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Keynote Speaker Tom Sheridan
Ben Brown: “We are off to a great start and I think the next presentation is going to be equally important to you. Tom Sheridan is a research anthropologist at the Southwest Center and Professor of Anthropology at The University of Arizona, School of Anthropology. He has conducted ethnographic and ethno historic research in the southwest and northern Mexico since 1971. Along with Nathan Sayre he edited a very comprehensive volume looking at ranching and livestock in the west called Stitching the West Back Together, and that’s the title of his presentation.”
Tom Sheridan: “Thanks Ben. As Ben said, Susan Charnley, Gary Nabhan, and I edited this volume called Stitching the West Back Together, which is in part about the response by the ranchers and foresters to some of the issues Nathan has just talked about. We look at case studies of how ranching and forestry communities have responded to the things that have gone on for the last 30-40 years. I want to concentrate on ranching today. I first got interested in ranching south, not north, of the US/Mexican border. That led me to pose some interesting questions about what the variables are that ranchers on both sides of the border have to deal with, like what is it they have to have access to.
One variable deals with the large amounts of land required by the ranchers because of the nature of these arid and semi arid ranges. And the two sides have come up with very different solutions based on their historical traditions. As many of you know down in Mexico that there is a tradition of holding property in common, called ranchos en Communidades. We in the US don’t have that tradition, so how does a rancher up here in Arizona, where less than 15% of the land is private, get access to the land they need?
One of the case studies in the book, Dennis and Deb Moroney’s ranch, gives you an idea of how this is done. Most of the ranches in the arid and semi arid west are actually mosaics of land tenure. It may be that a very small portion of the ranch is private, deeded land, but the bulk of the ranch (except for a few land grant ranches like the San Raphael here in AZ) is either federal or state grazing leases. This brings up a lot of political as well as economic problems because there are other constituencies out there who want a say on how those lands are managed.
One of the reasons the collaborative conservation movements have sprung up independently all over the west is in response to this mosaic of land tenure that most ranchers face. The ranchers don’t control their entire ranch. And they don’t control it even though that ranch is managed as an economic unit, and even though that is the basis for their bank loan. They don’t have final say on how many animals they can actually run on those federal and state leases. That gave rise to a tremendous amount of conflict, which hopefully has diminished at least a little in the last 10 years or so.
When I first got involved in these questions in the 1990’s, Arizona was kind of ground zero for the range wars, and I live at the north end of the Altar Valley, and the Altar Valley was kind of ground zero for the range wars in AZ. I am sure a lot of you know the Chilton Family and their troubles with the Center for Biological Diversity. That in part give rise to what Bill McDonald called the ‘radical center’; this feeling across the West where people just got sick and tired of the polemics and the confrontations and the polarizations. They got together to try to figure out a better way to go forward and to make decisions about lands, particularly the so called about public lands that ranchers and foresters depended on.
One of the first efforts other than ‘place based’ groups like the Malpai and the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance was what came to be called the Arizona Common Ground Round Table, which started in 1997 when the Arizona chapter of The Nature Conservancy came to the Udall Center at UA and said...”we feel like we have gotten off on the wrong foot with the ranching community. Can you help us build bridges and better relations with it?” And that led to something that Dennis and I and others participated in. It kind of became a state wide forum to discuss these issues.
One of the things we tried to find was common ground; what could environmentalists, hunters, scientists and ranchers agree on. Was there a common ground that transcended all those differences among all these different groups? I proposed a motto... “It’s land fragmentation, stupid,” ...because, particularly in the southwest, but all over the west, and especially if you live near any major urban centers, there is rampant land fragmentation. This is a map of metro Tucson and even though the population of Tucson has skyrocketed the population density has gone down. Look at the urban density in 1953 when there were probably about a hundred thousand people in metro Tucson. You had a population density of 5200 per square mile. By 1999, when you had close to a million people, that density had dropped in half. That’s because the way western cities grew was outward. People wanted half acre lots and the subdividers were happy to provide that. Most of that expansion came from the sale of farmland or ranchland, especially around Tucson. It was primarily ranchland that was being converted into residential subdivisions and the commercial properties that those subdivisions demanded.
That is one of the reasons that the first collaborative conservation effort I want to talk about is Pima County Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. This group identified ranch conservation as one of its six major elements. How many of you are familiar with the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan? Probably the most ambitious land use plan in the country. It was triggered in 1997 by the listing of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl. But the county decided that instead of responding to these listings on an ad hoc, species-by-species, basis they would try to put together a multi-species habitat conservation plan that would give some kind of certainty to all those different groups that wanted to develop land in at least eastern Pima County.
