Ranchers form a 'radical center' to protect wide-open spaces

Fire, modified fencing and a "grassbank" are rejuvenating rangeland. Where woody weeds once grew, the grass is stirrup high

  • By Jake Page
  • Smithsonian magazine, June 1997, Subscribe
 

 

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    Some people didn't think it was a good idea that Warner Glenn photographed the jaguar instead of killing it. Conventional wisdom in ranch country, after all, said that announcing the presence of an endangered species on your land meant even more restrictions on what you could do with it--so the best thing to do was to go by the dictum: "Shoot, shovel, and shut up."

    But when Glenn spotted the jaguar on the morning of March 7, 1996, high up in the Peloncillo Mountains of Arizona, he didn't shoot. Instead, he came home with a lot of photographs--believed to be the first ever taken of a free-ranging jaguar in the United States.

    It was just one way that ranchers have been working with environmentalists, and federal and state land agencies, to radically redefine the way they deal with the still vast tracts of open country in the West.

    The Malpai Borderlands Group, of which Glenn is a member, has staked a claim to this "radical center." In 1994, with an awareness that ranchers were "losing ground socially and politically," some residents of the Borderlands (an area of about one million acres that stretches across the New Mexico and Arizona border, just north of Mexico) banded together to make something of the common interests shared by ranchers, environmentalists and government agencies--a concern for open country.

    Some of the group's initiatives are already paying off. Much-needed fires are being allowed to burn, keeping woody species like mesquite and cholla cactus from spreading at the expense of grass. A cooperative effort between a local ranch and the state wildlife agency has engendered some new populations of Chiricahua leopard frogs. And a unique "grassbank" idea allows ranchers to rest their pastures in periods of drought to prevent overgrazing.

    Writer Jake Page traveled to the Borderlands to witness how local ranchers are working to preserve not only their "ranching way of life" but the region's diverse, fragile ecosystem as well.


    Some people didn't think it was a good idea that Warner Glenn photographed the jaguar instead of killing it. Conventional wisdom in ranch country, after all, said that announcing the presence of an endangered species on your land meant even more restrictions on what you could do with it--so the best thing to do was to go by the dictum: "Shoot, shovel, and shut up."

    But when Glenn spotted the jaguar on the morning of March 7, 1996, high up in the Peloncillo Mountains of Arizona, he didn't shoot. Instead, he came home with a lot of photographs--believed to be the first ever taken of a free-ranging jaguar in the United States.

    It was just one way that ranchers have been working with environmentalists, and federal and state land agencies, to radically redefine the way they deal with the still vast tracts of open country in the West.

    The Malpai Borderlands Group, of which Glenn is a member, has staked a claim to this "radical center." In 1994, with an awareness that ranchers were "losing ground socially and politically," some residents of the Borderlands (an area of about one million acres that stretches across the New Mexico and Arizona border, just north of Mexico) banded together to make something of the common interests shared by ranchers, environmentalists and government agencies--a concern for open country.

    Some of the group's initiatives are already paying off. Much-needed fires are being allowed to burn, keeping woody species like mesquite and cholla cactus from spreading at the expense of grass. A cooperative effort between a local ranch and the state wildlife agency has engendered some new populations of Chiricahua leopard frogs. And a unique "grassbank" idea allows ranchers to rest their pastures in periods of drought to prevent overgrazing.

    Writer Jake Page traveled to the Borderlands to witness how local ranchers are working to preserve not only their "ranching way of life" but the region's diverse, fragile ecosystem as well.

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