In a meeting with the technocrat who made the Claudette Comment, we pointed out that the documents he sends to us at the museum and the “game plans” he creates are AI-generated, full of contradictions and outright falsehoods, and generally useless. One woman pointed out that the generated list of potential sponsors the self-styled “disruptor” provided to us was made up of either dead programs (RIP IMLS), foundations for which our small rural museum didn’t qualify, or weapons and defense contractors, which was simply laughable.

The “disruptor” technocrat bristled at the accusations that the prompts he spent all of two minutes on (by his own admission) weren’t worthy of our time. He accused us of not embracing the future and not being willing to “iterate”, and explained that his use of generative AI was “basically an experiment” and if that experiment didn’t work, we needed to tell him so he could “go back to the prompt board and try again.”

“But why,” I asked, a woman with a master’s degree who works for 23 dollars an hour at a non-profit with a deficit more than twice what I make in a year, “Is our museum forced to be the guinea pig for your AI slop?”

He didn’t like that. Again, I was accused of “not being open” and the technocrat complained that our museum is supposed to be about tech. It’s not. It’s a STEAM museum, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math, and focuses mainly on children and hands-on tinkering activities. It’s in a rural county, services mostly Title-1 schools, and makes less in a year than Raytheon and Lockheed Martin make from selling a single bomb. Yes, those are actual companies he and his AI agent thought would sponsor us.

“The problem is,” He mansplained to me, “That at all the other companies I consult for, I have someone who translates my ideas. I’m an ideas man. I can come up with a million great ideas a day, but someone has to take those ideas and actually see if any of them work. At [redacted] I have Linda. At [redacted], I have Jill. And for most of my other work, I have Jana. The translator position is a full-time job, really.”

“And which of us,” I asked again, gesturing around the table of overworked, underpaid, overeducated women, “Is going to do that job? Because we are all already working two at this museum.”

“That’s your problem.” He said.

I wish I had to write a disclaimer that I’m paraphrasing. I wish I was being facetious or overly dramatic about how this man talks to us. But he truly does believe that his benefit to us is that he uses generative AI to come up with “ideas”, and that it is our job (as women – don’t think I didn’t notice that all of his “idea translators” are women!) to take those ideas and translate them into something usable or in any way valuable to us and our community.

This is a common theme, not just in the nonprofit and consulting worlds but across all fields. I personally have worn many hats in my life; I’ve worked in museums and architecture firms, as a bartender and waitress and writer and taxi driver (a real taxi, not a ride share). I’ve worked in different states and different countries. And the trend of women quietly managing men (who are generally higher paid than them and in positions with more authority) is found across the board.

At a museum position, with a new Executive Director coming on board, all staff were asked to write up their resumes and experience and give it to HR so that the new ED would be able to flick through a binder of staff and see where our expertise and backgrounds lay, and start to get to know us. All of us on staff – except the only male manager – got our resumes in by the date HR requested. I made twelve dollars an hour less than that manager, yet I still managed to get my resume in on time. And then, at the meeting where we were all supposed to put that binder together, another female staff member offered to talk on the phone with that male manager and write a resume up for him to ensure it got done.

There is a lot of lip service paid to emotional labor in relationships between cis women and men; the work that women put into reminding men to value them or see their work and acknowledge it, the burden women carry of teaching their partners how to love them. “I don’t want to have to spend so much time teaching him to care for me,” one of my married friends said. (Or the spectacular counter example of my ex-husband, who about eight months before our marriage ended told me that he would no longer be buying me gifts unless I explicitly told him what I wanted because “you should ask for something you want to ensure you maximize your own utility.”) These issues speak for themselves.

But there is also the management aspect of male-female relationships, which doesn’t stop at home but continues to the workplace.

We know that women are the ones who schedule appointments at home, who remind their partners to call their moms on their birthdays and who know when the dog is due for flea treatment or when the kids need to be picked up, who send out Christmas cards or thank-yous to friends. It’s a known issue for most long-term straight relationships, (“It’s hard to feel sexually attracted to someone who you feel like you have to parent sometimes,” another married friend told me.) but it isn’t as talked about in the context of the workplace; but it’s just as rampant there.

Female workers are the ones who pass around birthday cards for employees, or goodbye cards when staff leave. They are the ones who clean out the office fridge, buy snacks for team meetings, and organize the common spaces. They decorate the offices, create chore charts and put up reminders and organize holiday parties. They are always the ones “bumping” emails that haven’t been responded to, and sending out calendar invites to scheduled meetings. They take the notes during those same meetings, and send out the agendas beforehand. Even when they are underpaid, even when their manager is in the same room, they are the ones going the extra mile; every time.

