The ranchers would call me a cow cop and I guess that label is as good as any. The Nevada Wildlife Federation, of which I’m a member, sued the Humboldt National Forest two years ago for failing to keep grazing use within the terms and conditions of the grazing permits issued to ranchers. I’m checking up on whether they’re living up to their agreement to put an end to over grazing out here.

I see some problems and I see some heroic efforts to improve grazing management around Ely. Some permittees are putting electric fences along the creeks to allow the riparian corridors to heal while they haul water to the less used uplands for their cattle. Sadly it looks to me like a Sisyphean task. Many of the allotments cannot support the number of cows permitted here.

That is one of the basics of range management that often gets lost in efforts to avoid reductions in grazing. Reductions in numbers of cows alone without careful management will do little to cure grazing damage. But even intensive management—somebody moving the cattle constantly—can not overcome basic overstocking.

When I hike around the Boneyard allotment my blood begins to boil. This land is being abused to an extreme that is hard to understand in this day and age. This area is grazed by both cattle and sheep. The cows are camped in the creek causing serious damage. The stream banks are trampled. The sheep have stripped the aspen stands of all the young aspen trees. The vegetation has been reduced to a few grasses sheep find unpalatable.

These aspen stands should be dense with a wide variety of herbs and grasses. Young aspen should be abundant. Grazing as severe as I observe here will eventually greatly reduce if not eliminate large stands of aspen trees. On top of all this, I find off-road-vehicle tracks everywhere. Four-wheelers and motorcycles seem to be running with impunity. The damage to the land is severe.

I take pictures of the damage. I will give copies of the photos to the Forest Service with a report and a letter stating that we expect some strong action to be taken here under the terms of the agreement that settled our lawsuit against the agency.

It’s not like I don't understand some of what is going on here. It is tough to regulate land use in the small town West. Local social and political pressures can be intense. Rangers who attempt to change the status quo can expect a hornets nest of vicious opposition. I know, I've been there. I worked as a ranger for many years. I also know that change can happen and the fallout can be survived.

A local committee is meeting tonight to review grazing management here. It is one of the new consensus committees set up by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service to involve citizens in land use decisions. I have been invited to attend all of their meetings for the last couple of years. They seem desperate to get participation from someone with environmental credentials. The sad reality is that environmentalists in Ely don't dare speak the truth in these local meetings. So they need someone from out of town. I haven’t attended the meetings regularly because it’s a long way to Ely from Reno and I am not an expense account environmentalist. I do this on my own time and on my own dime.

A rancher objects to my presence at the meeting. But the facilitator explains that I was an early participant and have followed the minutes all along. The committee is attempting to deal with perceived conflicts between elk and cows. Predictably, the ranchers seem to be carrying the day. They are concerned about damage from elk in the very allotments I have just inspected. They say some elk are OK, but they want a commitment that no livestock reductions will be made to favor elk.

The Forest Service biologists are trying to hang tough but are fading in opposition to making such a commitment when I weigh in. I describe the abuse I have just seen. If the elk are causing any damage it is because the livestock and off road vehicles are denying the elk natural movement. I spent more than 30 years working in country shared by elk and cows. They don’t have to conflict. The committee eventually endorses a commitment to manage the land for the optimum number of both species. Nothing is set in concrete. But the wheel has turned a little bit.

These local committees rarely produce recommendations that disrupt local economic interests unless there is vigorous participation by outside public interest advocates. The founders of our national forests, parks, refuges and public land systems recognized locals will never forgo their own narrow economic interest in favor of the greater public good. Otherwise these lands would have been state or private lands from the start. When an agency or a whole administration, such as this one, caves in to local noise, they only postpone reform and prolong the agony.

“Local control over local issues. Outsiders can never understand local problems. People can best govern themselves.” That all sounds very Jeffersonian. The problem is that the economic interests of local cultures totally overwhelm broader, long-term public interests.

That’s why the livestock industry is more enthusiastic than anyone else about these local consensus groups. They are even trying to make such resource advisory councils mandatory by law. They want to limit committee membership to locals and make voting on each issue mandatory. Their proposals highlight exactly what must be avoided if such committees are to serve the public interest.

The idea could work. The trouble is that the process we are now using is wired to either fail or cave in to economic interests. Just look at the results of the Bureau of Land Management’s resource advisory councils and their attempts to produce standards and guidelines for grazing permits. They produced a bunch of motherhood and apple pie statements about rangeland and riparian health which are unenforceable and will change nothing.They did not produce anything that can move reform along at an acceptable pace.

The Susanville resource advisory council, of which I was a member, was an exception. We did recommend objective, definitive, measurable, utilization levels that will trigger corrective action if they are exceeded.I think the utilization levels we agreed to are still excessive. Yet they are clearly defined thresholds which the Bureau of Land Management has never used before.

Why was the Susanville group able to cross this major hurdle to enforceability when others could not? By pure chance we were a collection of compatible personalities. Also, we all had considerable experience working with consensus groups. We agreed wholeheartedly that we would not vote, that we would discuss a subject until the logic seemed evident to all, and then move on. We would not follow Roberts Rules of Order or any other formal process. Simple courtesy prevailed and was sufficient to keep procedure smooth. Our chairman was masterful at letting a discussion go long enough, and yet good at changing the subject when it was time. The Bureau of Land Management recorder was good at accurately picking up the decisions in that loose approach. And we approved his minutes at the next meeting.

