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Saving the Rich Let's get beyond the cows vs. condos soundbite. By Susan Zakin A few years ago, I visited the 22,000-acre San Rafael ranch near Patagonia with a group of reporters. It was a beautiful day, the sky a clear, deep blue. Wide-open space stretched as far as the eye could see. It looked great, unless you happened to notice the river that was dead and the only tree, an old cottonwood that was about to join it in the afterlife. To the educated eye, the ranch looked like Chernobyl. But the Eastern reporters in Tucson for an environmental journalism conference didn't know the difference. "Wow, isn't the sky blue?!!" was the most common remark. Before the dog-and-pony show started, a local environmentalist pulled me aside. "Susan," he said. "We're a millimeter away from a deal here. I don't want to piss this guy off. Capish?" Obediently, I kept my trap shut as Bob Sharp, the ranch's owner, told us that the legal mission of multiple use on the public lands was outmoded. "Damn right," I thought, surveying the sorry excuse for a river. Then Sharp announced that in the national forests surrounding his ranch, grazing should be the primary use. Holy cow. I had been cast into that strange parallel universe of ranchers and their shills, anthropologists and public policy wonks whose idea of solving problems is to hold consensus meetings that don't include the other side and then pretend everyone agrees. One of my friends calls these folks ranch symps. I get along better with the right-wing militia types I met up in Catron County than these pathetic wannabes. But something has to be done to bridge this historical gap between the frontier, which keeps getting declared dead but seems to hang on forever, and the brave new, overpopulated world. I'm still grasping for the solution, but I can't believe it has to be based on a lie. Unfortunately many groups working on this problem seem to find it necessary to obfuscate. A few years ago, the Nature Conservancy bought the ranch I had visited. The Conservancy then sold it to Wharton School of Business-trained entrepreneur Ross Humphreys, but retained "a conservation easement." This means Humphreys bought the ranch without the right to subdivide or develop the land. This is the tool of choice for what is being called "ranch conservation." Soon, even deals like this may be a thing of the past. Ranchers want to set a time limit on conservation easments so they can subdivide later. That means they can subdivide down the road. Humphreys, who also runs a book publishing company in town, owns three large Arizona ranches, including the San Rafael. Humphreys, who has worked closely with the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, recently stopped grazing on one of these, the Palo Alto, 32,000 acres of leased state land and deeded property. By his own admission, the ranch is too hammered. Instead, Humphreys, a "conservation rancher," is working with the USFWS to set up a mitigation bank on the Palo Alto for the Pima pineapple cactus. This means when a developer wants to screw up an acre of habitat, he can pay Humphreys to "protect" several acres of pineapple cactus habitat. The deal isn't set up yet, but the way this usually works is a 3:1 ratio. For every acre of destroyed habitat, a developer has to set aside three acres of intact habitat. They've been doing this for years in California, but it's new in Arizona. Guess what? Grazing isn't considered a danger to the Pima pineapple cactus. Humphreys will be able to run cattle and still collect his mitigation bank money. What does that tell you? To me, it says that Ross Humphreys is a smart guy and someday he is going to be very, very rich. Humphreys pointed out that large pieces of land, even with legal restrictions against subdividing, will become increasingly valuable as Arizona runs out of open space. "So you're looking at it not so much as a cattle ranch, but as a private estate?" I asked. "I am," said Humphries. This may be the only way to make money on ranching these days. But, aristo-ranchers like Humphries are nothing new. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury-News ran a prize-winning series on ranching. Reporters used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records revealing how "Rolex ranchers" such as hotel mogul Barron Hilton, beer manufacturer Anheuser-Busch Inc. and Mary Hewlett-Jaffe, daughter of Silicon Valley billionaire William Hewlett, benefited from below-market grazing fees. For instance reporters found that the top 10 percent of grazing permit holders control 65 percent of all livestock on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Essentially, what's going on now is a "soft landing" for country squires like Bob Sharp, whose ecologically destructive habits are no longer viable, no matter how much federal money they get. In the process, we're creating a new generation of landed gentry. What we're missing is the chance to bring ecological treasures, like the famous Grey Ranch in southern New Mexico, into the public domain. A few years ago, the Grey could have become a national wildlife refuge. Cattle would have been removed and the ranch opened to the public. But the Nature Conservancy decided to sell it to a nouveau rancher, Budweiser multimillionaire trustafarian Drum Hadley. One has to question these public policy decisions. Only one-third of Pima County ranchland is private. Getting cows off public land would do more good than clamping development restrictions on every acre of private land. I'm not arguing against The Nature Conservancy stopping real estate development on private land like the San Rafael Ranch. But the misleading rhetoric of groups like TNC and other ranch symp groups like the Udall Center is stifling public debate and may even be preventing long-term solutions. It's time to admit, once and for all, that the cowboy has no chaps. Then we might finally see reform of antiquated, environmentally destructive public lands policies. The truth will set more land free than a thousand Rolex ranchers.
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