I noticed this trend very quickly once I started working full-time in offices rather than in restaurants and bars and taxis. I found myself putting up twinkly lights in dark and depressing cubicles I shared with men, sticking chore charts over the sink in the common kitchen to ensure that someone other than “the office mom” put a dish away once in a while. I bought an office fish and set up its tank and took on the daily duties of caring for it. In my first week at my museum I decorated the bland and boring staff bathrooms with old cardboard cutouts – one dinosaur themed and one shark themed. I held a staff bbq at my house. I was going out of my way to make not just myself but other employees comfortable. I was “nesting” at work, making it feel homey and comfortable and a place I wanted to spend eight hours a day in. Other women on staff did this, too. But not the men. Never the men.

And then one day – probably after another enraging meeting with “the disruptor” – I stopped.

I make eleven dollars an hour less than the man I share an office with. The man who sits in the cosy room I’ve decorated, uses my mini fridge, pets my dog who sleeps under my desk. I make 80,000 dollars a year less than the Executive Director who eats the snacks I bring in, reads the articles I send out to the all staff email sharing interesting articles, and uses the bathrooms I’ve decorated. And who has made it clear that I will not be getting any raises in the foreseeable future because the museum just can’t afford it.

Which is fine. I happen to have an amazing partner who has a job that pays him well, and we own a lovely home together, and I am lucky enough to be able to work at a nonprofit making pennies and still come home to a house and a dog and a cat and a partner who doesn’t have to be parented (usually). But I also have stopped going that extra mile at work.

The chore chart above the sink filled up with stars. I haven’t replaced it, and neither has anyone else. We are on month three of it sitting there, full, just like the sink below it.

Some managers left and we shuffled offices around. I organized the new office for the new managers, but I’m not going to decorate it this time around. And, clearly, no one else is going to either. The final candidates arrive for a tour on Monday and the room is an uninviting, bare-walled cave. I’ve stopped myself from putting up posters and changing out the dead fluorescent light bulbs multiple times. It’s not my job to make this office more appealing to others, I tell myself.

I got several thousand dollars worth of plants donated to the museum to brighten up our entrance plaza, which many Google Reviews have said “looks abandoned” (ouch). I planted those plants by hand. I put up deer fencing to ensure they didn’t get eaten. I watered them diligently every day during this record-hot summer.

And then I went on a scheduled two-week vacation. I came back to find 80% of those plants dead. The man (who also makes more than me) who was assigned the job of watering them while I was gone forgot about a large portion of them, and I wasn’t there to pick up the slack. I’ve left the dead plants on the plaza rather than ripping them out.

And there they will sit.

So I started thinking about women and the dismal state of our society. This topic has loomed heavy in the back of my mind and, I’m sure, the minds of other women as our rights have been removed, as tech is increasingly used against us, and has A.I use feeds the gender inequality gap.

This can all feel very abstract, especially for us lucky enough to live in very liberal states like Oregon. But the older I get, and the less I appeal to men through my outfits, language, behavior, and work, the more I notice.

My day job is an exhibit designer at a children’s science museum. Working in the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) museum world means you encounter a never-ending parade of insanely smart, cool, educated and well-rounded women, all of whom are experts in niche fields and wearers of many hats. It also unfortunately means you encounter tech-bro AI junkies who use ChatGPT and Claude to create a false sense of genius in their day to day lives. A tech-bro venture capitalist who describes himself as a “disruptor” told my team that he wanted to name the membership tiers of our museum after famous scientists, and that he had “asked Claude” to come up with some ideas. The list of famous scientists was entirely white men. When this was pointed out to the “disruptor”, he told us (a room full of professional women with PhDs, masters degrees, and decades of experience between us)that he had “asked Claude, not Claudette.”

Working in exhibits means I also encounter “shop men”; contractors or other blue-color types who are shocked to see a woman wearing work boots. I first met these men when I worked in the landscape architecture field, and they have followed me to museums. My first week in my science museum position, I walked into the private workshop to find an older white man that I’d never seen before rifling through some cabinet drawers. “Can I help you find something?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” He said without looking at me. “I’m a long-time volunteer. Where’s the boss?”

“He’s not here,” I said. “But I am. I’m sure I can find what you’re looking for.”

