John Tierney:The Sagebrush Solution

[Wetzelbill]

July 26, 2005
The Sagebrush Solution
By JOHN TIERNEY
Boulder, Utah

Dell LeFevre has been consorting with environmentalists, and he understands why this makes his neighbors nervous. It makes him nervous, too. He is not what you would call a tree-hugger.

Mr. LeFevre, who is 65, has no affection for the hikers who want his cows out of the red-rock canyons and mesas in southern Utah, where his family has been ranching for five generations. He has considered environmentalism a dangerous religion since the day in 1991 when he and his father-in-law found two dozen cows shot to death, perhaps by someone determined to reclaim a scenic stretch of the Escalante River canyon.

Mr. LeFevre wants the ranchers to win this range war against the lawyers and politicians trying to restrict grazing on the plateau north of the Grand Canyon. He fought unsuccessfully to stop the Clinton administration from declaring it the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument because he knew the designation would mean more regulations, more hikers and fewer cows.

"I don't even know what the Grand Staircase is - nobody around here's ever called this place by that name," he said as he drove me around in his pickup truck, showing me hillsides and canyons where his cows no longer graze. "We've got Easterners who don't know the land telling us what to do with it. I'm a bitter old cowboy."

But he is not bitter when he talks about the deal he made with an environmentalist named Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. Mr. Hedden's group doesn't use lobbyists or lawsuits (or guns) to drive out ranchers. These environmentalists get land the old-fashioned way. They buy it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/opinion/26tierney.html?hp