Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West - Softcover

White, Courtney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610914031 ISBN 13: 9781610914031

Verlag: ISLAND PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In the final decade of the twentieth century, the American West was at war. Battle lines had hardened, with environmentalists squarely on one side of the fence, and ranchers on the other. By the mid-1990s, debates over the region’s damaged land had devolved into political wrangling, bitter lawsuits, and even death-threats. Conventional wisdom told us those who wanted to work the land and those who wanted to protect it had fundamentally different—and irreconcilable—values.
 
In Revolution on the Range, Courtney White challenges that truism, heralding stories from a new American West where cattle and conservation go hand in hand. He argues that ranchers and environmentalists have more in common than they’ve typically admitted: a love of wildlife, a deep respect for nature, and a strong allergic reaction to suburbanization. The real conflict has not been over ethics, but approaches. Today, a new brand of ranching is bridging the divide by mimicking nature while still turning a profit.
 
Westerners are literally reinventing the ranch by confronting their own assumptions about nature, profitability, and each other. Ranchers are learning that new ideas can actually help preserve traditional lifestyles. Environmentalists are learning that protected landscapes aren’t always healthier than working ones. White, a self-proclaimed middle-class city boy, has learned there’s more to ranching than grit and cowboy boots.
 
The author’s own transformation from conflict-oriented environmentalist to radical centrist mirrors the change sweeping the region. As ranchers and environmentalists find common cause, they’re discovering new ways to live on—and preserve—the land they both love. Revolution on the Range is the story of that journey, and a heartening vision of the new American West.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Courtney White is cofounder and executive director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. A former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist, White now devotes himself to land restoration.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Revolution on the Range

The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West

By Courtney White

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Courtney White
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-403-1

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
PROLOGUE, 
PART ONE - The New Ranch, 
Chapter One - THE NEW RANCH, 
Chapter Two - REPLENISHING SOIL AND PEOPLE, 
Chapter Three - GETTING INTO THE GAME, 
Interlude - RANCHING WITH WILDLIFE, 
Chapter Four - OUT OF COWBOY ISLAND, 
Chapter Five - CHANGING THE WORLD, 
PART TWO - The Working Wilderness, 
Chapter Six - THE WORKING WILDERNESS, 
Chapter Seven - GOALS THAT UNITE, 
Chapter Eight - QUID PRO QUO, 
Interlude - A MACHO FAILURE, 
Chapter Nine - THINKING LIKE A CREEK, 
Chapter Ten - THE GIFT, 
PART THREE - The Big Picture, 
Chapter Eleven - ACROSS BOUNDARIES, 
Chapter Twelve - USEFUL SCIENCE, 
Chapter Thirteen - CEASELESS CHANGE, 
Interlude - SEEING THE FOREST AND THE TREES, 
Chapter Fourteen - MUGIDO, 
Acknowledgments, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
About Island Press, 

CHAPTER 1

THE NEW RANCH

Ranching is one of the few western occupations that have been renewable and have produced a continuing way of life.

WALLACE STEGNER

It was a bad year to be a blade of grass.

In 2002, the winter snows were late and meager, part of an emerging period of drought, experts said. Then May and June exploded into flame. Catastrophic "crown" fires scorched more than a million acres of evergreens in the Four Corners states—New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah—making it a bad year to be a tree too.

The monsoon rains then failed to arrive in July, and by mid-August hope for a "green-up" had vanished. The land looked tired, shriveled, and beat-up. It was hard to tell which plants were alive, dormant or stunned, and which were dead. One range professional speculated that perhaps as many as sixty percent of the native bunchgrasses in New Mexico would die. It was bad news for the ranchers he knew and cared about, insult added to injury in an industry already beset by one seemingly intractable challenge after another.

