The quality of the "information" provided by Ken Rait of the Southern Utah Wilderness Association in his article ("Change on the public range is long overdue," Deseret News, Oct. 25) is exemplified by his representing the typical range cow and calf as weighing 1,800 pounds. During the 30 years I was associated with the livestock industry, the thousands of range cows and calves I saw - if one averages in calfless yearlings, 2-year-olds and newborn calves - probably weighed 1,100 pounds each.
To hear Rait tell it, the federal range is going to hell in a handbasket and can only be saved by "reforms" such as more than doubling the grazing fees, installing environmental cultists on grazing boards and confiscating range improvements that the ranchers paid to develop.Rait conveniently fails to mention that the principal damage to Western rangelands was done between about 1870 and about 1950. Since that time, according to all reliable material I have read, the many reliable "old-timers" I have talked with and my own observations in several Western states, major reductions in livestock numbers have taken place, many improvements in range management have occurred, and the trend in range condition - certainly with some exceptions - generally has been slowly improving.
For those wishing a realistic representation of what has actually occurred, I heartily recommend E.M. Christensen and Myrtis A. Hutchinson's classic study, "Historical Observations on the Ecology of Rush and Tooele Valleys, Utah" (Utah Academy of Sciences, Vol. 42, Part 1). According to Christensen and Hutchinson, by the 1860s there were already livestock present in their study area in such huge numbers as to "seem incredible today," and major ecological changes had occurred by the 1880s.
Until the advent of Rait's article, the official ecocultists' "justification" for more than doubling grazing fees was their overwhelming concern for balancing the federal budget. Now, according to Rait, they want these fee increases so that the federal agencies can increase their range management budgets. The change in justification possibly was inspired by recent revelations that wilderness and other recreation subsidies make the alleged grazing subsidies seem like chicken feed.
I have a better idea. The principal obstacle to improved functioning of range and wildlife personnel in the federal agencies since about 1970 has been the enormous increase in paperwork resulting from such environmentalists' strokes of genius as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Acts, etc. According to Bureau of Land Management data obtained for me by then-Sen. Jake Garn, between 1970 and 1980, the number of BLM employees increased by 58 percent overall, the number of GS-12 and higher employees increased by 132 percent and its budget more than quadrupled.
BLM employees working in the wild horse program deserve enormous credit for refusing to allow wild horse numbers to increase without limit and have so far prevented another major range disaster. Otherwise, BLM was almost certainly doing more effective range management and conservation work between 1950 and 1970 than it has been doing since. With the exception of the wild horse program, its principal range and wildlife activity since the early 1970s has been round after round of planning and environmental analysis.
The young city slickers and environmental cultists who largely took over BLM after 1970 badly need some experience in actually managing land rather than managing paperwork.
The greenness of some of these youngsters sometimes had to be seen to be believed. Very few of them had ever ridden a horse or worked on a barbed wire fence. One young federal biologist, I found out to my amazement, literally did not know the difference between deer tracks and cow tracks. Practically all of them, of course, considered themselves to be experts on wildlife-livestock relationships.
In my opinion, now that at least one round of planning and environmental analysis surely has been completed, BLM having been at it for more than 20 years now, there should be a moratorium on such operations, and range and wildlife personnel should be put to work in the field, using the planning that has already been done.
Faint chance of that happening, though. I understand that the next craze emanating from the environmentalists and Washington bureaucrats is something called "ecosystem management." This will undoubtedly require more decades of expensive inventory, planning and environmental analysis. A substantial part of the cost of this latest stroke of genius will undoubtedly also be charged off against the ranchers as part of their "subsidy."
Any hope that this will result in significant and cost-effective improvements in range and wildlife conservation programs is about as realistic as Rait's l,800-pound range cows and calves.