One of the first efforts at conservation by the Clinton administration was to try to raise the cost of grazing cattle on federal land.
If you scratched your head at the time and said, "What the ... ?" you weren't alone. Of all the environmental issues facing the nation, the habits of contented cattle munching on grass didn't seem that compelling. Plus, trying to discuss the issue immediately bogged down in an array of acronyms -- BLM and AUM and USFS, to name a few -- so trying to focus on it could cause your eyes to glaze over.
As it turned out, the key acronym for the Clinton White House was GOP, because that is the party affiliation of most Western senators and congressmen.
In the inland West, at least, just about everybody is a Republican, and those who aren't think the Republicans are too liberal. So challenging public lands grazing had very few political risks for a Democratic administration. Let's face it, the days of Gale McGee and Teno Roncalio and Frank Church are over in places like Wyoming and Idaho. Those states won't be electing a Democrat to Congress again soon in this millennium.
All Clinton was trying to do was raise grazing fees, which since time immemorial, on Bureau of Land Management lands (the BLM in the alphabet soup), have been $1.35 per AUM. Now AUM stands for an "animal unit month." An animal unit is a cow and calf. A month is, well, 30 days, give or take. In plain language, the federal government charges $1.35 per month for each cow and her attendant calf grazing on public lands.
The Clinton people arrived with backgrounds consisting mostly of elevated positions in environmental organizations and they were just itching to stick it to the ranching community for a variety of reasons. They blamed ranchers for sabotaging efforts to reintroduce wolves into the West, for killing off bald eagles, for threatening the survival of grizzly bears, for plinking defenseless prairie dogs with their .22s, for blocking wilderness legislation and for using their outsized political power in Congress to make a nuisance of themselves.
Of all these things, it should be said, the ranching community was guilty -- in cahoots with a wagonload of other special interests. But they are such genial, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types that it is hard to hate them for it.
Anyway, the Clintonites argued the ranchers were getting away with murder with this cheap AUM deal. Grazing leases on private land, sold on the open market, right next door to federal lands, went for seven to 10 times the cost of a federal lease. It was a swindle, they said.
Well, of course it was -- and is. Swindles made America great, from Manhattan Island to Jay Gould to Enron, and the ranchers buoyed this tradition by swatting away the grazing fee initiatives like so many annoying deer flies. They didn't even break a sweat. Grazing fees remain $1.35 per AUM and my prediction is they will be $1.35 per AUM on the day Wyoming next elects a Democrat to Congress.
Why so? Look at the math. The eight states of the interior West have a total population of 22.6 million people but account for 16 U.S. senators. California, with a population of 33.9 million, has two senators. Game, set and match to the friends of ranchers in the Senate.
Yet it might again be time to examine the concept of cattle grazing on public lands because there is a lot at stake. The 11 Western states account for 750 million acres -- 40 percent of the landmass of the lower 48 states. Almost half of it is owned by the federal government and managed by two agencies -- the aforementioned BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, or USFS. Virtually every acre of that land is leased for grazing -- at $1.35 per AUM -- and a lot of people think it ought to be used for other things.
The Foundation for Deep Ecology recently published a large coffee-table style book full of ugly pictures titled, "Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West." Impatient with trying to get ranchers to pay their fair share of grazing fees, the book in the end urges the removal of cattle from public lands.
The case for doing this surprisingly strong. Only about 2 percent of U.S. cattle producers use Western public lands. Despite the power of the cowboy myth, eliminating the beef produced by these ranchers would not make a dent in America's meat supplies. Eighty-nine percent of all the nation's cattle producers are located east of the 100th meridian -- which, FYI, splits the Dakotas, Nebraska and Texas roughly down the middle, takes the western third of Kansas and lops off Oklahoma's panhandle.
Just what could be done with the land, once freed up? Ideas abound, including one proposed some years ago that would allow buffalo to wander freely over the plains. It's not as far-fetched as you might think. In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper -- then both at Rutgers University -- noted the plains states were losing population to the point where many counties had declined to a density below what originally was defined as "the frontier" back in the mid-1800s.
Others would like to see the lands dedicated to recreation, wildlife, fish, watershed protection and wilderness.
Achieving such a change remains a daunting political task, however.
In 1992, I sat in the Washington office of one of Wyoming's senators at the time (Republican, of course), Malcolm Wallop, discussing with him the issue of grazing reform. He was against it. Wallop was a rancher himself, if you count raising polo ponies as ranching.
Then he told me a strange thing. He said there was a movement that styled itself "Cattle free in '93," urging the elimination of grazing from public land.
At the time, I covered Western environmental issues every day and I had never heard any legitimate environmental group call for the elimination of grazing on public lands. Western senators had a tradition of calling any departure from the status quo a "War on the West," so I thought perhaps this "Cattle free" business was just another rhetorical swipe in the long-running war of words. Even when the greenies took power in the Clinton White House they didn't even broach the subject of a cattle-free West.
That was then, as they say. Daunting or not, the concept of reducing the harmful effects of grazing on public lands by eliminating it is alive and well, surviving the hapless efforts of the Clinton administration. Bill Marlett, executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, writes, "The long-term good of ranching on public lands crumbles under the weight of honest observation ... livestock grazing on public lands is not sustainable, or desirable, in terms of its cost to the land or to the society."
Chances are, this effort won't go anywhere in the Bush administration. But administrations are not immortal. It takes a long time to build a case for a sweeping change like this one. Environmentalists have demonstrated tenacity in the past on issues they care passionately about. That's why, for instance, there are wolf packs in Yellowstone National Park, despite the near unanimous opposition of those 16 senators.
Maybe no Democrats occupying Western congressional seats for a long while, but no more cattle on public lands might be a bet with shorter odds.
