Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West

Rating:
Summary: One sided wonder
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Buy the Book, See for Yourself!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building
Review: I found this book while browsing at Cody's in Berkeley last week. It's big. It's colorful. It's angry. And sadly, it's packed full of deception. The problem is that if you live in Staten Island, NY you won't know that you're being decieved unless you've spent a lot of time visiting Nevada's Great Basin and watching the seasons change.

Two examples (among many):
- Lots of close-in photos of range cattle in late-summer condition standing near a water tank with cowpies scattered all over the bone-dry vicinity and not a blade of grass in sight. The fact is that if you zoom-out about 50 yds. you'll see a major difference between the heavily-tracked barren ground surrounding the water trough and the grazing allotment outside of the perimeter. Ditto for a different time of year. The perception is that the entire range is bone-dry, overstocked, and full of cowpies. Not true. The stocking rate on that sort of range is 1 cow for every 250 acres. Lots of room for a cow, her calf, and a few of their cowpies.
- An aerial photo designed to discount the idea of ranching as a natural defense against urban sprawl is taken high above the Gallatin Valley in Montana - the source of urban sprawl would be Bozeman. The photo shows several thousand acres of ranches, mainly irrigated alfalfa farms. The point of the photo is, "well, obviously there's no sprawl here." The problem?Bozeman isn't even captured in the photo! So, the photo is a lie that would make even George Orwell blush.

I'm an environmental activist. I think there's no more important issue facing our time than preventing a head-on collision with ecological catastrophe. So, it disappoints me greatly when a book like this is bankrolled and released by someone like Doug Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, especially after his success with "Fatal Harvest".

His credibility on this particular issue has been lost. More importantly, much of the hard work of building consensus among stakeholders in public lands coalitions has been vanquished because one green element decided to lie shamelessly to further its agenda of removing livestock from public lands. The hurt feelings and distrust will take years to mend, I'm afraid.

This book should remain on the shelf.

Rating:
Summary: One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies
Review: I'm afraid that most readers will only look at the pictures and read the captions and headlines. That's the point. No one sits down and reads through a book like this, so the message is as broad, blatant, and one-sided as a billboard. It is meant to seduce anyone who gives it a superficial glance. Leaf through it casually and discover that cattle are bad for just about anything you care to name. Are they good for anything at all? No. This is propaganda at its best (or worst).
"Welfare Ranching" is filled with pictures that are captioned to manipulate, rather than instruct. For every lush "cattle-free" area shown in the book, a barren area-just as "free"-could easily be found. The same is true of pictures showing cows on dry, dusty land. The photos are carefully chosen to show a single perspective.
On page 275 is a photo captioned "Campground full of cow manure, Nevada." It shows a flattish clearing dotted with sage and grass and a few old, dry cow pies. In the background are tall brush and trees with the hint of a mountain in the distance. It could be Nevada. Someone might camp there, if they chose to. It could also be someone's back pasture. Page 45 is a full page picture of "Severely eroded land." OK. What eroded it? We are meant to believe it was cattle, but even the author won't stick that label on. A horrifying photo of a cow carcass in a river occupies page 193. It probably smells as bad as the deer carcasses I used to find in the creek behind my grandmother's Connecticut farm.
The footnotes are probably not meant to be read, either. Otherwise, why would the author cite himself so often? Can a serious, reasonable argument against cattle ranching can be made by someone whose reference is a book called "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory?" The chapter on the health implications of meat consumption is written by the author of "The Vegetarian Way." The chapter on livestock raising from a global perspective is co-authored by an "environmental activist" advocate for wolf recovery and a math professor who authored "Judaism and Vegetarianism."
The "factual" parts of the book are a clever mixture of half-truths, excerpts out of context, skewed statistics and a grab-bag of factoids winkled out of scientific papers to fit the situation. For instance, on page 13 the author states that "ranching and associated activities provide very few jobs...most ranch operations...are not highly profitable...ranch families depend on [outside] jobs (to) help keep the ranch financially afloat." On page 15 the author argues that ranchers dominate Western politics because: "low salaries [of public office] rule out participation by people without other sources of income. Yet ranchers...having the financial latitude to engage in off-ranch pursuits-are able to hold office with less sacrifice than the work would require of others." The statement is made that "Vermont produces more beef than all the public lands in Nevada." USDA statistics show 500,000 head of cattle in Nevada in 2002, 285,000 in Vermont. Nevada has fewest cattle of any western state except Alaska.
Then there are all those questionable critters that cows are accused of threatening. There are snails the size of a pinhead, cave bugs and tiny fish. I couldn't help wondering how many insects and reptiles survived the sprawl of Phoenix or Seattle? Shouldn't we get those people "off the land" too? Abundant dinosaurs roamed where Los Angeles is now. Maybe we should try to "restore" them? There's more than a hint of wanting to "play God" in all this fervor over weeds and worms.
As for the cows, a "shift away from animal foods is not only an important individual choice, but also imperative for the well-being of humanity, and the ecological systems of the earth." (page 285)
"Welfare Ranching" is not simply a vegetarian tract. There is an underlying, more sinister agenda-The Wildlands Project. That includes a wide swath of land from the tip of South America to Northernmost Canada that is to be free of all human activity. The author of this extreme fantasy is Reed Noss, cited more than half a dozen times in the footnotes. Buried in the text are lines like this: "The majority of the West is directly or indirectly influenced by livestock production, either as rangeland, as cultivated land or pasture growing feed for livestock, or as delimited reserves of nature where naturally migrating wildlife are persecuted the instant they step outside the boundaries people have imposed on them." (page xiv) So, if you take away the rangeland, cultivated land and pasture, "migrating wildlife" will no longer have those boundaries.
In case anyone misses the point, in the next sentence the author adds the "hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest" to the "total physical and ecological footprint of livestock production." When all that Midwest farmland is out of production, there will be room for all the westerners evicted from the Wildlands Project to live. (What they will eat might be a problem.)
"There is no single conservation opportunity for rewilding...300 million acres as ending livestock grazing on all public lands." (page 324). Rewilding is the agenda. Concluding with "Our Vision" the author says: "We dream of a landscape where bison, pronghorn antelope, wolves, and grizzlies are free to roam...in which landscape-scale ecological processes can operate with a minimum of human interference. The elimination of livestock production from our public lands will set us on that pathway."
It's not just a "pathway." The Wildlands Project calls for one half of the land area of the 48 states to be encompassed in core wilderness reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades. What's left over is where people can live-within the boundaries set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Rating:
Summary: Not so great
Review: This book is deceptive -- so readers be wary. A picture of a mountain meadow and something along the lines of: "This is the way it could be" and then a picture of a desert - "this is the way it is." The pictures are taken in two entirely different ecosystems! And yet the editors imply that if cows were not present, picture 2 would look like picture 1. Not true.

Some interesting writing. Too bad, though, that it was framed by deception.

Rating:
Summary: Eyeopening, superb book
Review: 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.

 

Rating:
Summary: When a spade's a spade
Review: 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.