It's the wee hours of the morning. You're all tucked into
your rig and it comes into your head that there might be some
kind of animal in camp, you know? Y ou can just kind of
feel it. It's right outside the window and maybe you're thinking
it's a bear, or coyote or a fox or a moose. Maybe you're excited
about that. Maybe you're scared. Then you hear it.
Cow: MOOOOO
I'm in beautiful Colorado. I'm meeting up with some friends
to camp. I haven't spent much time in Colorado, so I think
this is gonna be fun. Another thing that I think is gonna be
fun that is that I'm sharing the campsite, not only with Linda
and Bob, but also with a bunch of cows. And for the story on
that we're gonna have to go back a ways.
Back in the homesteading days, the land that we call the BLM,
the land that we camp on and live on, it was just public
domain, you know, it was considered common area. The
problem with common area, and you know this, if you've ever
had roommates, the problem with common area is that because
everyone's responsible for it, nobody's responsible for it. And
so back then everybody just kind of let their cattle graze
wherever, everywhere - it's the other guys problem. And this led
to certain areas being basically decimated because there were
just too many animals foraging. So in 1934, at the request of
ranchers initially - you know, this has become very contentious
today, but initially, they wanted this - Congress passed
the Taylor Grazing Act. The Grazing Act created grazing
districts and they were under the jurisdiction of a brand new
government agency, newly created -the US Grazing Service. Permits
were issued, you had to have a permit to graze in a certain
area, and they were cheap. But to get one, you had to own land.
You had to have land where your animals could graze during part
of the year, and then the government would lease you
grazing rights to the public land for the rest of the year
while your land was recovering. By requiring land ownership the
permit system eliminated nomadic ranchers, you know, people who
had no land of their own and just spent their time wandering
with their herds to wherever there was something to eat. And
that is probably why the landowning ranchers were on
board, why they wanted this: 'cause it eliminated a lot of
competition. Though it sucks that the nomads were pushed out,
the reduction in cows, sheep and goats really did help a lot to
restore the land and the wildlife.
After about a decade under this system, the Grazing Service's
operations were brought to a halt by a dispute between the
House and Senate. So because of the dispute, there was no
appropriation to the Grazing Service. The fees they were
charging were really small, basically tokens, not enough to
cover the operation. And because they couldn't really pay their
own bills, it became pretty ineffective.
In 1946, under President Truman, the grazing service and the
General Land Office were merged to create the Bureau of Land
Management, the BLM that we know today. It's under the Department
of the Interior. They took over the grazing situation.
During the 60s and 70s - if you're old enough, you might
remember - conservation really became a thing. And it was a
truly bipartisan thing, by the way. Here's Republican President
Richard Nixon and his first State of the Union address in
1970.
The great question of the 70s is, shall we surrender to
our surroundings? Or shall we make our peace with nature and
begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our
air, to our land, and to our water?
Most people don't know this, especially in today's
divided political landscape, but many of the most important -
well, probably all - the most important environmental policies
in the country's history came into existence during the Nixon
administration. The creation of the Environmental Protection
Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the
Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
and the creation of 642 new parks. All of that happened
through a Republican president, working with the Democrat led
Congress.
Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond
party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all
the people of this country.
It's funny how separated the parties are about this stuff
today in their views about conservation. Back then it
wasn't really, it was barely looked at as being political. It
was really about survival.
NIxon: It is a cause of particular concern to young
Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim
consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed
now if we are to prevent disaster later.
Anyway, the new emphasis on conservation led to the
passage in 1978, of the Land Policy and Management Act. The
new policy was to keep all the remaining public lands public,
managing them for multiple uses and sustained yield - that is,
making sure that the grass grows back, the land stays healthy,
and that people have access, which is why we're able to camp
on it today. The grazing contracts continued but there
were frequently adjustments made to cover this multiple use
thing.
There are a lot of problems. You know, ranching is a very
expensive business, and it requires a lot of land, and
permits control a big chunk of that land. So it seems
inevitable. To be fair, the BLM has a very tough task of meeting
the needs of the farms that furnish so much of our food and
balancing that with the need to protect wildlife. It's
impossible to make everybody happy. There's a big revamp of
grazing rights on the table right now, the first one in 30
years, and already it's contentious between
environmentalists and ranchers. We have one side arguing that
the fees need to be raised, they need to be higher to cover the
damage that's done by grazing, and the other side wants the
fees to stay low. Then there are those who, to the far end of
that, don't feel the government has the right to charge any fees
at all, though this argument has been shot down all the way up to
the US Supreme Court.
You might remember the Bundy standoff which was a 2014 armed
confrontation between BLM agents and a group of ranchers who were
joined by groups like the Oathkeepers. I'm not going to go
down the rabbit hole of that whole dispute, which is kind of a
hot button reflection of how that conservation harmony we had
back in the 60s and 70s is not where we are today. There are
definitely a lot of complications and a lot of
conflict in a system that put the cows on the BLM. And there
are definitely two sides to that story. But...
I'm here now so let's see what the cows themselves think.
I had just finished my breakfast when this bunch showed up.
Captain isn't quite sure what to make. And then he's generally
pretty good with large animals. Though it's mostly horses he's met
so far. Cody barks at them. And of course Captain wants to be
like his big buddy, So -
No, no, no, buddy. No, Captain, Captain. Okay, who am I kidding,
Captain does plenty of barking on his own. You scared 'em off.
The cows here are likely brought in from farms like this one down
in the valley below. Linda said there's a cistern in here. It's
a water source that the cows go to everyday, but I haven't seen it yet,
Linda: And you can see one of those tanks.
Bob: Oh, that must be, it's been such a dry year. There's no
water here. It makes sense.
On our walks every morning Captain and I encounter a lot of
cows. Some of them seem afraid of us. Some of them are kind of
indifferent. Like we're not even there. And some of them are a
little intimidating, frankly, with their Kabuki mask faces and
cold stares. And if there are babies involved, which, there
are a fair number of babies, it becomes kind of a staredown.
I don't really know what the cows are trying to tell me, how
they weigh in on all of this. I feel like they're trying to say
something for sure. What do you think?
Hi.
Bob: Oh, that one's brave. That one's not afraid at all.
Can we be friends? No, Captain, Captain, come here.
Here's another unexpected animal encounter in camp. Check it out.
I'll see you over there.