These habitat conservation plans are an outgrowth of an amendment to the Endangered Species Act which says you can be protected against incidental take if you come up with a plan to mitigate habitat loss of those endangered or threatened species. The county decided that rather than make one group pay for it they would see if the citizens of the county in general would pay for it. There was an open space bond election in 2004 that gave the county $175 million to put this habitat conservation plan in action.
As I said before there were six major elements, including ranch conservation, which ... the county identified as goals. Because they concluded that working ranches had defined the urban boundaries of metro Tucson for at least the last l00 years, and the cheapest most effective way to protect the habitat for different threatened species was to keep those ranches working rather than converting them into residential subdivisions.
So, they began this multi-year planning process that was sponsored and organized by the county, but involved hundreds, probably thousands of volunteers, including all kinds of scientists. They set up a number of technical advisory teams including the science advisory team. The task of the science advisory team was to identify not just the listed species (about seven at the time) but all plants and animals that citizen scientists had identified as being vulnerable to development in eastern Pima County (primarily metro Tucson) over the next 50 years or so. Their hypothesis was that if you could keep enough habitats intact you could protect these priority vulnerable species.
So the science technical advisory team (wildlife biologists, ecologists, agency people) began to look at all the native plant and animals species in Pima County and determine a) were they vulnerable to the kind of urban development in Tucson since WWII and b) if so, what were their habitat needs. Since a lot of these species were so obscure that there wasn’t a lot of data on them they used vegetation as a proxy. And they began to put these layers over each other. At first they identified 55 species that were either vulnerable to development now or would be in the future. And then they began to layer the estimated critical habitats over one another. A lot of this was educated guesswork; in many cases that’s just what field science is--educated guesswork.
That led to the development of the conservation land system. The biological core (this follows general principles of conservation biology) was the area where the habitat of five or more vulnerable species was determined to be; and then there were multiple use areas, special elements (like caves for bats), and then important riparian areas. This led the science advisory team to come up with a conservation land system that actually covered more than 2 million of the 2.5 million acres of eastern Pima County. And if you ask why Eastern Pima County is important, you can see on a map of Pima County how much of the county is controlled by the Tohono O’odham Nation, and they did not participate in the process.
This was adopted the by Board of Supervisors in 2001 as the county’s comprehensive land use plan. One of the things the science tech team was told was...”we want you to determine the biologically preferred plan and don’t take any political or economic considerations into account.” And the county tried to create a ‘firewall’ between the people who were developing this system and all the interest groups (developers, realtors etc) who wanted a say in what the conservation land system looked like and what it included.
The new plan had some real teeth. So now for example, if you go to the county and you want to apply for a rezoning to build at a more dense level than the base line zoning is (which for most of the unincorporated county is one house per 4.13 acres)... you must leave at least 80% of the land that you own as natural open space (golf courses no longer qualify as natural open space), at least 66% for multiple use land, and at least 95% for important riparian land. If you want to swap lands with the county, say to develop more than 20% of your land in a biological core, you have to mitigate at a 4:1 ratio.
So this had real implications particularly for developers. The county’s argument for their participation was ‘regulatory certainty.’ Now, a builder would know exactly what they could do and where. You wouldn’t have to jump through all the hoops of US Fish and Wildlife because you were already covered by this umbrella habitat conservation plan. (Which, still, by the way has not been finally approved by US Fish and Wildlife 18 years later, but we hope will be approved later this year.)
As part of this and with the open space lands one of the things the county wanted to do was to prevent the real estate speculators from buying up ranches for their private lands. That’s what the real estate speculators were and still are interested in. They can’t do anything with federal or state lands, but private lands of a ranch (especially if they are near a major urban center) are incredibly valuable in a state where less than 15% of the land is private. So what the county began doing was when ranches came up for sale, for whatever reason, the county began to bid on those ranches. From 2004 when the bond was passed and 2010 when we ran out of money, every major ranch that came up for sale in Pima County was purchased by the county, not by speculators. The county then signed agreements with the former owner-operators to continue running the ranches as cattle ranches. The county didn’t want to get into the cattle business. They had already bought the A7 Ranch and they were tearing their hair out trying to manage it. So they signed multi-year agreements with the former owners to manage these ranches.
