Time to Shut Down the Public Lands Livestock Industry

(photo of trespass cattle in the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Photo by Tom Ribe)

We aren’t going to solve the climate crisis by doing a few easy things on the fringes and generally keeping our lives going as usual. We may have to confront some difficult choices and change the rules of the game that protect activities that are extremely damaging to society and the world that sustains us.

We can start by questioning everything we do together and individually. Global warming is the most serious problem humans have ever confronted and right now we are failing in our response to the problem. The physics and chemistry of the atmosphere will not wait for us to slowly come around to acting. Talking about it and doing little things won’t solve the problem. Rationalizing air and land pollution and delaying action with PR campaigns will make the problem worse.

So, let’s look at a tough choice we need to make. We need to phase out the livestock industry in the 11 states of the arid West. We need to shut down public land livestock grazing everywhere it happens, soon. The industry benefits very few people, produces less than 2% of the American beef supply, and the costs it exacts on nature and society are unacceptable.

This may seem idealistic, cruel, bold, unnecessary, and radical but this is the sort of choice we must make if we are going to survive the growing climate crisis. There will be collateral damage to sectors of our economy as we confront this emergency. And deciding how we bear bad news to people who earn their living polluting the air, ruining watersheds, and killing off wildlife and plant life will be another conversation. We can’t fantasize our way out of this problem.

Despite the romance of the cowboy and the myth that ranching is an important part of the western economy, we need to take a hard look at this industry’s costs of on society as a whole and measure that against the downsides for people who will be displaced by shutting it down. Public lands ranching is a tiny part of western state’s economies. Often only a fraction of 1% of a state’s GDP is related to public lands grazing. Closing public lands to grazing would have a tiny affect on state economies though we need to be helpful to ranchers who may need to make adjustments to using their own land to feed their cattle.

Cattle ranching in the west is a big contributor to global warming. Ranching on public lands is destroying wildlife populations, depleting water supplies, and it is a significant contributor to global warming. The climate change aspects of the industry are acute.

Oregon State University’s Dr. Boone Kauffman reveals in a recent research paper that public land grazing is a large contributor to global warming. Not only do cattle emit substantial amounts of methane directly, but they also degrade ecosystems so seriously that the lands that should be removing carbon dioxide from the air are instead contributing to it. The cumulative effects of these impacts are substantial.

In the dry West, cattle eat vast amounts of native plants. In many places they denude the ground and leave only inedible plants behind; cactus, sagebrush, and cheatgrass. In some places this native plant community devastation has been going on so long, we might think the land is naturally barren. Yet when we bar cattle from the land and allow it to recover, often a rich plant community returns, storing carbon, converting CO2 to oxygen, and providing habitat for thousands of invertebrates and animals. The societal value of land with rich plant communities and healthy watersheds cannot be overestimated. The contribution of healthy plant communities to battling climate change likewise cannot be overstated.

Kauffman found that cattle can remove 88% of above ground carbon storage on public land, even if native plants are replaced with weeds like cheatgrass or crested wheatgrass. Cattle kill native bunch grasses which have deep roots holding the soil and storing carbon.

Weeds follow cattle and sheep. On millions of acres of the West, an exotic grass called cheatgrass fills into overgrazed areas. Annual cheatgrass goes to seed in the spring, dries and becomes explosively flammable. When it burns, it seeds easily into the ash but other native plants may not be able to endure the frequent hot fires that cheatgrass encourages. So cheatgrass expands its range by helping burn its competitors. Sadly, cheatgrass is here to stay and it displaces natives in too many places.

The ranching industry will respond by saying that these ungrazed plant communities are wildfires in waiting. They say they need to graze to keep flammable plant material off the land, so wildfires won’t grow. This thinking is an extension of the reductionist, utilitarian approach to nature with a narrow economic interest at its center. This is self-serving rationalization and denial.

Fire in grasslands stimulates and regenerates the plant communities. Fire in grass among forest trees kills many small trees that create ladder fuels that feed high severity fires. Fire in grasses and shurby plant communities is a good thing overall. Of course, if we have planted houses and other structures in such places, we need to provide defensible space around those buildings.

Meanwhile Kauffman finds that a cow-calf pair on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land produces 233 pounds of methane a year and additional nitrous oxide from their manure. There are 2.1 million cattle on US Forest Service and BLM lands in the US. This is not a trivial problem as 85% of US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands are grazed by domestic livestock. That means 188 million acres of land we all own together is degraded by livestock.

So, cattle on public lands are a significant problem for the American people and the international community.

Some many argue that we could simply consolidate cattle onto feed lots and remove them from public lands. This would be a first step but growing feed for cattle uses large amounts of water needed for people and wildlife in arid areas like most of the western US. And the methane emissions continue regardless of where the cattle live.

This is a tough issue. How do we confront entrenched interests like the livestock industry that enjoy substantial federal incentives and legal protections to graze on our lands? How do we convince Congress to cut off the subsidies, close public lands to livestock, and put the future of humanity before a politically powerful industry?

 

Tom Ribe