In 2001, a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth professor asked me to speak to his environmental class on the “War on the West” by the Clinton administration, which had ended weeks earlier.
Professor Jack Stauder’s invitation drew invective from his colleagues for allying himself with “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” but he countered that “environmentalists are always the good guys saving the environment [is a] fairy tale.” The environmental movement, he said, is “based on a cruel and uncompromising ideology.”
In a new book, “The Blue and the Green: A Cultural Ecological History of an Arizona Ranching Community,” Stauder has more to say about “the greens.”
Stauder was born in Colorado, grew up the son of a rancher, “learning from him the life of ranching and feeling his love for the land,” and spent his high school years in Las Cruces, N.M. After two semesters at Harvard, he took a year off, did construction work, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, but returned to major in American history and literature. His interest in social anthropology was sparked by a summer with Mexican Indians. He graduated in 1962, won a Marshall Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Cambridge University. Along the way, he became a Marxist.
His flirtation with Marxism ended after traveling to 110 countries, including Ethiopia, source of his first book. “I talked to everyone I met; in communist countries, they just weren’t happy.” Meanwhile, travel in the United States taught him about environmentalists. Each summer he traveled in a camper van, meeting with Westerners. Soon, he focused on the beautiful Blue River Valley — “isolated and obscure, unheard of by even most Arizonans” — on New Mexico’s western border.
Stauder argues that his latest book is not a personal polemic; instead, he insists the men and women tell their story in their own words. He acknowledges the ranchers and other people on the Blue, the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Arizona Game and Fish Department employees, various environmentalists, and scientists and experts on ranching who helped ensure he got it right.
The Blue was a “land of beauty and plenty,” but it was also “a frontier beset by dangers and difficulties.” Specifically, he says, it was “a traditional hunting territory of the White River and other Apache bands.” Eventually, however, “[d]espite Apaches, rustlers, rough terrain, hardship, and risk, the Blue was irresistible to those who wanted land.” They wanted the land because it had water.
The Blue’s late settling extended the “cattle-ranching frontier into the American interior,” which saw boom and bust economies, overgrazing, ecological damage due to a lack of property rights — the U.S. government owns most of the land — and fire, drought and floods. However, the newly minted Forest Service, including young Aldo Leopold, worked with and helped the ranchers. Through it all, if they did not necessarily prosper, they survived.
That soon changed. At the end of the century, many would be running fewer livestock and some would be out of the cattle business entirely due to the anti-ranching environmental juggernaut, the Clinton administration’s War on the West, the death by a thousand paper cuts from the National Environmental Policy Act, and abuses of the Endangered Species Act.
Stauder calls for “common ground environmentalism,” in which environmentalists who see ranching in a positive light acknowledge ranchers’ commitment to stewardship of the land and abandon the ideological obsessions of radical greens. Furthermore, he hopes Forest Service personnel of good will can circumvent the arduous “legal and institutional framework” that has caused Westerners such problems. Is he too optimistic? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, in writing about the Blue, Stauder has told the modern history of ranching across the West. All who love liberty should pay heed.
William Perry Pendley, an attorney, is president of Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver. He is author of “Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle Against Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today” (Regnery, 2013).
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