“I don’t think you can.” He said, still shuffling drawer contents.

“Try me.”

“Okay, I’ll try you” He finally looked at me, and he said it like it was a test he knew I’d fail. “Do you know what a Phillip’s head screwdriver is?”

I am thirty-one years old. I have a publishing deal and a book agent. I’m very proud of that fact; it took me years of querying agents to find one, and another year of hard editing work to get my non-fiction book proposal into publishers’ hands and an advance on my work into mine. Time and time again, when it comes up in small talk that I have a book coming out next year, the response (by men, always always by men) is “Oh cool. Self published?” The assumption that I have done some sort of finagling or used some sort of short cut to get my work into the public sphere is made with a mere glance at who I am. The topic of cows and public land management is another mark against me; I have been warned off of the topic at nearly every turn;

“They’ll come after you,” I’ve been told.

“They’ll sue you to oblivion,” they’ve warned me.

The unsaid sub context lies there, offensive but ignored, like a dildo on a sidewalk; the corporate powers that be are going to take me down, not because what I am writing about is false, but because I am a woman doing the writing.

I don’t have any solutions for these patterns I’ve noticed. I don’t even have any real reason for sharing them, other than that I am tired.

Recently, when a potential partner on a museum project mentioned at a meeting that she thought she should draw up a contract with me to ensure she didn’t monopolize my time, my boss interrupted; “Don’t worry about Liz, she has a big mouth. You can’t take advantage of her because she’ll let you know if you do.”

She said this like it was a bad thing.

The word “wilderness” comes from the Old English wild-doer-ness; the place of untamed beasts. And a land of untamed beasts is, more or less, what the first European colonists found in North America. The indigenous tribes had no domesticated livestock, and while there was plenty of agriculture, it was agriculture focused on native plants, rather than imported exotics. Huge trade networks did exist, as did large permanent communities, but much of the continent was unbroken wilderness. This did not mean that the tribal communities didn’t utilize or manage the wilderness, however. Wilderness was a resource just as a carefully tended field was, and tribes maintained that wilderness for the express purpose of keeping it full of stable plant and animal populations for future generations to benefit from.

This is a concept that the European colonists didn’t understand, and one that many people today don’t fully grasp, either. Protecting a landscape as a wilderness does not “lock up” resources or threaten development. Rather, it preserves important sources of genetic diversity in plants and animals, protects the economic future of nearby communities, and ensures that valuable and attractive landscapes to live, work, and make money in aren’t destroyed. In the modern United States especially, wilderness areas are legally supposed to be preserved and managed “for the values and benefits” they provide to people.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 marked the birth of legal wilderness designations in the United States, giving the US Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service the authority to protect and manage wilderness areas under their jurisdictions. These wilderness areas were to be managed under the principle of non-degradation, meaning that these lands were to be managed to maintain or improve their current ecological conditions. The requirements set out by the original act were very strict. Wilderness areas ban roads and motorized vehicles, buildings, and even the use of chainsaws to maintain the untouched character of the lands. People generally have to hike into wilderness areas, or park only on the very edges of them, to experience them. Any infrastructure that is developed, such as trailhead markers or signs, must be made of natural materials. Overall, the act protected some of our most vulnerable landscapes and preserved them for future generations.

But.

There were three main issues with the Wilderness Act. The first was that the act allowed livestock grazing to continue in any area where grazing was established before the act was signed, so long as they adhered to the new wilderness rules. The second problem was that in 1980, Congress decided that those rules were discriminatory against grazing management, and the act was amended so that grazing could not be “phased out” of wilderness areas, and any facilities that were in wilderness areas before the act was signed were allowed to be maintained and improved. Not only that, but they didn’t have to use the natural materials that everyone else did. Ranchers could construct or install new infrastructure if it was considered vital for grazing practices – including fences, barns, wells, cabins, and stock tanks. And they could use motorized vehicles to do it all.

In one fell swoop, the original Wilderness Act was gutted. The non-degradation principle was a pointless effort in the face of the impacts of cattle grazing. The crux of the act changed from the protection of ecosystems to the protection of economic interests. The entire goal of allowing natural ecological processes to proceed as freely as possible was hamstrung by the livestock industry. Today, grazing takes place on about a third of all wilderness lands in the contiguous United States.

