Ranchers and environmentalists aren't that far apart |
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This column was published by "Writers on the Range, High Country News," a syndication service that distributes opinion pieces to newspapers across the West. In addition, the column is scheduled to be included an a collection of essays about the West to be published by Fulcrum Press sometime in 2001. |
| I was
having coffee, recently, with an ecology-minded friend
whom I respect. She began telling me how bad grazing is
for grasslands, and I nodded and acted as if listening
carefully. But I was really thinking about my grandfather,
who once made his living off of grazing cattle. The last time I saw my grandfather, I had yet to hear the word "riparian." As far as I knew, grazing was not considered a bad thing by environmental groups, and ranchers, although they were suspicious of the movement, could still say "environmentalist" without an accompanying four-letter adjective. Since then the range war has heated up in the West. Environmental groups have began promoting prairie dogs and mountain plovers as the grasslands' equivalents of the spotted owl, and ranchers are starting to worry that the list of endangered species might soon include them. I might have become a rancher myself, like my grandfather, but I showed too little enthusiasm. I was young and didn't understand the possibilities, so instead I went to school and eventually found a job working at a newspaper. That's where I ended up, but when I was very young and on the ranch, all I wanted was to be like my grandfather. We called him Pappa, and he had a certain way of wearing his hat, a certain way of looking at a person as if he could tell not only whether your shoes were tied and your nose was running, but what you were thinking. No matter what was happening, he was in control. There was no situation he could not handle, or so I thought. At the end of his life, this was taken from him. I had heard he was ill -- a stroke -- and although this bothered me greatly, I was involved in college and was busy. What a stroke could mean to a person like my grandfather hadn't sunk in. Then the phone rang, and I learned that Pappa was in a hospital just two blocks from my campus. It was good I already knew the man in the bed was Pappa; otherwise, I would not have recognized him. Half of his face was limp, and in place of the quick, insightful eyes, there was a pained, lost, helpless expression. Although I didn't know it at the time -- was afraid to admit it to myself at the time -- he was dying. I reserved an hour every day to sit by his bed. Sometimes he knew I was there, sometimes he didn't. There were instances, rare but very important to me, when the old will solidified in his eyes, and he sat up like his self. At these times he talked to me, often about his ranch. He emphasized how hard he worked to protect a particularly fragile piece of land, resisting a temptation through economic hard times that would have been too much for a lesser person: "For 20 years I kept the cows off that land. For 20 years." These were, perhaps, the last intelligent words he spoke to me -- statements about ecology that were more than merely impassionate. They were fierce. It was not a kind of environmentalism that a person learns in school. This was a caring for the land that was born out of an intimate relationship with it, a relationship that is connected to the well-being of the rancher and his family. When I remember him, I see him stepping out of his pickup onto the range grass, as he did when I accompanied him as a boy, the felt cowboy hat he always wore shading his face. I see him stooping down, checking the small plants like a gardener, making sure they would be there next year as well as this. After all, the health of the grass was, for him, a matter of survival. Without it, there would be no cows, no ranch, and his family would be scattered. I have worked in eastern Montana newspapers for 10 years. Because ranching is big news in my part of the West, I have talked to many ranchers. I have had coffee with them at their kitchen tables. I have eaten with their families. I have ridden around in pickups and looked at their cows, discussing with them their ranching operations. I have been impressed at how much in common many of these have with my grandfather -- not only in demeanor, but in attitude toward the land. Not all ranchers are good ranchers, but those who practice their trade well know their grasslands in a way that is not possible for most of us. Like my grandfather, they tend to be ecology-minded because ecology, for them, is a matter of survival. If the grass lands stop producing, their way of life ends. I believe my ecologist friend, if she knew my grandfather, would have liked him. Some things he had to say she might dislike, and I'm certain that if she mentioned prairie dogs in glowing terms, he would become angry. But if they talked until they got down to the what really matters -- the land and their feelings toward it -- they would discover they weren't that far apart. |
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