Newspaper column: How to save the West from devastating wildfires

As we enter another wildfire season — and each one seems to be more devastating than the previous one — the question lingers: Why?

According to The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic it is unquestionably due to climate change.

Pay no heed to the fact that prior to 1980 less than 25,000 acres of wildfires occurred each year in Nevada. In each of the past two years, more than 1 million acres have burned. Coincidentally, since 1980 the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have made massive cuts in the number of cattle and sheep allowed to graze federal land. The number of sheep has fallen 80 percent and the number of cattle has been cut in half.

This past week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review magazine asks the question: “What Is Causing Massive Wildfires In the U.S. West: The Environment — Or Environmentalism?”

The article focuses on the largest fire in Nevada history — the July 2018 Martin Fire, which burned nearly half a million acres in Northeast Nevada and devastated the Ninety-Six Ranch, which has been run by the Stock and Stewart families for 155 years. The article includes an extensive interview with rancher Kris Stewart, who has been lobbying the federal land agencies and the president to allow historic levels of grazing to prevent such wildfires.

Stewart told the magazine’s editor the vegetative fuel levels on the rangeland that burned in the Martin Fire had been allowed to reach 1,000 percent of normal by the BLM’s own estimates, and, despite this, she said the ranch was denied permission for additional grazing time.

In the 1960s, she reported, “the modern environmental movement began to inform range management studies and policy, and environmental lawsuits caused a shift in grazing policies. Once considered engaged partners, ranchers were viewed as the enemy …”

This was political, not scientific. Stewart noted that range biologists such as Allan Savory have concluded that livestock grazing disturbs the soil in a healthy manner, “allowing rain and snow water, seeds and fertilizer to be absorbed throughout the soil. They obviously also deposit some of those seeds as well as a completely natural and healthy fertilizer to the soil.”

In the 2015 summer edition of Range magazine, under the headline “Cows can save the world,” Savory stated, “Over millions of years such grasslands — soil life, plants, grazing animals and their predators — developed together in an amazing symbiotic relationship. The grasses needed animals grazing, trampling, dunging and urinating just as much as the animals needed plants.”

In fact, livestock have actually transformed Nevada from a barren desert into land habitable by wildlife such as elk, deer and sage grouse — all of which are decimated by massive wildfires.

The late Elko County Commissioner Grant Gerber often charged that federal agents are in thrall of the radical environmentalists, whose mantra is that the land should be returned to the pristine state before ranchers ruined it by trampling it with sheep and cattle.

Gerber was fond of quoting from the diary of fur trapper Peter Skene Ogden who crossed Nevada circa 1828: “There were times when we tasted no food, and we were unable to discover water for several days together; without wood, we keenly felt the cold; wanting grass, our horses were reduced to great weakness, so that many of them died, on whose emaciated carcases we were constrained to satisfy the intolerable cravings of our hunger, and as a last resource, to quench our thirst with their blood.”

Only after the sheep and cattle came and trampled the earth and fertilized it, as Savory explained, and ranchers improved access to water, the region blossomed.

Whether that can continue is in jeopardy. Stewart estimates the fire cost the ranch $160,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for such things as hay. And since reseeding efforts have been largely unsuccessful those expenses are likely to occur for at least two or three years, exhausting savings and retirement accounts.

After the ranchers appealed to the White House, Stewart says President Trump responded with an executive order in December titled “Promoting Active Management of America’s Forests, Rangelands, and Other Federal Lands To Improve Conditions and Reduce Wildfire Risk.”

“Whether our family operation will survive this battle is unclear,” Stewart said, “but if we have a part in saving U.S. cattle ranching and our way of life, it will have been worth the time, expense and trouble for the next generation.”

The fires are destroying the one thing that could prevent them.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Save money by selling off federal public grazing range

Here is an idea from 1982 whose time has come.