Here’s a list of all the ranches that were purchased. As you can see there is a fair amount of private land but much more federal and state grazing lands. Included here are a number of ranches in the Altar Valley, which is what I want to talk about next. There are all sorts of questions about what is going to happen to these ranches once the current generation of former owner-operators retire, or die, or get tired of being ranchers. What the transition will be nobody really knows yet. So this is an incredible experiment, very much a work in progress. And how it plays out could offer a lot of opportunities for ranching in the future, or it could be a disaster. We don’t know yet. It could be an opportunity for younger people to get into ranching who couldn’t afford to buy a ranch outright. But again, it’s unclear.
I was fortunate enough to be able to participate at different levels in the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, and in this book I wrote a Chapter on the SDCP. (By the way I have a few copies which I will be happy to sell at $25.00, about $10 below the list price, so you can see me later if you are interested). Obviously, this is conservation on a very, very large scale--much larger than individual ranches. It also offers the opportunities to do some experiments. Do we turn some of these ranches into grass banks?...or do these ranches consolidate and we get bigger and fewer ranches?... or do younger people get a change to enter into the cattle business by leasing these county ranches? Again, we don’t know yet, but it is definitely something the ranching community should keep an eye on.
This is the current conservation land system in Pima County. The big space in the middle is the Tohono O’odham Nation, with metro Tucson there in white above. I am on the conservation acquisition commission. We are the county commission that makes recommendations on how the money should be spent on open space. It has been quite a roller coaster ride. The money became available in 2005. Remember what was happening in AZ in 2005? A real estate boom! And we were told at one point that real estate in Pima County was increasing in value by 1% a month. Then what happened in 2008? The boom went bust, and it became a lot cheaper and a lot easier to buy ranches that came up for sale. In 2005 speculators who were bidding on state trust lands near Tucson or Phoenix were paying at times 20 times the appraised value of those state trust lands. In many cases the value of a ranch was 75% to maybe 90% based on its real estate potential rather than on its value as a working ranch. So the county really stepped in and stopped a lot of speculation from happening.
Now I want to switch gears and look at another collaborative conservation effort, and that’s the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance, which was very important to Pima County during the SDCP because of its biodiversity. (Here Tom gives information on the geographical location of the Altar Valley) It’s about 600,000 acres mostly high desert grasslands, and largely unfragmented by developers. There is only one major subdivision, where I live, in the northern part of the valley. So you have a large unfragmented landscape with open wildlife corridors between major mountain ranges. Of course those are major pluses, and they follow the principles of conservation biology. That’s what you want. And not surprisingly, it is one of only two areas in the US where there have been confirmed sightings of the Jaguar. The other area being, of course, the Malpai Borderlands area, and now more recently, the Santa Rita Mountains.
Next slide... The Altar Valley is a typical mosaic; private lands 13% (a little less than the state average), Federal lands 37%, (much of which is the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge which was a private ranch up until the 1980s), and then almost half of it state trust lands. So again most ranches in the Altar Valley are mosaics of land with a little bit of private land, a lot of state trust lands, and a few ranches that have allotments on the Coronado National Forest, where there is US Forest Service land. The Altar Valley also includes Arivaca Creek which meanders thru the Refuge and drains into Altar Wash.
The idea of the Alliance came about when two ranchers in the valley, Charley Miller of the Elkhorn Ranch and John King of the Anvil Ranch, got together at a cattle sale and decided it would be a good idea for the ranchers in the valley to get together. They were explicitly modeling their organization on the Malpai Borderlands Group, which is one of the reasons why MBG is so important. It was the real pioneer of ranching collaborative conservation here in the southwest. In fact, ranchers in the Altar Valley invited people from the Malpai to come over and talk about why they put together the MBG and what it had to offer the ranchers of the Altar Valley. So this was a case that was not an independent invention, but the Malpai providing the model which the Altar followed at least in part.
So again you see all the reasons for forming the Alliance: ranching is the primary activity, there are no major mines there, no major settlements, and until recently (when drug smuggling became the biggest economic activity in the valley) ranching was and continues to be the primary economic driver of the Valley. So the ranchers got together and the Alliance was formed in 1995. It became a 501C3 five years later. This slideshows the four goals the Alliance set. They addressed both conservation and, just as importantly, the preservation of the Altar Valley as a working landscape devoted to agriculture. Here’s our website... (Tom gives location and description). Just like the Malpai the Alliance was formed not just to respond to the political polarization that was... pitting environmentalist against ranchers and foresters, but also to accomplish some large landscape goals that were hard to do on the individual ranch level.
