Friends of Idaho Watersheds Project

Thanks to John Horning of Forest Guardians of Santa Fe for this story
from the Albuquerque Journal of last Sunday.

Things must be changing if people are talking about "the beginning of the end" !  One can only hope that the rest of the arid west will closely follow New Mexico and Arizona's lead in recovering our riparian and watershed heritage.

 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL FEATURES GRAZING RIVERSIDE BAN

The Sunday Albuquerque Journal included a front-page story on Forest Guardians' recent legal victory resulting in a shutdown of grazing along some 300 miles of rivers and streams in southwestern New Mexico and
southeastern Arizona. One of the ranchers quoted in the story, John Faust, said the injunction "is the beginning of the end as far as cattle ranching on the national forests," Faust says.  The story included a large photo
of a fenceline separating severely overgrazed and ungrazed portions of the San Francisco River on the Gila National Forest.  The full story appears below.

Sunday, May 31, 1998

Fenced Out

Ranchers call it the beginning of their end, but environmentalists say the ranchers' refusal to protect N.M. streamsides has cost them their cows' access to the water
By Mike Taugher
Journal Staff Writer

RESERVE - For Glen McCarty, this might be the beginning of the end. His white hat stained deeply with dirt and sweat, McCarty stands in a ponderosa pine-dotted meadow where his grandfather got the family cattle
business started more than 100 years ago. But now, McCarty, 72, sees the end coming for cattle ranching on the Southwest's national forests. "I think it's gone," he says, walking along a barbed wire fence recently strung by the U.S. Forest Service to keep his cows out of Tularosa Creek. Like many ranchers who use national forests in New Mexico and Arizona, McCarty is feeling the pinch of new restrictions that protect streams and wildlife. He blames the squeeze on environmental advocates. "They're ruining the ranchers," he says in his clipped manner.

Ranchers like McCarty are especially irked about an agreement reached in April between the Forest Service and environmental activists that bars cattle from hundreds of miles of streams on southwestern forests. It is
that agreement that forced the Forest Service to fence McCarty's cows out of the creek. The agreement, which partially settled lawsuits that activists filed against the Forest Service to protect rare wildlife species, is by some accounts historic. Activists say it marks the beginning of a new era of protected streams, restored riverside forests and healthy wildlife habitat.

But the agreement also could spell the beginning of the end for cattle ranching as we know it on the Southwest's national forests. "It's a big deal for all these people. Some of these guys have no other facilities to water their livestock," says Caren Cowan, director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. "It has the potential to radically (change) the industry as a whole," Cowan adds.

The Forest Service says that protecting streamside areas does not necessarily mean the end of an industry, although it could put some ranchers out of business. "How ranching takes place will be dramatically different in 10 to 20 years from what it is today," says David Stewart, the Forest Service's acting regional director for rangeland management.  "If people decide they are not going to change, in my view their end is fairly near." The agreement with environmentalists merely reflected what the agency was already doing, Stewart says.

Not all ranchers will be affected equally. Many who no longer will have access to forest streams still have other means to water their cows. They have stock tanks, access to streams on private land or are willing to haul water to their cows. But McCarty was hit especially hard. He relies heavily on streams such as Tularosa Creek to water the 600-plus cows he moves among five different grazing allotments. He says it probably would be too expensive to build enough stock tanks to replace the water he now uses in the streams, so McCarty is holding out hope that the Forest Service will leave gaps in the fences to allow his cows access to water. "We need the water. We need the access," McCarty says.

The problem for McCarty is that Tularosa Creek is home to a threatened fish species called the loach minnow. And the streamside, or riparian, area running along the banks of the creek is potential habitat for an endangered songbird called the Southwestern willow flycatcher. Environmentalists say that barring cattle from the creek will not only protect those species, but also make the streamsides better habitat. Some activists are not bothered in the least that protecting wildlife might have devastating consequences for ranchers on New Mexico's public lands. They say the only reason that protection of forest streams is coming so suddenly for ranchers who use public land is that ranchers have resisted for years even moderate environmental protection. "It's the bitter fruit of their own stalling, their own delay," says John Horning, a watershed specialist with Forest Guardians of Santa Fe, one of two conservation groups that sued the Forest Service to protect streamside areas from cows Referring to McCarty's predicament, Horning says, "That's the price he has to pay for abusing the land."

Streamside battleground

Because of their importance to cattle and wildlife, the state's streamside areas have become a battleground. Though only about 1 percent of the state's landscape runs along streams, those areas provide for a huge portion of New Mexico's plant and animal diversity. Cows need these areas, too. Cattle congregate along streams because of the relatively abundant food, water and shade they find there. But cows can turn shady, meandering streams into dry barren washes. By trampling stream banks and eating the lush vegetation that grows along streams, cows expose soil and cause erosion -- widening and deepening the stream's channel.

That might not sound like a problem, but the effects are numerous. Water no longer meanders -- it rushes downstream, failing to soak the ground along the stream banks. The stream is less able to retain water. A deeper channel also means the stream is less likely to spill over its banks to drop rich sediment and soak marshy pockets. And a deeper channel means the water table will drop along the stream, changing the kinds of plants that grow there. Instead of willows, cottonwoods, rushes and sedges that naturally grow along streams, junipers, pines and other plants that normally grow in the uplands move in. The streamside forests give way to range. And that's bad for creatures like the Southwestern willow flycatcher, which breeds in the region's riparian brush.