I don’t like voting because it cripples any chance the group has to break away from “group think.” Committees stand a chance of changing things only when they recognize that real wisdom will likely be found among a small minority of the participants.

I’m wandering around on top of Table Mountain in central Nevada carrying my 13-pound Hawken rifle, in pursuit of one of the big bucks sure to inhabit this lonely range. I’m cow free for a week, alone with my thoughts. Permits to hunt with a primitive rifle are hard to come by, but worth the wait. Table Mountain is, at least for now, a cattle free wilderness area. The former permittee lost his grazing permit in an ideological battle with the Forest Service. Its been 10 years since cattle grazed here and the signs of their use are fading fast.

All the moo-moo-mooing is gone. The only four-legged sound for days has been an occasional elk bugle. I drink from any spring, without the flies, mud, and stink found on cow range. Young aspen trees are popping up everywhere. I can camp without having to clear cowpies first. I walk through tall waving grass. It’s easy to let my fantasies slip back to mountain man times. Before long I can imagine a cattle free Monitor Range, central Nevada, hell, a cattle free Nevada.

But, instead, my mind wanders to my own past in Colorado. My home country is the South Park area: Fairplay, Jefferson, Lake George, all tiny cow towns with a small tourist trade back then. Good solid communities with active churches, Lions Clubs, and so on. I appreciated all that but spent a lot of energy arguing with the local ranchers over how many elk were enough elk. They forced the State Fish and Game to hold elk numbers low because elk were a nuisance. They competed with cattle. Most streams in the area were capable of supporting good trout but were either grazed to death or posted private property. I often thought how nice it would be if the cattlemen all got rich and moved away.

Essentially that is what happened. Denver and the other cities bought up the water rights. Vail and all those ski resorts were built just over the pass. I can hardly bear to return. The ranches are subdivided and dotted with summer homes. The solid, tied-to-the-land people have been replaced with a superficial, pleasure-seeking shallow culture that measures people by the square footage of their trophy homes. True, the elk herd has expanded beyond our dreams, and most trout streams are healthy and open to the public. But, gawd, at what price!

Let me make it clear that nothing we could have done for the ranchers would have stemmed the trend to a recreation economy. Public land grazing policies had nothing to do with the changes. This was not a case of cows vs. condos. Nevertheless seeing this happen clarified for me the value of the culture of people who make their living from the land. I am angry about the land abuse which many of these people have institutionalized. Angry, yes, but damnit cow towns are fine places to live because ranchers are fine people. Well, most of them anyway.

So, do I really want a cattle free Nevada? No! Do I want cattle free wilderness. No again! However, I do think we need some large livestock free areas for retreat and research, like Table Mountain. Livestock grazing has been so pervasive in the Great Basin that we really do not know what the land can do. Leaving significant areas unused is an essential element of wise use. I am not a preservationist. I am a wise use advocate. I believe we have a right to use the land. However, with rights go responsibilities. We have a responsibility to always avoid taking more from the land than it can sustain. We also have a responsibility to restore damaged land.

I have lived and worked all around the west, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and now Nevada and California. I’ve always been fascinated by the different land ethics in different places. The Sand Hills of Nebraska is wonderful rangeland in generally good condition. Why? These ranchers do not take good care of the land because the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, or citizen reformers make them do it. And it isn't because most of the land is private. These people take just as good care of the public lands as they do of their own. I think good stewardship is the norm because the land is so fragile. Abuse the grass and you have nothing but sand dunes in a few years. Rangelands elsewhere deteriorate slowly over a long time. But there is a short lag time between ecological crime and economic punishment in the Sand Hills.

The conventional wisdom these days is that values are changing in the west and the old land uses are no longer accepted. Over and over, we hear that folks moving to the new west are put off by clear cuts and beat out streams. They are berating the natives and forcing a misguided preservationist philosophy on the west. On top of that eastern politicians are trying to force eastern ways on us westerners. This ain't the way I see it. And I've been around longer than most of those who write such bull. I first got involved in trying to curb overgrazing in 1956. And it is my experience that many of the new westerners are either right wingers or preoccupied with whether their neighbor’s square footage is greater than their own. At best they are NIMBYs. They will help only if a clear cut threatens their own view. The truth is that most westerners have long been uncomfortable with land use practices. Overgrazing has never been OK with anyone except the ranching community. Massive clear cuts and road building have never been popular with anybody except the logging industry. There has always been widespread discontent amongst westerners with land use practices in the west.

The problem is extractive industries still have a stranglehold on county and state government. The history of land use reform is littered with the broken careers of reform minded state fish and game biologists, Forest Service rangers, and BLM range conservationists. Citizens who care don’t dare speak up in the closed societies of the small town West. But some things have changed. Free time has become more abundant. People have time and money to travel. TV has made people aware of nature and its fragility and publicized western land abuse. People outside the west have discovered their public lands and become concerned about how they are being abused. Most importantly, westerners have gone east and recruited help for the reform westerners wanted. This is still going on. Just look at the campaign for wilderness in Utah. It’s strength in the east has been the key to holding off the Utah congressional delegation’s attempts to limit wilderness. This must go on. Westerners will never get reform in the west without outside intervention.