Bygone Era Conservation

The Tracks

Bygone Era Conservation

Grace and Simplicity

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Finding a place to continue has been the order of daily business this week.

            The first step of the recipe has been to be feeding horses somewhere around sunup and then try to hit the road to be at the ranch at least by 7:00. The task at hand has been to rebuild the fence on the west side of the shipping trap.

            Fence repair on too many western ranches has never been as much about rebuilding as patching. Most of the patching has been woefully inadequate and the miles and miles of CCC (Three C’s by rural New Mexico vernacular)  and or Progress Administration Works (WPA) installed original fencing is now in desperate need of not just repair, but replacement.

            Of course, the work programs that initiated these federal programs were initially not congressional acts, but, rather, successive rounds of executive orders. The driver was the Great Depression and the order for the CCC, EO 6101, was signed by FDR in 1933 followed by similar action for WPA, EO 7034, in 1935.

            Young, unemployed men age 18-25 were interviewed and selected by the Department of Labor for the assignments. The initiation was a military type camp setting where basic physical conditioning, health assessments, and rudimentary instruction was given. A total of 300 work type assignments were identified with the logic being that none of the work would compete with the limited private industry jobs of the time.

            The placements were only six months in duration, but allowances to reapply were offered with a restriction of no more than two years of total work time. Some 8.5 million Americans were eventually involved.

            Each worker was paid $30 per month with the initial stipulation to send $25 of that total to families back home. The remaining $5 was to be retained for personal use.

Can we only imagine how that would go over today?

The Tracks

The reminders of that work on our rural lands are not just the presence of the old fencing infrastructure, but also extensive conservation work.

So much of the work is not just a memory, but still functions as effective erosion control structures. In fact, much of what remains is the only erosion control structure that was ever installed on these lands. Serpentine walls, gabion walls, rip rap, and retaining levees are still functioning especially where even the least amount of maintenance has been attempted.

The inventory of this work is amazing especially when the full extent of it was accomplished in only eight years. Thousands of miles of fence, hundreds of thousands of flood control structures, and millions of trees were planted with the oversight and decisions of assigned personnel.

Quite an accomplishment you might think? Absolutely it was, but it is even a greater feat when you realize it could never be done today.

The modern-day collective maze is simply too suppressive.

The environmental assessments, the buffer requirements, the NEPAs, the star chamber committees, the rule and standards books, the land use plans, the CRMPs, the layered land use designations, the arts clearance protocols, the viewscape demands, the specialists’ interpretations, the ever evolving field guidelines, the absence of monitoring history, the resource model audits, the overlapping agency assignments, the public comment and review period, and the various agendas promulgated by the nongovernmental oversite warriors would, collectively, bring it all to a full standstill. Even the paint colors of the various exposed parts would encounter disagreement, and, thus, would delay the projects until the producer involved would give up and decline to participate.

That is where we are today.

We are dead in the water as to any large scale and serious innovation through self-determination. Even old fenceposts can’t be pulled if there are pottery shards visible around them, and, under no circumstance and on threat of contract breach, can a single new fence post hole be dug on a new project without an official order to proceed.

For heaven’s sakes … that is what our government has wrought.

Grace and Simplicity

The CCC camp of memory still exists to some extent in Grant County on the Mangus just above the juncture of Blacksmith. For years it was identified only by the swinging foot bridge that spanned the deep cut of the canyon and connected the camp to Highway 180 in the event of flooding.

The camp itself was largely hidden from view on a bench on the west side of the creek.

Several times I was down there by myself mounted on ol’ Champ and quietly moseying around. The place held some degree of intrigue and foreboding as if any moment some soul would jump out of the empty structures to demand an answer as to why trespass was occurring. It wasn’t just me, either. Champ didn’t like the place at all. He never liked being there and was always looking for a reason to snort and jump sideways. He was more than glad to leave at the slightest cue of departure.

Cue, heck, he’da left in a heartbeat by just giving him his head.

I always assumed the McMillens owned the land where the camp was located, but why it was never used for anything was always a mystery. It was quite extensive and could certainly have served as a camp for any number of seasonal uses.

When the CCC left it was simply abandoned to wither and slowly decay.

Perhaps that is metaphorical in the attempt to compare the tasks and efforts for the various conservation tasks of that era as compared to today. Original thought and ingenuity are institutionally minimized from a policy perspective. The grace and simplicity of an individual’s ideas are discounted and or suppressed by overwhelming regulatory impasse.

Decadence in any form is … an unfortunate place to be.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “I’ve never met a single person who has evidence that any of this work was environmentally inappropriate.”