Two sides of the fence

 "It's hard for people to believe that one, this isn't natural. And two, that cows cause this," Horning, the environmentalist, says as he hikes through a badly damaged stretch of the San Francisco River just outside
Reserve. The stream banks here are barren -- no willows, and only a few granddaddy cottonwoods here and there. What little plant life there is here is eaten down. Mostly, the floodplain is dirt.

Still, despite the sparseness of vegetation, Horning says scenes like this usually are accepted as normal. "People understand a clearcut (forest) immediately," Horning said. "It speaks to them. But rivers have been degraded for so long that people have come to expect this as the status quo." To make his point, Horning points to contrasting conditions on either side of a barbed wire fence at the edge of the grazing allotment: on one side, a barren streamside. And beyond the fence, an ungrazed stretch where willows and other plants are coming back in profusion. "Most people would say flood plain? Riparian habitat? Nahhh. But there you have it on the other side of the fence," Horning said. "On one side you see the beginnings of a riparian forest. On the other side ... you have something that's grazed to the bone."

Trouble brewing

The pressure from environmental activists in the Southwest has been building for years. John Faust, for one, says he saw the trouble brewing before the Forest Service signed the agreement with activists. There was the clash between loggers and those acting on behalf of Mexican spotted owls in this same region, and Mexican gray wolves are being reintroduced just across the state line in Arizona over the protests of ranchers.

And while ranchers like Faust, 49, say they have taken measures such as rotating cattle through pastures to allow streamsides to recover, the pressure to restore these heavily used national forests was obvious. The agreement, Faust says, may turn out to be the "icing on the cake" that encourages him to get out of the ranching business. He's serious, too. When a Journal reporter and photographer arrived recently
at his house in Glenwood, Faust was at the kitchen table discussing the possibility of selling the ranch with a real estate broker.

 "I just think it's the beginning of the end as far as cattle ranching on the national forests," Faust says. His brothers already are intent on selling their shares of the ranch, so the decision for Faust is whether he should hang on to the ranch himself. "This place has been in my family since the late 1880s. I'm fixing to get out of it. I'm just about sick of it," he says. Later, as the day gave way to evening, Faust looked out over a box
canyon on the San Francisco River that has been part of his family's ranch for a century. He said cottonwoods now growing along the river were absent when he played here as a youth. The fact that the trees are growing here now is proof, Faust says, of his good management. But now, he ponders the future of his industry. And his future here. "I've got grandkids I would like to see grow up here," he says. "But I don't think that's going to happen."

Nontraditional methods

Although livestock groups dispute the degree to which cattle are to blame, there is broad agreement among scientists, federal land managers and environmentalists that livestock grazing has caused significant damage
to streamsides in New Mexico's national forests. "I don't know that that's fact," said Cowan of New Mexico Cattle Growers. "I don't think anyone is taking into consideration the damage wildlife do, particularly elk."

But Stewart, the Forest Service's regional rangeland boss, said that if the cattle industry is unwilling to acknowledge grazing has damaged riparian areas, "they've got a problem." He said the ranchers who will survive will be the ones willing to use nontraditional ranching methods embodied in what is called holistic resource management. "I don't know of any business enterprise where we do business the way we did business 50 years ago -- or even one or two years ago," Stewart added. "One of the problems of the livestock industry is they're so darn traditional. If they don't change themselves ... they will put themselves out of business. It's not us putting them out of business."

 Many ranchers say they are already changing the way they do business. Glenwood rancher Hugh B. McKeen says cottonwoods growing along the San Francisco River are there because he stabilized a stream bank by
planting trees and keeping cows away during the growing season. But even that, he says, is not enough for the Forest Service or environmental activists.  "If you took all the cows off for 1,000 years, it still wouldn't
meet their standards," McKeen says. "What they're doing is kicking us off the land, and then they'll do the science."

Environmental activists say healthy riparian areas like some of those on McKeen's allotment are the exception, rather than the rule. The Forest Service's own data show that only about 18 percent of the streamside area it manages in New Mexico and Arizona is up to environmental standards. Biologists blame much of the problems in New Mexico on cows, though they add that dams, development and diversion of water also have taken a toll. "The present condition of riparian is poor across Arizona and New Mexico on Forest Service lands," said Jennifer Fowler-Propst, who supervises the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's New Mexico ecological services office.

Conservation victory

Environmental activists are fresh off a major courtroom win last year in which they forced the Forest Service to protect Mexican spotted owls and curtail logging in the Southwest. They then turned their attention last year in earnest to the region's rivers and streams. They sued the Forest Service in late 1997 with the idea that they could get cattle out of parts of the national forests by forcing protection of rare species protected by the Endangered Species Act in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona.

Then they filed court papers to force the Forest Service to pull cows immediately out of hundreds of miles of habitat on about 60 grazing allotments. To the cattle industry's surprise, the Forest Service agreed to those demands without an order from the court. "It's definitely the most significant grazing-related conservation victory in the West," Horning says. But ranchers felt betrayed. "Over the generations, I think the beef producers have seen themselves as partners with the Forest Service, as custodians of the land. Then the Forest Service has come (with new restrictions) with no consideration of the livestock producer," says Cowan. Cowan says she is receiving several calls a week from ranchers seeking help in dealing with the terms of the settlement. Many of them are bitter.

The new willingness by the Forest Service to impose unilateral restrictions, Cowan adds, could be the beginning of a trend that could decimate the Southwest's ranching industry much as the Pacific Northwest's logging industry was hammered after efforts to protect northern spotted owls increased in the 1980s. "It's a signal of a trend," Cowan adds. "The impacts are going to be comparable to what happened in the Northwest with the logging industry."