PUT UP OR SHUT UP
This is a reprint of an article that was first published in Range Magazine in 1996 under the title I’ve given it here. Since 1996, it has been republished in a number of other publications including a Sierra Club Newsletter and, as an editorial, in a number of western newspapers. Twelve going on thirteen years after I made this challenge no one has taken me up on it.
TIME FOR A SHOWDOWN ON THE WESTERN RANGE
by Dan Dagget
Some fights can’t be settled with words.
That, I believe, is the case with the battle over whether grazing should be removed from public lands in the American West. Anti-grazers have been trying to get cows off these lands for more than a hundred years, and for just as long ranchers and their allies have been battling them to a standstill. As taxpayers, we have poured billions of dollars into this standoff, funding legislation, regulation, lawsuits and range improvements, and for all that money we’ve got little more than a century of ill-will and divisiveness.
That’s why I propose that we settle this standoff once and for all, in a way as Western as sublime scenery and wide open spaces—with a good, old fashioned showdown backed up, of course, with a wager.
Most of you, I’m sure, are wondering what’s to settle. Everyone knows that the rangelands of the West are overgrazed, overtrampled, and overpolluted with cow splats. And everybody knows who’s to blame—all those welfare ranchers and their ravenous cows and sheep. Some scientists claim that livestock have wreaked more havoc on the West than all bulldozers and chainsaws combined. Some even say that the damage they have created is so severe it may never heal.
So, what’s the hold up? Getimoff and lockitup! That’s the way to save the range, right! If that’s what you believe, I’ve got a challenge for you.
What would you do if I offered to bet you that, if we took two identical pieces of Western rangeland side by side, and you used the lockemup and getimoff approach on your side, and I put cows on my side, lots of ‘em, and left them there until they had eaten just about everything, and then I took them off until the plants grew back and kept repeating that, that my side would be healthier than yours; that it would be greener and more vital with more diversity and less bare dirt?
Would you break your fingers trying trying to seal the deal with a handshake before I changed my mind? Would you put your life savings on the line?
Before you do, there’s a couple of things I ought to tell you.
I ought to tell you that I first made this challenge four years ago in a magazine that was distributed nationally, and no one took me up on it. Because that magazine was read mostly by ranchers, I made the offer again, in the newsletter of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club. Again, no takers. This past December (2000) I made the challenge again at The First National Conference on Grazing Lands. I even offered to let the Getimoffs set the criteria by which we would judge the winner. Still no takers.
There’s a reason for that. While no one’s denying that there have been problems and still are, some ranchers have changed the way they manage their animals. They’ve begun concentrating them by means of temporary fences, herders, or tasty enticements and moving them around the land in the manner of a herd of bison pursued by wolves and Native American hunters. Grazing in this way, livestock don’t overgraze, but they do mow, de-thatch, reseed, and fertilize as natural grazers do. In other words they perform the same functions you and I perform to keep our own grasslands, our yards, green and healthy.
These methods have been used to restore health to lands damaged by mining, off road vehicles, roadbuilding, catastrophic wildfire, and even overgrazing. A peripheral benefit of this method is it combats global warming by removing carbon from the air by sequestering it in the roots of plants it helps to grow. Surprisingly, this technique works best where the land has been damaged the most, where the Getimoff approach has failed, and the people who advocate it say we may have to wait centuries for their method to work.
What that means is the showdown has already happened, and the Getimoffs lost. You don’t know that because no one told you, or at least no one told you in a way that got your attention. If any of these victories were covered in your local media, they were buried on the last page of section Z. as a (yawn) successful range restoration. You didn’t bother to read that because you were too busy reading about another Getimoff victory to remove grazing on page 1.
That’s why I’ve made this challenge and will keep making it. Because doing so is the only way I know of to get the majority of Americans to wake up to what may be the most effective way to restore our rangelands to health and sustain them that way. The good part of this showdown, if anyone takes me up on it, is that we all come away winners. We all come away with a knowledge of how to manage the West that is based on reality not on self-serving animosities or outdated assumptions.