Customer Reviews

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction Of The American West

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Welfare Ranching provides the data and insight into the public lands livestock industry that has long been needed. Here in the West the damage is seen on hundreds of millions of acres of our public lands. What is amazing is the lack of attention among our public officials at the tremendous cost of this outmoded practice. The lost soil, polluted streams and destroyed wildlife habitat have value in the billions of dollars on an annual basis that so far outweighs any possible economic benefit of livestock production, it is necessary for the public to become educated on this issue so they will pressure our lawmakers and public officials to make and enforce ecologically sound regulations and practices to restore this land. A final note, the soil loss and plant community losses are a loss in carbon storage - this is going to become a critical issue as we at last deal with greenhouse gases. Finally, let's not forget the history of the sheep and cattle industry in their efforts to have our public lands turned over to the States and then sold to ranchers for 10 cents an acre in the 1940's. This continues today with the farm and ranch lobby and their henchmen in congress who constantly are working to undermine environmental protections and have the land sold off to industry.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson, Editors. 346 pp. Sausalito, California: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002. [$$$] paperback; [$$$] hardback.

At 12 x 13 inches, with beautiful and startling photographs, Welfare Ranching: the Subsidized Destruction of the American West deserves a prominent place on the environmentalist's coffee table. Don't expect a balanced view of the current issues, however; this book, a compilation of essays and articles, celebrates only the anti-livestock perspective in the conflict concerning cattle grazing on federal land in the West.

The book is divided into seven parts. I, II and III introduce readers to anti-grazing views and objectives. Part IV consists of ecological research reports. Parts V and VI offer essays about related subjects such as economics, nutrition, suburban sprawl and the use of grazing permits as collateral. A handful of solutions are reviewed in two essays in part VII, followed by "Our Vision," the editors' wrap-up.

The federal lands grazing conflict pits environmentalists against family ranchers and the cattle industry. Environmentalists, among whom the authors of this book count themselves, want an end to livestock grazing on federal land because it harms water, land and wildlife. And they object to leasing land to ranchers at prices below market value, which explains the book's title.

The ranchers' point of view is barely mentioned. Ranching has supported generations of families for close to one-hundred-fifty years. Food for livestock is sparse in the arid West so cattle need to roam over a wide area to find enough to eat. At the same time, ranchers must raise and sell a certain number of cattle each year to avoid debt. Because there is insufficient forage on the ranchers' own land to feed the quantity of cattle needed to break even financially, ranchers lease additional grazing land from the federal government. The loss of grazing leases will, quite simply, put them out of business.

Overall, Welfare Ranching is well-written and researched, and accompanied by generous footnotes and bibliographies. Some pieces were published earlier in peer-reviewed journals, a further indication of their high quality. Ninety-five pages of striking photographs illustrate the dramatic difference between grazed and natural or restored land, ranging from wildflowers scattered across rolling green hills in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley to livestock-damaged cracked earth and dry creek beds in Coronado National Forest in Arizona.

The book's minimal use of degrading anti-ranching clichés makes it easier to read than some of the activist literature and websites. However, the transcript of a lecture given by Edward Abbey, one that encourages the harming and killing of cattle, seems self-indulgent and ridiculously inhumane. His and a handful of other essays employ language that may strike some readers as smug and elitist.

Enviro-speak like "rewild," "keystone species" and "dewatering of fish" may strengthen the bond with the converted but grates after awhile. Can't we just say the fish died because the river dried up? "Livestock abuse" sounds like cattle torture but means land, water and wildlife abuse caused by livestock grazing. The occasional tendency to imply wrongdoing, by applying late 20th century standards to 19th century actions, seems careless in a work compiled to validate the anti-grazing position.

To a certain degree, Welfare Ranching promotes a common concept in "livestock-free" literature: that federal land leased to ranchers is somehow owned by and available to anyone at any time. References to "our public land" often imply that federal land belongs to each individual American when, in fact, it belongs to the American government as a corporate entity.

The grazing controversy is not as simple as removing cattle from federal land, as Welfare Ranching may lead some readers to believe. Factors other than ecology fuel this debate and need acknowledgement, for example, prejudices about city vs. ranch people, on both sides; refusals to communicate and/or negotiate; and the efficacy of the Bureau of Land Management offices in affected states. It's unfortunate that these obstacles, and the underlying history and values that motivate the parties involved, aren't within the book's scope. The small space devoted to possible solutions is surprising in view of the book's purpose to show that environmental damage needs to be repaired.