Writing at Forbes magazine online today, Steve Hanke, a one-time senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, resurrects an idea he broached 36 years ago — sell off federal grazing lands with the first right of refusal going to current grazing permit holders.

Hanke says Reagan endorsed the idea, as did then-U.S. Sen. and Reagan confidant Paul Laxalt. He quotes Laxalt as saying:

Before we proceed any further, let me tell you where I stand. I believe a need does exist to sell some of our excess public lands. However, I intend to do all in my power to protect existing public land users from being “locked out.” To this end, I endorse a proposal developed by Dr. Steve Hanke, a senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, that deals with the protection of existing grazing rights which, I believe, can serve as a model for protecting miners as well. Basically, Dr. Hanke has proposed that ranchers currently holding grazing permits be given the right to purchase, on a first refusal basis, the public grazing permits that they currently rent from the BLM.

Hanke says the federal government should stop renting grazing land — a process by which the government loses 91 cents an acre — and sell it at a profit.

Hanke concludes:

The question now is: what would be the benefits associated with this privatization proposal?

First, the productivity of federal grazing lands would increase.

Second, federal revenues would be generated. Instead of receiving annual grazing fees, the federal government would receive an equivalent lump-sum payment.

Third, the annual federal costs (and these do not include, as they should, capital carrying charges) exceed the annual revenues generated from federal grazing lands. Therefore, privatization would eliminate negative cash flows for the federal government. This would obviously benefit all U.S. taxpayers, who must now pay taxes to support the federal government’s retention of public grazing lands.

Lastly, a state and local property tax base would be created. Western dependence on Washington, D.C. would be reduced and federalism would be enhanced.

Sounds like a winning proposition, especially for taxpayers.

BLM pix

 

Obama’s budget is a declaration of war on the West

President Obama’s budget may well be dead on arrival, but its fetid corpse tells a tale of just what his administration thinks of the West, according to this week’s newspaper column, available online at The Ely Times and the Elko Daily Free Press.

The budget proposes to raise grazing fees on both Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land by $1 a head per month — a 74 percent increase.

The budget also seeks to pick the pockets of drillers of oil and natural gas wells on federally controlled land by increasing royalty payments by $2.5 billion over the next 10 years.

Cattle grazing near Austin, Nev.

While the Obama administration is trying to declare various species across the West threatened or endangered — most of which are threatened or endangered due to the huge increase in wildfires — his budget proposes to slash funding for a program to reduce the dried brush and trees that fuel those fires by $90 million in 2014.

Both Reps. Mark Amodei and Steven Horsford — who together represent the bulk of rural Nevada, 85 percent of which is controlled by various federal agencies — were dismissive of the Obama budget.

Amodei, a Republican, commented, “With yet another budget from the president that doesn’t balance, increases spending, raises taxes, raises grazing fees, and continues to block American energy production, I suspect it will meet the same fate as his last budget — voted down 97-0 in the Senate and 419-0 in the House.”

Horsford, a Democrat, said, “The president’s budget is just one of many budget proposals, and as we hopefully continue through the budget process, we will have to consider a variety of funding priorities. I will fight to make sure the rural communities in my district have the resources they need and the representation they deserve to maintain their livelihood.”

“Our nation is nearly $17 trillion in debt,” observed Sen. Dean Heller. “At a time when Nevadans are simply trying to keep their heads above water, the president is asking for another $8.2 trillion, partly on the backs of our ranchers and rural communities.”

Dustin Van Liew, a spokesman for both the Public Lands Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said the budget shows this administration has no understanding of American agriculture.

“The president’s lack of understanding for the federal lands grazing industry, as evidenced by his proposed 74 percent tax on federal land ranchers, is extremely disappointing,” Van Liew said. “Effectively increasing the grazing fee during these times of economic uncertainty will unnecessarily increase burdens on livestock producers and hamper their ability to create jobs and generate economic growth in their communities.”

Read the full column online at Ely and Elko websites.