- [Peter Warren] Most of Southeast Arizona,
call it 150 years ago, roughly when
the first big wave of white settlers
came into the country, the country was just a sea of grass.
Some of the early descriptions of the valleys
of Southeast Arizona were just open grass
from one mountain range to the next.
And it was just a rancher's dream,
this grass extending for miles and miles.
And, at the time, they simply didn't realize
how fragile the country was.
(soft music)
- [Steve Archer] Woody plant proliferation
in grasslands issue's been around for quite a long time.
If you at that old literature, people there
started talking about the shrubs
seem to be making inroads into grasslands.
They had a premonition that this could become a problem.
And indeed, by the 1930s and 40s, it was a problem.
South America, Australia, Africa, for example,
all the major continents have this woody plant
encroachment phenomena that have been happening
over the last hundred years.
- Elkhorn Ranch is a working ranch
that has been in our family since 1946.
Here at our ranch at Elkhorn, we found in the early 80s
that conditions had evolved such that we had
very dense mesquite densities in some areas.
We had very little grassland to cover,
and we had serious gully erosion.
- My name is Clara Miller, my sister and I
are fourth-generation ranchers at our ranch, Elkhorn.
We don't feed very much hay, so it's mostly during
the summer they're turned out to pasture all the time.
So, having pastures that we can use, pretty big deal.
- [Joe King] In the 70s and 80s, they really focused
on managed efforts to remove mesquites.
They've tried chaining, which is dragging a big anchor chain
across pastures and just knocking over mesquites
and uprooting them, which had success.
But it also leveled everything in its path, too,
so a lot of endangered species would be impacted by that.
- The grasses have a dense network of shallow roots
which hold the soil in place, and the structure
of that perennial grass captures rainfall
and encourages it to infiltrate into the soil.
And really plays an important role in watershed function.
Places like the Altar Valley, we're in a watershed
of a major drainage that feeds the aqua thirst for Tucson.
So, a million people downstream depend for part of
their water supply on the recharge from this valley.
(upbeat music)
- The 1900s, early in the 20th Century, there was
quite a controversy nationally about the role of fire.
As a result of a large fire in 1910 that burned
three states up in the northern Rockies, it forced
the policy decision to go toward total fire exclusion.
- Up until the 1890s, fire was
a natural influence on the land.
It was as natural as rain.
Fire will kill the brush, stimulate the grass,
relief nutrients to improve grass growth.
So with fire, we can see a recovery of grassland
and maintain that kind of dynamic,
equilibrium between grasses and shrubs.
- [Jeffrey] Excluding fire is ill-advised,
and the application of prescribed fire is a legitimate
and most ecologically appropriate
and inexpensive tool that we have at our disposal.
- People had been starting to use prescribed fire
as a management tool to re-juggle the vegetation
back towards grassland, away from brushy-type vegetation.
And that program was very successful,
but as a lot of the regulatory issues,
endangered species that compliance,
as those laws became a bigger part of doing business,
it became much harder to do these management practices.
While everyone believes that prescribed fire
is a very good management tool, we are finding
that it is very difficult to implement.
(piano music)
- [Peter Warren] The word prescribed means there's
a set of conditions within which you can do it,
and outside of those prescribed limits, you can't.
It's very easy in any given year to not have
your prescription line up in a way
that you can actually do the project.
- Thank you so much for coming, and I hope
you enjoy your stay while you're here, and all of them.
- [Peter Warren] Having a meeting between
the Malpipe Borderlands Group and the Altar Valley Alliance
was a cross-boundary conversation.
- Getting the right groups of people together
from those two initiatives, very place-based initiatives,
plus a few other key resource people
to really tackle their priority issues on fire
and everyone has kind of a piece of the solution.
And you can see stuff getting done on the ground.
- [Jeffrey Whitney] I was sort of retired last night
from the evening conversation, and I was thinking,
well, I don't know, it doesn't feel like
we really have any obstacles.
You all have diligently and persistently
and doggedly cleared the trail.
- Morning everybody.
- [Crowd] Morning.
- Welcome to Pig Mountain.
(laughter)
You're all experienced in this fuel type and terrain.
Be cognizant of where you're at and what you're doing.
Be paying attention to the fire behavior and the topography.
- Please be safe and have fun and realize that you're part
of a pretty symbolic day as well of trying to get
a good prescribed fire going again in Southern Arizona.
- We're gonna break here, and then
we're gonna head out here, we're gonna start lighting.
(upbeat music)
(cows mooing)
- [Sarah King] This ranch has been in operation since 1895,
just shy of our 125th anniversary, and I think that's
a pretty long legacy that speaks to caring more about
the land itself, a way of lifestyle on the land,
than just a short gain of money.
We're always getting a better understanding
of what the landscape should be, could be, would have been.
(piano music)
- [Steve Archer] Conservation of grasslands
as an ecosystem type is potentially a worthy goal.
So it's not just about increasing forage production,
but it's also about maintaining grassland,
diversity, and bio-diversity.
It's maintaining habitat for game and non-game wildlife.
It's about carbon sequestration.
It's about potentially ground water recharge
and stream flow, and a whole variety of ecosystem services.
But brush management treatments,
they can be prohibitively expensive.
(piano music)
It shouldn't be the responsibility
of that land owner and that rancher.
The public needs to say: We are willing
to support efforts that will get us
these benefits that we all need and enjoy.
- [Tahnee Robertson] It's these place-based groups,
collaboratives, that are bringing together, say,
the rural producers, landowners with environmental
organizations and all the agencies and others.
- You can't help but feel optimistic
because they just care about it so much.
So you get enough people together that care that much,
and you figure something good is gonna happen.
- [Mary Miller] It feels wonderful, you know,
to be able to ride through an area
and see a place that at one time, it was
sort of raw and ugly and now you see it
covered with vegetation and you see its shape more rounded.
There's bigger plant diversity in that area.
That's really satisfying.
(soft music)