At irregular intervals one of my favorite environmentally intelligent publications arrives in my post box. I always read it carefully, cover to cover, as it never fails to contain useful and reliable information and insights not usually found in more mainstream environmental publications. It is called Watersheds Messenger and is published periodically by Hailey-based Western Watersheds Project, which describes itself, accurately I think, as "working to protect and restore Western watersheds and wildlife through education, public policy initiatives and litigation."
The Messenger, which has been published between two and four times a year since 1993, is one part of the education arm of WWP. It is only 16 pages and has a circulation of just 3,000, but anyone who views the landscape and wildlife of Western America as more than commodity and resource will be informed, entertained, amused, enraged and, in some cases, inspired to action by every issue. Actually, the same can be said of even those anthropocentric people who see the natural world as theirs for the taking—so long as they are honest and intelligent about the long-term sustainability of the takings. If the world is only mankind's nest (and, for the record, it is much more than that), befouling it is not in mankind's best interests, to put it less harshly than, say, a cattle-eroded bank of a stream full of cow manure and urine.
WWP and the Messenger explore the reality of what Bernard DeVoto meant when he wrote, "So now we come to the business which created the West's most powerful illusion about itself and, though this is not immediately apparent, has done more damage to the West than any other—the stock business."
For example:
The lead story in the latest (Fall 2008) issue of Watersheds Messenger is titled "Not a Good Place for Cows," and begins, "One might be hard pressed to think of a less appropriate place for livestock grazing, but that hasn't stopped the BLM from letting cows roam on the Sonoran Desert National Monument year after year."
The well-known environmental writer George Wuerthner, co-editor of "Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West," presents his argument in the same issue that "Traditional ranching in the West is on life support and dying." In fact, he writes, "Ranching is doomed in the West by rising land values," a premise he explores through the sad tale of "Bob," a third-generation Montana rancher who lost neighbors, family, community and even the ranch itself without being able to confront the change in his own life and lifestyle within a landscape that no longer sustains them. Bob seems a case study of Sigmund Freud's description of denial as a defense against any reality that might necessitate change in a person's life.
And zoologist Dr. Steve Herman in "Remembering My First Time" tells about losing his virginity (ideals and naiveté, not sexual) as a young man while studying the Lodgepole Pine Needleminer in the Glass Mountains of eastern California in 1962. In the course of his field work he inadvertently discovered employees of the U.S. Forest Service building fences for a private cattle outfit, his first exposure to one little-known aspect of the common Western business practice known as "welfare ranching." Convinced he had "uncovered a major scandal," Herman went as quickly as he could to the U.S. Forest Service district ranger's office in Lee Vining. The district ranger was not only unsympathetic to Herman's concerns about the inappropriate use of taxpayers' dollars for the stock business, he went to Herman's boss, whose scientific research was being conducted on that piece of public land only with the ranger's blessings. Not only had Herman not uncovered a scandal, the Forest Service did not appreciate his questioning its practices. Taxpayer/citizen Herman was able to keep his job only with a forced and insincere "apology" to the imperious district ranger (for pointing out that Forest Service employees should not be building fence for cattlemen on public time), losing his ideals virginity and, as a consequence, becoming a lifelong activist/opponent of public lands grazing.
There are few 16-page publications in which someone interested in the Western landscape and the wild and tame life it sustains (or not) can read in the same issue about the least appropriate and most damaging places for grazing cattle on public land, Freudian psychology at work among the cowboys of Western America and one man's introduction to being had by the undeniable if largely hidden (or not) collusion between government institutions and private business at taxpayer expense on public lands.
Watersheds Messenger is a jewel among environmental publications, and anyone concerned with the West, the Western landscape and the environment at large will find much of use and interest in its pages. It can be found online at www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess.html.
