Barbed-wire fences encapsulate the wrongs of public land grazing.

Fences entangle and kill wildlife, and block them from migration routes and waterholes. Often funded by taxpayers, these fences exist to benefit private extractive interests. Bleak, manmade slashes mar the open, vast landscapes of public lands in the West.

This grim picture made me all the more eager to pitch in on a volunteer project to remove an infestation of barbed-wire fences in the Steens Mountain Wilderness in remote southeastern Oregon. I felt that ripping out fences with my own hands so that pronghorn, deer and elk could once again roam unencumbered would make a real, immediate difference for the land and the wild creatures who call it home.

A bonus of the trip was putting out of my mind the daily scandals of executive plunder at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Global Crossing. But as I would soon discover, escaping corporate greed isn't easy even in the Oregon backcountry, thousands of miles from financial centers.

A Century of Overgrazing

Oregon's newest wilderness area is a unique, glaciated fault-block mountain rising to 9,700 feet in the high desert of southeastern Oregon. A land of contrasts, Steens Mountain's rolling hills are blanketed with aspens, sagebrush and grasses, and punctuated by glacial gorges such as Big Indian and Kiger that present majestic vistas.

Its fragile alpine and sub-alpine areas host native plants such as bunchgrasses, aspens and lupines, as well as wildlife including pronghorn, bighorn sheep, raptors and elk. The high summit of Steens captures passing moisture, generating the Donner und Blitzen River -- designated a Wild and Scenic River -- and several creeks that are home to threatened redband trout.

European immigrants in the 1800s exploited the then­bountiful water and grasses by cramming hundreds of thousands of domestic livestock onto the higher reaches of the mountain. Overgrazing plagued Steens throughout the 20th century.

Wilderness Protection at Last

Recognizing the special beauty of the area, conservationists sought for many years to protect it. A successful lawsuit in 1994 by the Oregon Natural Desert Association and the National Wildlife Federation removed livestock from the Donner und Blitzen River. Protection efforts culminated in the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act (SMA), which Congress passed in October 2000.

Key features of the SMA include:

• Designation of nearly 170,000 acres as wilderness, 97,000 acres of which are livestock-free, and retirement of grazing permits associated with those lands;

• Acquisition of 18,446 acres of private in-holdings in return for U.S. Treasury payments totaling $5,157,000 to five private landowners who also received 104,236 acres of BLM lands elsewhere as part of the exchange;

• Designation of Ankle Creek and Mud Creek, tributaries of the Donner und Blitzen River, as Wild and Scenic rivers;

• Establishment of the Redband Trout Preserve, which includes portions of the Donner und Blitzen River, Ankle Creek and Mud Creek, to protect this threatened species of high-desert fish.

As part of the BLM's efforts to restore wilderness qualities to the designated "cow-free" areas, a nonprofit service organization, Wilderness Volunteers, assigned our group of 10 to Ankle Creek. We would backpack into the area, set up a base camp by the newly designated wild and scenic river and spend four days ripping out barbed-wire fences that were no longer needed in a "cow-free" area.

"Cow-Free" or Cows O'Plenty?

After a tough, 6-mile hike with packs on old four-wheel drive roads, our group faced an unsettling reality all around Ankle Creek: What was touted as "cow-free" was severely and recently "cow-nuked." Cattle manure was everywhere including our campsite. Grasses were chewed to less than an inch, and down to bare ground along Ankle Creek.

Cattle had trampled the stream and the springs forming its headwaters. Young willows and aspens had been eaten, leaving a dusty, barren understory in the mature aspen and willow communities. As disconcerting as the damage was, a more disturbing realization crept in. As the week progressed, we found a biological wasteland: few birds or butterflies, no deer, no elk, no pronghorn. With no forage or cover, the wildlife had mostly disappeared.

I felt the anguish of this high-desert land and its wildlife, invaded by alien Eurasian cattle that have dominated the land for more than a century. Our project, I hoped, was the start of a healing process. With every strand of barbed wire coiled up and every fence post pulled out, I envisioned the land sighing relief.

Our hardworking group removed -- completely by our own muscle power -- about 2.5 miles of barbed-wire fencing from the riparian zone and uplands near the upper stretch of Ankle Creek. Seeing the piles of posts, rolls of barbed wire and a landscape turning from domesticated to wild again was indeed a tangible reward.

But what about the devastation to the land, its wildlife and plants? While the long recovery process desperately needs to begin, we found out, to our disbelief, that one more season of grazing is scheduled for Ankle Creek. Was it to give another homespun, salt-of the-earth "steward of the land" another season to find other allotments for an ailing operation so that he won't lose the fourth-generation homestead?

Corporate Plunder Revisited

No, we discovered, it was not Ma and Pa Rancher completely "utilizing" all available forage so that their marginal operation could squeak by. The devastation we experienced on these public lands -- designated wilderness and Wild and Scenic River, the highest of all legal protections -- was for the private benefit of an out-of state corporation named Roaring Springs Ranch Inc. (RSR).

Headquartered west of the Cascades in Kalama, Wash., RSR is described in a 1999 Range magazine article as the owner of 425,000 acres in the Catlow Valley (near the western base of Steens). As part of the SMA, RSR received 76,374 acres of BLM land in exchange for ceding 10,909 acres to the agency. Besides the unwitting generosity of the American public in exchanging land at a 7:1 ratio in favor of RSR, taxpayers paid the corporation more than $2.8 million as part of the exchange.

Net result: Courtesy of American taxpayers, RSR ended up with substantially more private land, more cash for its coffers and a couple more seasons at the public trough for its livestock to devour our grasses, forbs, shrubs and trees. From the nearly complete annihilation of grasses, willows and aspens that I observed, it seemed clear that RSR is strip-mining the forage from the land in the Ankle and Mud Creek drainages as a last hurrah in its final seasons of permitted grazing.

Despite my desire to retreat to a simple world of hands-on work with wire cutters to restore the land from domestic livestock grazing, I couldn't escape the Byzantine grazing regime that allows an uneconomical, extractive use of our public lands at untold costs to wildlife, streams and habitat. Nor did I escape the world of Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. Corporate greed is alive and exploiting the public resources of America, even in the remote reaches of southeastern Oregon.

What can you do to help? Contact the BLM, as we did about Steens, or wherever you witness atrocities to public lands. And join Wilderness Volunteers for another fence removal project in the Steens area this coming summer.

For information, visit www.wildernessvolunteers.org 

Debra Ellers, a WWP board member, lives in Boise, Idaho.