.)

Community rights would also be hitched to the fate of the ranch's timber and water resources. First, the resource bank would keep sustainable logging alive on the Taylor Ranch, benefiting both the Taylors and the villagers. The bank would give logging rights to San Luisans in small-diameter spruce-fir thinnings and 5- to 15-acre aspen patch cuts. The harvest would then be processed locally to produce lucrative value-added products, such as molding. The thinned forests would accelerate the growth of commercial timber while opening the forest floor to sunlight and more plants for wildlife. Small aspen clearcuts would rejuvenate decadent and dying aspen stands while creating ideal summer grasslands for elk. Everyone would gain: The Taylor Ranch and surrounding farmlands would have more elk to hunt; the Taylor family could harvest more timber, sooner; and the local community could build a thriving industry.

Second, and possibly most important, the community's thinning and patch-cutting could be designed to retain more snow in the forest and to optimize how much of it melts into the watershed in the summer. The irrigation waters below the ranch could then run cleaner and longer, benefiting local farmers. Further up the watershed, proper timber management would spur on the already growing population of beavers, the keystone species for sustaining the highly productive wetlands so essential to a broad array of plant and animal life.

It's too early to tell if the resource bank will work, or even if all the players in La Sierra's future will embrace its benefits, its responsibilities, and its challenges to conventional thinking. But this much is certain. The mountain land stretching from Turner's Vermijo Ranch to the Forbes property and beyond is private. And each of those properties is an island of conservation hope in a grim sea of failed federal management.

The weak link in the string of private pearls is the Taylor Ranch, mostly by dint of its contested title. But if those rights can be adjudicated by informal means, the string will be complete and secure. A private wildland of vast proportions will find a long-sought niche in the federally owned West. And as Americans debate the future of public lands and federal wilderness, the solitary bay of the first privately reintroduced gray wolf will echo across a landscape carved in love and profit by the capitalist tools of Turner, Taylor, and Forbes.