One of the 2 major goals was to bring fire back into this fire adapted desert grassland. As in so many other aspects of range ecology, John King was the pioneer here. His Anvil Ranch is the oldest continuously family occupied ranch in the valley. Manuel King, John’s grandfather, had started this ranch in the 1890’s. John King, working with Dan Robinette, who retired from NRCS, decided to do some prescribed burning during the 1980s (a very wet decade). They got great results; a real increase in native grasses, a real decrease in noxious shrubs like burroweed, and a real increase in grass production. All this benefited the wildlife as well as the King’s cattle. But then the Kings and everybody else in the valley were shut down by the US Fish and Wildlife Service over endangered species concerns--primarily the Pima pineapple cactus. So they were not allowed to burn, even though the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge was allowed to continue burning.
One of the major endeavors of the Alliance has been to try to work past that, and over a good 15-20 year period the Alliance began to established partnerships with federal and state land management agencies. A multi-agency team working with the Alliance and spearheaded by the NRCS, put together a watershed-wide burn plan, which finally in 2009 was signed off by the US Fish and Wildlife. It established how many acres can be burned during the year, and included not only prescribed burns but natural burns as well. In 2009 the human-caused Elkhorn fire broke out, and once the fire people established that the Elkhorn Ranch was protected they let that fire burn and it burned over 24,000 acres. So this reintroduction of fire has been fairly successful in the Altar Valley, and in fact the Alliance has gotten two big grants from The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The first was to prepare five burn plans and the second was to prepare additional burn plans to incorporate the watershed restoration work being done, and actually do that before a prescribed burn is carried out. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has been very important in this particular stage of the Alliances’ history.
The second major problem the Alliance ranchers identified was erosion and arroyo cutting. This was the main trunk of the Altar Wash, which is sort of a textbook example of down-cutting of these arid or semi arid arroyos or washes. This has been a recurring problem in the southwest long before people ever got here. The Alliance heard about the work that Bill Zeedyk was doing thru the Quivira Coalition and other groups. We brought Bill over for a workshop, and his first recommendation was that you ‘pick the low hanging fruit’. In other words, if you want to reverse erosion you start where you will have the most chances of success. So we started by working on the upland gullies of Altar Wash, because that was a scale that the Alliance could work at without a lot of additional resources or technical expertise. We started under Bill’s direction repairing the upland gullies with one-rock dams and other rock structures that Bill has developed over the years--pretty much the same techniques that native peoples have been using in this part of the world for thousands of years. This is something that can be done because it is relatively inexpensive and you can utilize a lot of volunteer labor as long as you have trained people directing the labor.
The other thing that Bill and Steve Carson and others were advocating was to change the way dirt roads are constructed; to grade them in such a way they are no longer an erosive feature on the landscape. In country like this, roads are perhaps the single most damaging form of human impact on the environment in terms of erosion. Look at most dirt roads the next time you drive down them. They are usually a foot or more below the surrounding lands. So just by introducing ...sort of low raised burms and wide take off areas (as pictured in the slide) you can gently remove the water from the road and have it spread out. You capture the water rather than have it flow away, and that is really what the ranchers want to do. You want to keep soil in place and water in place as much as possible.
For decades, John King and others have dreamed of restoring the main trunk of Altar Wash, which is 20’ deep in places and much wider in the most eroded areas. Here in this slide you can see the 1983 flood, which was a really major flood event. John King remembers his grandfather talking about how prior to the down cutting a man on horseback could ride in front of the flood and could stay in front of the flood waters. Altar Wash was a broad flood plain held in place largely by Sacaton grasses. But through a number of different human induced changes such as fire suppression, and the building of a wagon road down through the flood plain, the wash became a major drainage for flood waters. Much of this is documented in Nathan Sayre’s book on the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge.
How do you begin to heal drainage of that size? We were lucky enough to have an item in the most recent Pima County bond package, but unfortunately all of the bonds were defeated this time. Nonetheless, we just had a 3-day workshop at the Elkhorn Ranch that discussed what could and could not be done on this issue on a much bigger scale than repairing the upland gullies.
The jury is still out on whether or not we can work directly on this major drainage. Basically, what the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance is trying to do is in a sense go back to John Wesley Powell’s original vision for the West. Powell, in his report on arid lands, recommended that the west should be divided up into watersheds rather than abstract township and range grids. And that’s the way the arid and semi arid west should be managed. Unfortunately his recommendations were never adopted because there were too many vested interests opposed to that. But fire and water and a whole host of other problems that ranchers face (like invasive plants) don’t respect all the artificial borders that have divided up watersheds for more than a century in the west. So how do you carry out large landscape conservation across these borders; across not only private lands, but BLM, Forest Service, State Trust lands and on and on?
