Which is more damaging to our landscape.......ranching and farming or sprawl? George Wuerthner has written extensively on this topic and in the Posting below and in the 1st Post published today, makes a strong case that we should not stop one or the other.........But that we must mitigate both to accomplish our re-wilding objectives...........That in fact ranching/farming done either without regard for the health of the land or practiced in parts of the USA that are both unsuited climate and waterwise should cease ...............That we should enact the proper zoning to prevent sprawl is a must..........read our email conversation below and George's above posted essay and you will have a new appreciation for the problem that we face in combating wild land degradation and how we might go about changing course and take the steps needed to restore wild lands and wild creatures

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From: George Wuerthner <gwuerthner@gmail.com>
To: Meril, Rick
Sent: Tue Nov 23 06:58:13 2010
Subject: Re: Ranchers and open space

Rick

People are geographically challenged. Get up in the air and look down next time you travel and what you will see is not cities or suburbs once you have traveled even a few minutes. What you will see is mostly lands used for ranching and/or farming. The entire middle part of the country is nothing but row crops of corn and soy for cattle feed. And even in the West, nearly all the land outside of cities is irrigated hay production and/or rangelands. The percentages are so skewed towards ranching and livestock production, it human habitation development (i.e. subdivisions) would have to grow by 1000 times to match the habitat destroyed by ranching/livestock production. That is simply not going to happen. There are many other limits on human population and urbanization that will prevent that from happening. 

Even in countries with much higher densities than the US (say in Europe) the majority if land is not urbanized. 

According to the USDA there are 60 million acres in the US that are in urbanized, developed, malls, highways, etc. category. Double that and you have 120 million acres. We have 2.3 billion acres in the US! In other words, that is still something like 5-6% of the land area. And that assumes the land consumed by urbanization will be the same rate and kind as today.I think we are seeing a concentration. I.e. more and more dense settlement in and near urban areas. Suburbia will be less desirable in the future for a host of reasons, including higher energy costs. 

The problem isn't urbanization. It's really the fact that most of the land is exploited and not suitable for wildlife and/or poor wildlife habitat. The real problem are the exploitative uses. Spotted owls are not going extinct because of housing tracts in Oregon and Washington. It's logging. Salmon are not going extinct because of housing tracts--it's logging and ranching. Sage grouse are not going extinct because of ski resorts and condos. It's ranching. And so it goes. When you look at the causes for extinction, you find that urban development is not the major factor--and where it is listed, it is usually the coup de grace on a population that has dwindled because of the other factors like farming, ranching, and logging. Only with a few species that have a very limited geographic range--say some butterfly that may be found only one mountain--does urbanization pose the major threat. In most cases, endangered species are listed because of severe population decline that results from other factors--typically habitat quality decline that results from ranching, farming and logging.  In other words, subdivisions may be the final nail on the coffin, but typically the species affected are already in severe population decline due to other factors. 

You will get a lot more bang for bucks eliminating ranching than any other action. 

The amount of money we spend on Ag subsidies is huge. The Conservation Reserve Program (CPR) which pays farmers and ranchers to take lands out of crop production is a good example. We spend more on that program annually which only rents the land (meaning it can always be planted to crops again) than we spend ten times as much on the CPR than on the entire budget of the Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife refuges. Which would be a better use of money? Buying up more land for wildlife refuges or continuing to support CPR? 

That's only one example.

If you want to keep lands from being developed, we would be better off lobbying for land use restrictions. In Oregon, the entire state is zoned. You don't hear the condos and cows argument in Oregon because ranchers can't subdivide their land unless it's within an urban growth boundary. For all the money that groups like TNC and so forth spend on conservation easements and "championing" ranching, if they spent a fraction on citizen measures to limit and restrict where urbanization can occur, we could address ranching impacts honestly, instead always couching it as a false choice between condos and cows. 

If we could eliminate ranching from just the 250 million acres of public lands that are grazed, you would automatically have a huge difference for many species that are on the edge today. And if we could remove ranching from much of the private lands in the West, then we would see even more species recovery. 

I could give you an example here from the Northeast. Logging and farming destroyed the forests here. In 1880 85% of Vermont, for instance, was cleared. Today about 80% of Vermont is now reforested (but still degraded as a result of past logging and on-going logging). Nevertheless, much of that land is now in public ownership (Green Mountain NF etc.) and even  the private holdings are in much better shape today than in 1880s because farms have been abandoned. The result has been the recovery of black bear, beaver, moose, and many other species that were actually extrapated from Vermont in the 1800s. 

I see a similar future for the West. As ranching becomes more and more economically marginal, we'll see lots of that land either converted to public holdings and/or just held in private ownership, but not ranched or farmed. And the habitat quality will increase. Unfortunately unlike the 1800s when there were few government welfare systems, farmers who  occupied marginal lands such as in Vermont just went out of business. Today, everyone is trying to subsidize them and protect them from paying the real costs of operations--including for instance, ranching without killing predators. 
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On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Meril, Rick <Rick.Meril@warnerbros.com> wrote:

George

All true

But the politics and mindset in montana and wyoming and utah is so rancher extraction ingrained

What do you do with those folks

You can't vaporize them

And u and I have seen sprawl in our lifetime make the east coast one giant boston to georgia city

La to san diego same

300 million will be 600 million by 2100

Do not forget the long view

Hardscape development is never reclaimed whereas pasture and farmland can grow back

From: George Wuerthner <gwuerthner@gmail.com>
To: Meril, Rick

Sent: Tue Nov 23 06:07:08 2010
Subject: Re: Ranchers and open space

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Rick

I am not worried that most of the West will be destroyed by subdivisions. Even in California, there are huge areas of the state with virtually no population. Northwest California between the Sacramento Valley and Coast has fewer people than western Montana. The desert areas, high Sierras, Cascades, etc. are virtually uninhabited. 