It remains to be seen if anti-grazing activism is solution-driven or primarily intended to disparage those with whom the activists disagree. Although Welfare Ranching seems written to motivate readers to find solutions to federal lands cattle grazing, additional material about solutions, and less ridicule, would have furthered a more constructive debate.

C. Shepard is a freelance writer in Berkeley, California. She's working on a story about the federal lands grazing conflict in southeastern Oregon.

Welfare Ranching is a beautiful book, full of full-color photos and articles by dozens of scientists and concerned biological conservationists regarding the destruction of the American West by cattle ranchers. Wuerthner and Matteson point out that there are 525 million acres of land in the Western United States which are used for livestock grazing. That only eleven percent of U.S. cattle producers are in the west, but their grazing area equals twenty-five percent of the total land area of the lower 48 United States and most of that is public land. These lands are often over-grazed, degraded, and denuded of plants. The water sources are manipulated by the ranchers to provide water for their livestock, thereby removing the water from access by native plants and wildlife. The introduction of livestock into the arid lands of the American west is like introducing an exotic species into a community. The livestock completely undermine and degrade the ecosystem and their presence is linked to the decline in native bird and vegetation populations. It has been noted that by raising domestic animals which demand large quantities of water and forage in a place that is dry, and by favoring slow-moving, heavy, and more or less defenseless livestock in terrain that is rugged, vast, and inhabited by native predators, ranchers have put themselves in a position of constant warfare with the land. Nearly all public lands [in the Western U.S.] that have any forage potential for livestock are leased for grazing. This includes 90% of Bureau of Land Management land, 69% of U.S. Forest Service land and a surprising number of wildlife refuges and national parks. Three hundred million of these acres have the potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration by terminating domestic livestock production on public lands
Bird species need water and vegetation to survive, and many are threatened or driven into extinction by the ubiquitous livestock grazing which destroys their habitat. Birds generally do not respond to the presence of grazing livestock but to the impacts on vegetation as a result of grazing. Breeding Bird Survey data suggest that grassland birds as a group are showing greater population declines than any other avian assemblage in North America. This is attributable to habitat modifications including livestock grazing, fire suppression, prairie dog control, cultivations, and exotic grasses.
Livestock grazing harms native species and promotes alien plant growth. The hundreds of photos in the book, Welfare Ranching, document the denuded, degraded land and polluted, manipulated water sources which result from cattle grazing. Some ranchers suggest that since bison used to naturally live on the grasslands, cattle are a good modern day substitute, but cattle and bison are not similar animals. Bison moved around a lot, effectively grazing on plants only once before moving on, and bison also lived in drier areas and ate drier plants than cattle do; domestic cattle spend most of their time within 400 meters of water. Cattle ranchers also suggest that the grasslands need to be grazed by cattle in order to be healthy, but in a native grassland there is a wide variety of animals that naturally graze in a sustainable way, such as nematodes, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, elk, and bison.
Livestock grazing is the most common land use in western North America. It is difficult to study in a controlled manner as there are not many large areas free of grazing because approximately 70% of the eleven western states is grazed. A study comparing Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northern New Mexico, one of the largest grazing exclosures in the American West, with six grazing sites, found that plant species richness was higher in the protected areas than in the grazed areas (Floyd et al. 2003). Recent paleo-ecological studies on the Colorado Plateau determined that the most severe vegetation changes of the last 5,400 years resulted from livestock grazing during the last two centuries (Cole et al. 1997).
It is apparent that many species of grassland birds, and neo-tropical migratory birds have declined drastically in the past few decades. Much of the research on this subject has found that the decline in bird species is correlated to the decline in habitat and vegetation which is directly linked to grazing livestock on the majority of land area in the western United States. Over half of the grazing is done on publicly owned lands which, due to the time-honored traditions in the West of allowing cattle ranchers full access to any lands they want, and because these ranchers and their grazing interests have been very important in the political and social life of the West for over a century, and because, until recently, grazing on public lands has been an accepted practice with no special attention paid to it, the question of closing off public lands to grazing has become a power struggle and a contentious issue between conservationists, ranchers, the government, and land managers. There is enough documented evidence that grazing has many deleterious effects on the land such as: damaging the soil, polluting the water supply, destroying native vegetation, encouraging alien species, and that ranchers and land managers have altered the ecosystem by: controlling fires, diverting the scarce water supply to cattle use only, and actively killing many native animal species that they consider inconvenient or dangerous to their interests.
It is obvious that livestock grazing on western lands is not a sustainable operation. It is environmentally damaging and causes great loss of biodiversity. It is sustained only through the political influence of cattle ranchers and the ignorance and indifference of the public. The great wave of new research which is being done by conservation biologists and environmentalists will help change this devastating scene in the future when students begin to inform themselves by reading these research papers, and when the popular media brings the desolation and waste to the notice of the people, that their land is being appropriated by private interests who are destroying the environment and profiting at the expense of thousands of plant and animal species each year.
Welfare Ranching, The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, brings these facts to the people in the form of a beautiful well-documented book full of great photographs. Most of the information in this book is taken from scientific articles and journals. How many of us spend our time reading dry scientific journals? If you would like to have a combination of fact and photos, in an interesting to read and understand format with articles published by well-known conservation biologists and others whose main concern is to save our lands and our native plants and animals, then Welfare Ranching is the book to have.

