By Rocky Barker
Duane Coombs exhibited the optimism that every Western
rancher and farmer needs to have about the overwhelming challenges they
face in the life they love.
Those include drought, fires, floods,
disease, poor markets, predators and just bad luck. But most of the
ranchers I’ve known have the view that Coombs has: Things are always
going to get better next year.
Coombs, who manages the Smith Creek
Ranch near Austin, Nev., spoke Tuesday at a news conference in Denver
in favor of the massive collaborative conservation plan unveiled this
week to protect sage grouse across 173 million acres and 11 states. He
told an audience that included four Western governors from both
political parties and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell that his
11-year-old daughter Desatoya (Desi for short) has helped him to
overcome his own distrust of government while working on the ranch to
save the bird his family loves.
“In this little girl’s life, government is her partner,” Coombs said.
Named
for a mountain range near the ranch, Desi has watched her father put
white streamers on his barbed wire — she calls them “chicken flappers” —
to keep the grouse from flying into the fences. One of her best friends
is U.S. Geological Survey biologist Katelyn Andrle.
If the
American West can take Coombs’ approach to restoring the sage grouse and
saving the sagebrush steppe ecosystem, then perhaps it remains “Next
Year Country.” But it’s a daunting task.
Energy companies are considering lawsuits because they think the 98
federal land plan amendments that include sage grouse conservation
measures are too tough. Environmental groups such as Western Watersheds
Project, Advocates for the West and the Center for Biodiversity think
the plans don’t go far enough to turn the bird from the path to
extinction.
At the heart of both sides’ reservations is the
incredible distrust that has evolved over the past 40 years of public
lands governance. Each side has valid reasons for their views, but
taking that leap of faith that created this “all lands” conservation
plan requires challenging their own status quo.
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