Monday, January 21, 2008

The cowboys score! Bumper stickers that read "No Moo in '92," and "Cattle Free by '93" signaled the open warfare between Western ranchers and environmental groups in the last decade. The war is still raging. Groups such as the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and others set out years ago to free the West of cattle, sheep and the ranchers responsible for them. A favorite tool used by these well-funded organizations is the Wilderness Act of 1964. This law was enacted originally to preserve 9 million acres of wilderness so "future generations could see what their forefathers had to conquer." Now, there are 702 officially designated Wilderness Areas, covering 107.4 million acres. Every year environmental groups propose and lobby Congress to designate even more areas as "wilderness." There are 38 such bills in the current Congress. "Wilderness" designation is a legal term that prohibits the use of motorized vehicles in the area. There can be no commercial enterprise in a "wilderness" area. There can be no roads nor permanent structures. Motorized equipment or mechanized transport is prohibited. "Wilderness" means land "untrammeled by humans." The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, or NMWA, led a campaign to designate an additional 422,138 acres in Dona Ana County, N.M., as "wilderness," and another 108,000 acres as a national conservation area. The federal government owns 34.1 percent of New Mexico, of which, 1.6 million acres is already designated as "wilderness." The new area proposed by the NMWA borders Mexico and includes thousands of acres of grazing land, which would automatically become "No Moo" zones. Ranchers, and the businesses that depend upon them, would join the cowboy graveyard that environmental organizations have cultivated over the last few decades. Maybe not. The same cowboy ingenuity, that made ranching in the West possible in the first place, stirred and assembled a group of people who created a new organization: People For Preserving Our Western Heritage, or PFPOWH. The new organization, PFPOWH, developed a great audio/visual presentation that explains all the facts about "wilderness" designation. For example, motorized vehicles cannot be used in a "wilderness" area to fight fires or to chase illegal aliens or drug smugglers. Consider the impact that "wilderness" designation would have on a single ranch in the area that has 89 miles of fencing, 56 miles of roads, 20 earthen reservoirs, eight water wells, 16 miles of pipelines for moving water to 11 storage tanks, nine cattle corrals, three barns and two residences....

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