Let me keep this simple and concise: I grew up in the rural culture. I grew up walking and hunting on cattle ranches for more miles than I could ever remember. I have family that own a cattle ranch in the west. It was precisely this life experiance that turned me against public lands ranching with the very strong wish that it will end during my life. Cattle are nothing less than vermin on the land, being the single reason why there are so many endangered fish, birds and mammals in the western U.S. If we wish to restore the land with health and vitality the cattle must be removed. There is plenty of proof that my words are true and accurate if a person wishes to seek out that information and this book is a good start. Look at the land that has had the cattle removed and you'll see land that is once again abundant with life. Google: Hart Mountain national antelope refuge. An area that had cattle removed years ago and is now thriving with wildlife and getting better each year without cattle.

The negative reviews of this book are simply by people that live this culture and don't want it to end. Understandable but highly mis-guided. The few cannot be allowed to destroy our nations, and worlds, natural heritage.

The cattle must go.

An excellant book for those concerned about the impact, and subsidized cost of this program. You will find the science to promote, continue at will grazing cattle and sheep unsettling and corrupt.

The people who gave bad reviews of this book don't realize that most of the ranchers in this area are working towards anti-grazing permits. Does this not tell you, that the people who live it first hand KNOW how damaging it is?

How much federal (and state) public lands are grazed by domestic livestock? 257,277,550 acres of federal public lands, 33,358,000 acres of state lands, 290,635,550 acres total. This is an area equal to all eastern seaboard states from Maine to Georgia, with Missouri thrown in as well.

Today only about 6% of America's land is residential (urban, suburban, and rural). About 20% is farmland, another 25% is rangeland, and the rest is wilderness and woodland.

The people against this book were against it from the start, so they only looked for quick ways to disprove it. They did not bother to read the book, or visit the website to learn more about it.

Livestock grazing in the arid West has caused more damage than the chainsaw and bulldozer combined. "Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West" is a seven-pound book featuring 346 pages of articles and photographs by expert authors and photographers on the severe negative impacts of livestock grazing on western public lands. Finally we have a book that honestly depicts in full-color the damage caused by a few thousand ranchers and their livestock to millions of acres of public lands. But don't take my word for it--or any other book "reviewer"--buy the book and see for yourself!

