Ranching versus Sustainability
The matter of History
Generational Knowledge
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
Kern County
rancher, Kenneth Mebane, endured a series of hip replacements in order to
continue his historical calling. Mebane’s close friend and fellow Californio,
Chuck Hitchcock, was no different. Chuck suffered many injuries and woes to
remain active in the only thing that mattered … being a participant in the California ranching and
horse culture.
Kenneth was
the model of the western slope rancher. Chuck was the epitome of the California vaquero. They
were brothers born of a culture that time and the collision of circumstances
created. As time passed, they both mourned the attrition of their culture as
much or more than they mourned the loss of their own vitality.
Kern County
gave them life and a common soul born of sun and the gifts of the earth, and …
it is there they will now rest forever.
Ranching versus Sustainability
Change the
names, but Kenneth and Chuck’s counterparts are scattered across the width and
breadth of North America. They speak Spanish
on the southern tier and varying degrees of English elsewhere where grass grows
and cattle convert sunlight into protein. Most accounts suggest that it is a
uniquely American culture, but it isn’t. The progenitors of the Iberian Peninsula would view the similarities with great
interest. So would the modern day Australians, Argentines, Mexicans, and
Canadians, but what each version of range steward would agree upon is that the
cow now receives the central spotlight. She is the queen of modern sunlight
conversion. To replace her American annual contribution of 25 billion pounds of
protein, there would be a gigantic and unsustainable slaughter of frolicking
deer, antelope, and bison.
The generic
story of the creation of the American ranching industry has become dreary
monochrome. What has always been absent is the description of the true nature
of the relationship the self supporting rancher has with the land, the
immensity and importance of his cultural heritage, and the ecological validity
of his continuing existence.
Advocacy for these factors is
necessary, but some will argue it was never present. Certainly over the last half century there has
been little substantive cultural or political defense. Underwritten by the
federal land management agencies, the ranching industry in the West is being
subjected to updated resource management plans on the basis of a) considerations
for closing lands to grazing, b) grazing to be reduced 25%, c) grazing to be managed
on the basis of watershed priority bases, and or d) livestock adjustments will
be done on a case by case basis. There is no intention of seeking improvements
in production.
This demonstrates that antagonists
of the culture long ago found an unbounded niche to become dominant in policy
and management formulation. Similar to the suggestions that civilization took
root when advances were sufficient to allow enough leisure time to tinker with
ideas, the environmentalists found adequate governmental and societal welfare
to devote time and effort to laying the foundations of what has become a cultural
assault. Those efforts have grown exponentially and have spread like cancer to
all corners of society.
Enforced
private property rights would have done much to retard the assault, but that
didn’t happen. As a result, rural cleansing is now occurring. It has huge
implications of structural despair. The environmental assault against the cow
is based upon a philosophy of science that has grown and has now been accepted
through the element of moral standing. That corrupted moral implication is the
salvation of the earth. That is being force fed to us on the basis of Sustainability. In this context, it is
an environmental and political invention.
As Thomas
Kuhn has noted, this is a paradigm of science that has been professionalized on
the basis of hijacked moral implications. It, like global warming and social welfare,
is nearly impossible to displace after reaching the institutionalized realm of
primary policy.
Sustainability came about with the nebulous
notion of biodiversity following the United Nations publication of the World Conservation Strategy in 1980. Similar high brow reports came in 1987, 1991,
and 1992. By the time the 2006 report Livestock’s
long Shadow was printed, Sustainability
was regarded as the guiding principle for all future development. Biased
science had proven that development is sustainable only if it is ecologically sound.
The element
of elitism in this hoax is staggering.
In order to identify and map this
soundness, the demand on the United
States and this president is the matter of future
funding. Human and institutional capacity
is not fluid and properly distributed hence American taxpayers are being
expected to come up with funding to field human
resources (e.g. scientists), and institutional
resources (e.g. systematic reference collections such as botanic gardens
and genetic depositories) in order to make this all happen. The bottom line is,
while we fight for our ranching existence, too many career paths and political
capital expectations are riding on the outcome of the United Nations global
warming funding decisions.
History will show this is being
based on the professionalized and false science of … Sustainability.
Cultural cleansing
Less than two percent of American
families are now engaged in primary production agriculture. Less than half are
ranchers. The average age of that demographic is just under 60 years of age,
and, collectively, they manage something just under 800 million acres of
grasslands, pastures and grazed forests. That means that an aging cultural
resource of less than one percent of the American population is serving as the
front line management of 33% of the nation’s footprint.
There will be those who suggest
that statistic proves that too few people are actively managing a
disproportionate share of the American landscape. Those of us who know the
cultural assault that is being waged against the industry will counter by
saying this is a vital business sector that is being systematically dismantled.
Hope is being vanquished, parallel enterprises have long been suppressed,
regulatory burdens are unrelenting, and cultural despair is endemic. Young
people are being driven away by the inability to create opportunities for them
to remain. Next generation recruitment is a major indicator of the problem and
there are huge implications. If there is a true and pending cataclysm of real sustainability,
it lies with the destruction of local ecological stewardship.
Kimberly D. Kirner, Assistant
Professor of Anthropology, Cal State Northridge, is starting to identify this
dilemma. In her work, she elevates why experiential learning forges emotional
ties to the land and local communities for cultural continuity. She maintains
that site specific knowledge is absolutely necessary for all adaptive
co-management, monitoring, and conservation strategies. Furthermore, continuity
of local ecological knowledge is a significant factor in the resilience of
ranching culture, rural pastoral economies, and working landscapes.
The Kirner emphasis relates to the importance
of Cultural Heritage. Cultural heritage or history is the traditions,
knowledge, places and artifacts that people inherit from past generations. This
can be tangible (trails, roads, fence placement, homesteads, physical
infrastructure, tack, and working heirlooms), intangible (stories, experiences,
learned insight, and other, more esoteric ecological knowledge), and natural
(places, livestock and wildlife patterns and habits, turf responses to
rainfall, and, other, biorhythmic nuances).
As a cultural anthropologist, she
has come to equate continuity of this heritage, this history, with natural system
integrity. Her own words best describe her research.
Cultural
heritage is part of an integrated system that ensures that knowledge is passed
on from one generation to the next. It generates a sense of identity and
motivates younger generations to learn the lifeways of their parents and
grandparents. In the case of family ranchers, cultural heritage is an integral
part of the continuity of local ecological knowledge. Local knowledge is
complementary to formal scientific approaches to management … (it) contains
deep and rich data on a single locale over long periods of time in ways that
science rarely can provide.
Voices from the land
The problem is local management
systems cannot exist without the whole. Threats to the integrity of the
combined cultural history are coming from a wide array of places far removed
from these systems. When too many ranches fail in a given locale, the integrity
of the entire system is put at risk. In a nation that is losing direct ties to
the land at an alarming rate, it must become incumbent on American leadership
to recognize the cultural, economic, and ecological risks inherent in the
decline.
In this case, it is time to
recognize that the history value of ranching is not just an academic debate. It
is the cornerstone that must be preserved for the genuine sustainability of
nearly a third of the landmass of the United States all of which remains
what even the environmentalists acclaim as their goal … permanent open spaces.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “In this series of essays mapping the
importance of the History Value, cultural integrity appears first. The heart of
the debate, cattle, will appear in the second installment.”
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