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Preface - Introduction - CHAPTERS: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12
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Rancher Wayne brings in 200 head from March through July to feed on the lush spring growth on this typical 12,000-acre BLM allotment. The cattle spend their time on the fertile, grassy flats and along watercourses and moist drainages. They eat selectively, consuming the most nutritious bunchgrasses, herbaceous perennials, riparian growth, and choicest browse.

The first year his cattle grow fat, and Wayne is happy. The second year, he is still pleased, but at the end of the grazing season his cattle haven't gained as much weight. At the end of the third season, the year's herd is thinner still, and Wayne is beginning to worry.

The years pass. Soon after each of the intermittent wetter periods, Wayne's hopes rise with the new green growth, but this never lasts long; overall trend is downward. The allotment is progressively more ragged and cowburnt. Wayne's cattle become less selective, eat decreasingly palatable vegetation, and roam farther to find enough to eat. They are undernourished and disease-prone. Reproduction is low, mortality high.

Like most public lands ranchers, Wayne derives a minor portion of his total income from ranching public land. However, he is unwilling to admit the obvious -- that Wayne Allotment, like all public allotments, is an inherently lousy place to raise livestock. Rather, like his peers he blames failure on bad luck, bad weather, predators, high production costs, low beef prices, vandals, government rules and regulations, and so on. Wayne is committed -socially, politically, habitually, and emotionally as much as financially -- to being a celebrated Cowboy with 12,000 acres and a 200-head herd. He is not about to cut his herd, and he knows the BLM won't force him to, to any significant degree.

Wayne is in a quandary, being adamantly opposed to reducing herd size, but realizing the need to increase the allotment's suitability for livestock to maintain herd size. Like most ranching advocates he inevitably sees only one solution: begin the government-sponsored range development process to artificially improve the range for livestock. Not only will this maintain Wayne's livestock production at government expense, but it will place the burden of responsibility for keeping the allotment productive squarely and permanently on government (taxpayers') shoulders. Once the range development program stabilizes a certain production level, government will be expected to maintain that level indefinitely. Though Wayne is happier, the story doesn't have a happy ending.

The West is systematically looted.

--Bernard DeVoto

A range improvement program may include wells, reservoirs, detention dams, ditches, water spreaders, storage tanks, pipe lines, spring developments, watering troughs, fences, corrals, loading chutes, dipping vats, cattle guards, weighing scales, riders' cabins, bridges, truck trails, stock trails, stock driveways, water-hauling roads firebreaks, contour furrowing, check dams, diversion dams, subsoil sagebrush eradication, plowing and range reseeding noxious and poisonous weed control, rodent control, insect control, predatory animal control reseeding of logging roads and skid trails, brush burning and reseeding and eradication of brush stands by chemical spraying.

--Phillip 0. Foss, Politics and Grass (Foss 1960)

Livestock have wasted the West more than any other single agent, but they are helpless pawns in a complex game of maximum profit and power. Stockmen, government range managers, university and business professionals, politicians, and other components of the ranching establishment are in charge. And while the impact of livestock grazing is more than enough reason to end public lands ranching, it is only half of the environmental story.

For more than a century, in its attempt to maximize livestock production, this grazing establishment has in effect waged war against the Western environment.* The industry fights its war with what it calls "range improvements" and "range management," 2 basic weapons systems which together may be termed "range development." Its enemy in this never-ending battle is anything that inhibits or is perceived to inhibit maximum livestock production. As will be evident, this includes an incredible number and variety of living things and inanimate objects.

* Additionally and significantly, many ranchers habitually manipulate the land due to long-standing tradition, because it gives them a feeling of doing something worthwhile, or simply out of sheer boredom.

Range "Improvements"

Fixed developments on the open land that facilitate livestock production may be termed "range improvements." As with "newspeak" in George Orwell's classic, 1984, the wording is intended to rearrange the reality of whoever sees, hears, or uses it. By consistently calling anything they do to the land an "improvement," ranchers and their aides lead people to believe that these developments actually do improve the range, and should therefore be supported. Taking reality-bending terminology one step further, BLM recently has begun calling range developments "accomplishments." By constantly defining and redefining range terminology in relation to the land, the ranching establishment creates a widely accepted, malleable, self-serving reality.

Purposefully obscured is that these developments are designed to improve the land for livestock grazing. And though they may temporarily benefit livestock production, they usually degrade the environment and public use.

Millions of fences, stock tanks, and other range "improvements" have been constructed on our public land, the vast majority with our taxes (see Chapter V11). They and the land they occupy are treated more or less as private property by stockmen. BLM does in fact consider some permanent structural developments made by ranchers on federal land to be private property, effectively privatizing the land they occupy.

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This corral is posted "NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING" - essentially privatizing the BLM land it occupies as well.

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