Through wonderful pictures and thoughtful essays by leading historians, scientists, and economic and policy experts, this book superbly shows the environmental crisis that the US West faces due to livestock production, an industry that uses more land and water than any other. A statement on the cover flap summarizes the problem well: "Over decades, the placement of exotic, water hogging, ill-adapted livestock on western lands has changed diverse native plant communities into monocultures of weeds; turned perennially flowing creeks into dry stream beds; relegated large predators such as wolves and grizzly bears to only the most remote wilderness areas; and forced many wildlife
species to the edge of extinction.
The book is awesome. Instead of the common book size, 5 inches by 8 inches, it is an eye-catching 12 inches by 13.5 inches. Many of its spectacular pictures completely cover two facing pages. Particularly effective are three consecutive such pictures, showing (1) "How It Was" (a beautiful natural area with a variety of covered plants), (2) "How It Is" (many cows and their manure on land completely devoid of plants), and (3) "How It Can Be" (another natural area with grass and some native animals). There are over 90 consecutive pages of pictures under the heading, "How to Look ... and See," with text referring to numbered places on the pictures that illustrate harmful effects of animal grazing.
The wide variety of photographs vividly show the contrast between land used to raise cattle and the relatively few places that have been protected from its damaging effects. To dramatize the scope of the problem, each odd-numbered page without a picture has "300 million acres at stake," written at the bottom of the page. This area, equal to that of three Californias, or the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, from Maine to Florida, with Missouri added, is the amount of public land grazed by livestock in the U.S, West, at great cost to society. What makes the situation even worse are the many subsidies, courtesy of taxpayers, that public lands ranching operations receive, including low-interest loans, predator "control," fencing, government-funded range "developments," and emergency bailouts - hence the book's title: "Welfare Ranching."
The book does not only paint a negative portrait of current conditions on public lands. It also presents an alternate vision that can renew and restore these lands, if enough citizens demand that governments shift land management priorities to benefiting people and the environment and away from facilitating private gain.
I am proud that my article (co-authored by Mollie Matteson), "Eating Is an Agricultural Act: Modern livestock Agriculture from a Global Perspective," appears in the book. When I was asked to submit an article, I readily consented, but I never imagined that it would appear in such a spectacular book.
While not a typical vegetarian-promoting book, the book's giant size, marvelous pictures, and cogent essays give it great potential to capture people's attention to how harmful animal-based diets are and thereby to help shift them away from unhealthy diets and help shift society away from harmful agricultural practices. I hope that it gets the wide audience it so richly deserves so that it can help move our precious planet away from its present perilous path to a more sustainable one.

 

Grazing is not the Answer
Review by Keith Akers

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. Edited by George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson. Washington, Covelo, and London: Island Press, 2002. 346 pages, paperback, approximately 11 3/4" by 13 1/2", ...

There is a tendency among some environmentalists to regard grazing cattle as an alternative way of raising meat which is superior to factory farms. After all, cattle consume forage on grasslands that could not grow food for people anyway; and the cows live lives of comparative ease compared to their sisters and brothers crammed into factory stalls. And what else are we going to do with our Western lands, anyway?

Welfare Ranching is the definitive answer to these questions. A political issue is an unlikely candidate for a coffee-table book; but this color-illustrated book is at the same time brilliantly organized, stunningly photographed, and comprehensively documented. It specifically addresses grazing on public lands, but there's very little in Welfare Ranching that doesn't also apply to all grazing in the West. After reading this, there is little room to escape the conclusion that grazing is an incredibly destructive form of agriculture; if anything, it would seem to be far worse even than factory farms. It is wiping out the land; it is wiping out entire species; it is biological warfare against the earth. For mass destruction, it would make Saddam Hussein envious. And YOU are helping to pay for it with your taxes.

The real strength of Welfare Ranching lies in its ability to show what is wrong -- and what is right -- not just through words, but through pictures. It has lots of pictures, in fact opening it at random you will likely find a small body of text and a huge picture. Those of us who are not familiar with this subject probably would look at an area grazed by cattle and say to ourselves, "well, what's wrong with this?" What the authors of this book have done, is to tell us how to look -- and see -- what is really going on.

Almost as an afterthought, the editors have also presented not only lots of color pictures which show what the problems are, but thorough and up-to-date essays by what are really the top people in the field. There are essays on exotic weeds, bears, prairie dogs, snails, frogs, bison, wolves, and the underlying economic realities.

Welfare Ranching is neither the first nor the only book to discuss the issue of public lands grazing, but it is the best and most comprehensive. This book has made it impossible for an intelligent person, regardless of their dietary habits, to defend public lands ranching. Because of the attractiveness of the presentation of the issue, and the comprehensive nature of the coverage of the problems, Welfare Ranching is a "must read" for anyone concerned about the environmental problems of the West.

Keith Akers is the author of The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and Nonviolence in Early Christianity.

Although it is refreshing to see the authors opinions right in the title, it is distressing to have that be the sum total of the facts to back up the opinion. If you are looking for a book to confirm your thoughts that the federal government is a good caretaker of the land, then this is it. If your experience with government agencies leads you to believe that they may not be the best guardians of the west, you may have issues this book.

I was disappointed that the editors have clearly tried to sell their opinion, rather than inform or enlighten. This book is as one sided as a new car brochure. There have been hundreds of studies that compare land that is used for grazing, with land where all grazing has been stopped, and none of these studies are mentioned in this book. To bad many people will take this book as a presentation of facts.

Dan Dagett's book Beyond the Rangeland Conflict is a far better balance of the facts, and one I would highly recommend. To buy this book is to encourage an elitist and imperial view of the west, and one that is based on glossy misrepresentations.