I think one of the basic goals of the collaborative conservation movement is to try to figure out how to do that. They have talked about how our evolving understanding of range lands leads us to see these lands as more and more complex and more and more idiosyncratic. And the same caveats apply to the collaborative conservation movement. This book discusses a lot of different ways in which people across the west have tried to accomplish this problem. Probably the biggest lesson learned is that there is no single cookie-cutter model. There is no single technique in the tool kit that works everywhere. I am more and more convinced that this is a very time consuming, slow process because what it really depends on is people sitting at the table across from each other and developing enough trust to see beyond their differences, and work towards common ground and common goals.
The Alliance has learned first of all that conservation carried out on the land is a good way to bring people together. Everyone can agree on the benefits that properly timed fires can bring, or that erosion control can bring. We’ve also found out that there are certain issues to avoid. We take no official positions on endangered species issues because those are real ‘flash points.’ One of the things that any group has to learn is that the leaders of your group can’t get too far out ahead of everyone else in the group. You’ve got to maintain group unity, and that may preclude the group itself taking a stand on certain issues. Some of those issues could tear you apart.
I see this as a very long process. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. At the end of this book we come up with a number of different recommendations. One of the things that drive rural producers crazy is turnover in the agencies. You work with someone in the agencies and you educate them about the natural and social landscape and that takes time, and then all of a sudden they are gone and someone new comes in and you have to start all over again. So, collaborative conservation depends on long term commitments. We believe the best way to accomplish large scaled landscape is to keep working landscapes working in a sustainable fashion. This is what Nathan and the Malpai group call ‘working wildernesses’.
A few years ago we had to decide do we need members, and like the Malpai Group we decided “no.” We want to keep this as a rancher’s association. We’ll have partners, but not members. The other problem all volunteer non profits face sooner or later is ‘burnout.’ You may have nine or ten or fifteen members but generally three of four of those people do most of the work. How do you keep them from burning out? At some point you do have to get at least some part time paid staff members because there is a lot of logistics involved in this.
These are some of the challenges we have successfully confronted. The Malpai has always been a model to the Alliance--in a sense an older brother. I hope collaborative conservation will be the future of the 21st century west; otherwise we will just face more conflict, polarization, and confrontation. And when we do that rural people will lose out, because there are a lot more people in the cities than there are out here. The more people and partners we can bring into these organizations, the more long term success we will have keeping these landscapes working landscapes.”
(Applause)
Questions....
Q: On the issue of funding...Given the recent.....failure of bond issues...is there any prospect in Arizona of funding by state lottery moneys?
Tom Sheridan: “There have been a few attempts, and...some lottery money has been used for conservation use...primarily for Arizona Game and Fish. There also was this initiative called ‘growing smarter’ ... but it petered out.. .Right now the political climate in Arizona is not conducive to this kind of conservation initiatives. It’s a very fluid situation...The politics in Arizona may be very different five years from now than it is today.”
Q...inaudible
Tom Sheridan: “That would be great. I’ve heard one estimate that even within Tucson boundaries, 40% is undeveloped. But at least until recently most people wanted separate, single family homes with big yards. And that’s what the developers gave them. And the cheapest land to do that with was on the markets. A lot of us would like to see that change, but right now there is no way to legislate that. When the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan was create they estimated that 15,000 more people were moving into metro Tucson than were leaving. And there is no way to keep those people out. The only thing you can do is sort of direct them into areas where they can live...and hopefully direct them into areas that are less biologically diverse.
It’s a huge problem and we have a very limited tool kit, especially in Arizona. Right now in Arizona if you have land in unincorporated areas, you can subdivide that land up to five times, as long as you don’t drop below baseline zoning. That has given rise to the proliferation of ‘wildcat subdivisions’, which is basically ‘buyer beware.’ As the builder you never have to go before planning or zoning boards, or get Board of Supervisor approval. You don’t have to provide roads or sewers or anything. People have bought and bought that kind of land. But once they buy it, then they want all the services. So this was another reason Pima County developed the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan-- because of those wildcat subdivisions. They are fiscal black holes. It costs far more to provide the services the people are demanding than you will ever get back in property taxes. The county wants regulated development because that’s the only way they will ever be able to break even.”
End of Questions
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