The rest of the West is even less developed. There is a lot of hype about how subdivisions are destroying wildlife habitat. In reality, farming, ranching, and logging affect far more of the habitat than housing tracts. And these exploitative uses are the big problem for most wildlife, except in a few places where humans are very concentrated (like LA basin). So while I don't necessarily support more subdivisions (and encourage zoning and so forth to limit them), I also want to limit ranching, farming and logging to the minimal area needed. Much of the land that is used for these purposes are marginal and they contribute very little to the total supply of these products. I.e. you can grow far more wood in Georgia than in say Montana's high elevation mountains. Why log Montana where it takes 150 years to grow a 10 inch tree when you can grow a ten inch tree in Georgia in ten years? The same for livestock. States like Missouri, Georgia, EastTexas, Florida, etc. all grow more beef than most western states. Most of the West is too dry. The contribution of ranching to overall meat production is actually quite small, but the ecological damage is far more significant. If all the ranches in the West disappeared, people would still have plenty of meat to eat (if they really wanted to do that). 

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Meril, Rick <Rick.Meril@warnerbros.com> wrote:

George

Thank you......I know theoretically a false choice......but can all of the human behavior mechanisms change enough to keep the ranchers in biz while keeping wild america alive? I want what u seek.......is it doable or do we have to compromise with existing habits and induce the ranchers to "play ball" with us

I will post your attachments

I compliment u on your insight and knowledge

Keep em coming.....I battle objections in my biz all day.......look at the hardened questions todd and the others have when they comment on your writings on new west......how do we dent their dug in positions???

From: George Wuerthner <gwuerthner@gmail.com>
To: Meril, Rick
Sent: Tue Nov 23 05:30:45 2010
Subject: Ranchers and open space

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Rick:

I' have written a lot about the condos and cows issue. It's a false choice. There is very little evidence that livestock grazing prevents subdivisions. The argument that most subdivisions are carved from ranchlands is like arguing that most heroin addicts drank milk. Yes both statements are true but they are not significant. The reason most subdivisions come from private lands is that most private land that is not urbanized tends to be used for three major industries--farming, timber production or livestock production. Some lands do all three. But there is little evidence that subsidies keep ranchlands from being subdivided. Rather it is demand for land by growing population that drives subdivisions. In places with little demand, there's no or little threat from subdivisions. Go check out North Dakota if you want to see a place with no subdivision threat--even though nearly all the land is private and used for Ag including ranching.

But even if there is demand, ranching does not prevent subdivisions. Plus there's another assumption that is false. Open space is not the same as good wildlife habitat.  Because most people fail to identify what is driving subdivision, they waste their time on false alternatives like supporting ranching. 

But the basic arguments goes something like this.

First, the vast majority of land is occupied by livestock production. For instance, even in California all the urbanization including the highways, malls, housing tracts, etc. only occupies about 3-4% of the state's land area. And of course, in the rest of the West, it is far less. In Oregon, for instance, it's about 1% of the land. In Montana, it's only .17% of the land. These figures are very accurate and done by using air photos and digitized and then all land uses scanned. 

But most of us live in these urban and suburban areas and we extrapolate what we view around us to the larger land area.

Again using California, 50% of the state is public land. But a great deal of that land is grazed by livestock. Then when you go to the private land, you find that nearly all of the private lands are used for livestock production. They are either grazed, used for growing forage crops like alfalfa, hay and so forth. Even though California is well known for growing things like veggies, fruits, wine, etc. those kinds of crops occupy a very small percentage of California's acreage. 

When you get to a state like Montana, you find that the bulk of land is used for livestock production. For instance, though only 400,000 acres or so are occupied by housing tracts, rural subdivisions, etc. there are over 5.5 million acres of just hay fields in the state. Some 70 million acres (private and public) . are considered "rangelands". So you have the bulk of the state occupied by livestock production. 

The assumption that ranching is better than condos is also exaggerated. If you were to do a full accounting of all the costs associated with ranching and compared it to a typical subdivision, I don't think you would find that subdivisions are necssarily worse, and in some cases it is better. For instance, all the rivers in the West that are dewatered are in bad shape not because of housing tracts, but because of livestock production. Even in California, the vast majority of all water goes for irrigation of cow food. Some 50% of all water used in California is for growing hay and alfalfa. All the cities use less than 10% of the water. So those rivers that are drained, causing a decline in salmon, steelhead, etc. are the result of livestock production. 

Finally, there is no evidence that ranchers won't sell when they can. In other words, when demand is there, a great majority of ranchers sell out (even though they could choose to put their lands in conservation easements and not have them available for subdivisions). We hear all the time that ranchers had "no choice" but to sell out for subdivision. That's bogus. They just make more money selling for subdivisions. So unless you have another way to preserve these lands i.e. you plan to buy them for public lands at some point, subsidizing ranchers does nothing in the long run, but waste money that could be used for actual public acquisition which would preclude subdivision forever. 

Geo.