For some, it was the final blow. Ranching in the American West, much like the grass on which it depended that year, has been struggling for survival. Persistently poor economics, tenacious opponents, shifting values in public-land use, changing demographics, decreased political influence, and the temptation of rapidly rising private land values have all combined to push ranching right to the edge. And not just ranching; according to one analysis the number of natural resource jobs, including agriculture, as a share of total employment in the Rocky Mountain West has declined by two-thirds since the mid-1970s. Today, less than one in thirty jobs in the region is in logging, mining, or agriculture. This fits a national trend. By 1993, the U.S. Census Bureau had dropped its long-standing survey of farm residents. The farm population across the nation had dwindled from 40 percent of households in 1900 to a statistically insignificant 2 percent by 1990. The Bureau decided that a survey was no longer relevant.

If the experts are correct—that the current multiyear drought could rival the decade-long "megadrought" of the 1950s for ecological, and thus economic, devastation—the tenuous grip of ranchers on the future will be loosened further, perhaps permanently. The ubiquitous "last cowboys," mythologized in a seemingly endless stream of tabletop photography books, could ride into their final sunset once and for all.

Or would they?

After all, for millions of years grass has always managed to return and flourish. James Ingalls, U.S. senator from Kansas (1873–1891) once wrote:

Grass is the forgiveness of nature—her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass, and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become grass grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated; forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.

Few understand these words better than ranchers, who, because their cattle require grass, depend on the forgiveness of nature for a livelihood while simultaneously nurturing its beneficence. And like grass, ranching's adaptive response to adversity over the years has been patience—to outlast its troubles. The key to survival for both has been endurance—the ability to hold things together until the next rainstorm. Evolution favors grit.

Or at least it used to.

Today, grit may still rule for grass, but for ranchers it has become more hindrance than help. "Ranching selects for stubbornness," a friend of mine likes to say. While admiring ranching and ranchers, he does not intend his quip to be taken as a tribute. What he means is this: stubbornness is not adaptive when it means rejecting new ideas or not adjusting to evolving values in a rapidly changing world.

This is where ranching and grass ultimately part ways: unlike grass, ranching may not be immortal.

Fortunately, a growing number of ranchers understand this and are embracing a cluster of new ideas and methods, often with the happy result of increased profits, restored land health, and repaired relationships with others. I call their work the New Ranch. But what did it mean exactly? What were the "new" things ranchers were doing to stay in business while neighboring enterprises went under? How did they differ from "new" ranch to "new" ranch? What were the commonalities? What was the key? Technology, ideas, economics, increased attention to ecology, or all of the above?

During that summer of fire and heat I decided to take a 1,400-mile drive from Santa Fe to Lander, Wyoming, and back, visiting four ranch families in order to see the New Ranch up close. Initially, I wanted to know if ranching would survive this latest turn of the evolutionary wheel. Was it still renewable, as Stegner once observed, or is the New West destined to redefine a ranch as a mobile home park and a subdivi-sion? But I also wanted to discover the outline of the future, and, with a little luck, find my real objective—hope—which, like grass, is sometimes required to lie quietly, waiting for rain.

The James Ranch North of Durango, Colorado

One of the first things you notice about the James Ranch is how busy the water is. Everywhere you turn, there is water flowing, filling, spilling, irrigating, laughing. Whether it is the big, fast-flowing community ditch, the noisy network of smaller irrigation ditches, the deliberate spill of water on pasture, the refreshing fish ponds, or the low roar of the muscular Animas River, take a walk in any direction on the ranch during the summer and you are destined to intercept water at work. It is purposeful water too, growing trees, cooling chickens, quenching cattle, raising vegetables, and, above all, sustaining grass.

All this energy on one ranch is no coincidence—busy water is a good metaphor for the James family. The purposefulness starts at the top. Tall, handsome, and quick to smile, David James grew up in southern California, where his father lived the American dream as a successful engineer and inventor, dabbling a bit in ranching and agriculture on the side. David attended the University of Redlands in the late 1950s, where he majored in business, but cattle got into his blood,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISLAND PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1610914031
• ISBN 13: 9781610914031
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar