and its Impact on the Economy
and the Environment
Continuing fragmentation of land hurts ranching, hunting and wildlife conservation. It is an issue that is common to these groups, and requires a cooperative strategy among them. As 20-acre "ranchettes" replace the traditional ranch, rural activities including ranching and hunting are becoming less a part of the landscape. Fragmented land also makes managing for wildlife throughout the full range of their habitat more difficult.
When a ranching landscape is converted to development, serious social, ecological and economic problems result. From the rancher's perspective, generations of a family's work is lost. Society loses the wide open spaces that characterize the West. At the local level, the agricultural-based economy is less viable. Agriculture is "the lifeblood of many rural communities, that is an essential element of the West's sense of place and neighborliness, and that is a major reason people who live [in the West] want to stay and so many others want to move there" (Probst 1997).
Dividing up the land also threatens the viability of ecosystems. As a result of development, pasture and grasslands are destroyed, wetlands are filled in, and riparian areas are lost as springs are diverted. Together with the loss of habitat comes the loss of natural forces such as fire and floods that shape the land; worse yet, as natural forces are suppressed, the risk of catastrophic floods and fires increases.
Many federal government policies, like the death tax, encourage land fragmentation. Due to the capital-intensive nature of ranching, the sale of land and/or cattle often is the primary source of funds available to meet the costs of death taxes. For ranchers, their production facility is the land -- land that they and their ancestors have nurtured to ensure its ability to support their livestock herds, and land that they share with a natural ecosystem that includes wildlife habitat, watersheds and riparian areas. The net result of the death tax is that land which once provided nutritious beef as well as wildlife habitat instead is used to grow houses, shopping malls and roads.
Wildlife knows no boundaries. Many big-game animals spend their summers in the mountainous U.S. Forest Service lands, spring and fall on Bureau of Land Management lands, and winters on the lower, more productive, private land. In many regions, up to 70 percent of big-game animals remain on private land during winter, a season critical to the survival of most such species (CAST 1996). Thus, private landowners supply habitat for wildlife. If private land that is critical winter range is converted from ranching and open space to development, it will result in loss of the winter habitat base and big-game populations will be reduced.
As the rural West becomes more suburban, pressures against traditional uses of the land such as ranching and hunting have grown. The new rural landowner is often an "urban cowboy," sometimes with little understanding of the traditional rural economy and its people. The recently transplanted urbanite may refuse to allow livestock and hunters on his land. The newcomers often do not have a relationship with the land, they are not the stewards of the land (as were the ranchers before them), but rather temporary tenants (Probst 1997). There is a strong need to bring sportsmen and ranchers together to protect the traditional uses of land in the West.