If this 1980 amendment allowed ranchers to develop on wilderness land by the merit of their “always having been there”, surely other uses were grandfathered in as well? Of course not. In the late 1980s an eighty year old Navajo man named George Simpson asked for BLM permission to fix his corral and add long overdue electricity to his home, which was and always had been on public land just inside a wilderness area. Despite allowing ranchers to build roads and cabins, drill wells and put up fences, George was denied his requests to improve his existing home. The then Navajo Coordinator of the Farmington Resource Area, Danny Charlie, said in a BLM report that he was working with the tribe to “resettle” George outside of the wilderness area, in a move that hauntingly echoed federal “Indian resettlement” programs.

A 2005 Government Accountability Office study revealed that the National Parks service, which allows cattle to graze on 1.6 million acres in 31 separate park units, was spending nearly half a million dollars a year to accommodate commercial beef cattle production inside national parks. This seems at odds with the National Park Service’s Organic Act of 1916, which stated that “the fundamental purpose of parks and reservations is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

The third main problem with the Wilderness Act was a 473 million-acre omission; The Bureau of Land Management was not included in the act, despite the fact that the BLM managed more public land than any of the other federal agencies combined. By the mid seventies, the public began to recognize this omission, and in 1976, the Federal Land Policy Act required that the BLM conduct a survey of all its potential roadless wilderness areas for suitability to be added to the National Wilderness acreage. Estimates at the time of the new policy estimated that between 50 and 90 million acres of BLM land had the potential to be classified as wilderness.

The BLM took four years to complete its initial survey, and identified only 25 million acres out of nearly 500 million as being “potential” wilderness sites. These sites were designated WSAs, or Wilderness Study Areas, and 795 were cataloged. These WSAs were to be studied to determine whether they were best used as wilderness, or better suited for “other uses”, including mining and grazing. The strangest thing about the studies was the determination that if an area was found to be highly sensitive – that is, if mixed uses like mining, grazing, or logging would “substantially destroy wilderness values” – the recommendation by the BLM would be that the area not be designated as a wilderness. WSA designation didn’t come with a time limit, either; the BLM could take as long as it wanted to decide on the wilderness designation of these sites. And take its time it has; as of 2025, the BLM still has the smallest current and potential amount of wilderness acreage of all federal agencies – a laughable 10.18 million acres of legally designated wilderness, and a further 11.1 million acres of WSAs “under review”. For comparison, the much smaller National Forest Service manages over 36.6 million acres of legally designated wilderness, with more than five million in the state of California alone.

You and I already know that the BLM functions to carry out the bidding of the livestock industry. The frustrating thing is that the federal wilderness system knows it, too. In a textbook on wilderness management published for students planning to enter the federal wilderness system, it is explicitly stated;

“Public land grazing has a strong and active political constituency in the livestock industry. Without provision for grazing to continue where it was already established, the Wilderness Act could not have passed – so grazing was included as one of the so-called allowed but nonconforming uses… In the years since that time, objections to grazing in wilderness and on all public lands have increased, and in response, livestock interests have supported legislation and management direction to protect (and possibly strengthen) their right to graze and manage livestock grazing in wilderness.”

What happens when the cattle are removed from a degraded public rangeland? At Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon, a study was conducted by researchers from the US Forest Service, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. 23 years after the removal of cows from the refuge, the study compared images of exact locations before and after the period of rest. The study found significantly less gullying on the landscape, with water channel width increasing by sixty-four percent after the removal of cattle, and seventy-three percent less bank erosion of streams. They also found ninety percent less bare soil on the refuge, and a whopping increase of over 350% for riparian plant species like willows and rushes.

When Great Basin National Park, on the border of Nevada and Utah and smack dab in the middle of the “Great American Desert”, was federally designated in 1986, grazing had been continual in the area for over one hundred years. That park designation came with a typical addendum mandating that grazing within the park boundaries “continue in perpetuity”. But in a landscape where less than ten inches of rain falls a year and over seventy percent of the ecoregion is covered in invasive cheatgrass, visitors were shocked at the state of the newest national park and demanded that livestock be removed. Subsequent environmental reports made the reality of livestocks’ impacts on the landscape too obvious to ignore.

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Four years after the park was established, a conservation group and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada began talks with the Great Basin ranching families about buying out their grazing permits. The work focused primarily on cattle grazing allotments, to start. It took nine years for the kinks to be worked out of the plan, but finally in December of 1999 cattle grazing ended in Great Basin National Park. A decade later in 2008, sheep grazing was bought out as well.

According to the National Park service;

“The final outcome involving the cattle ranchers and the buyout of their grazing permits has been described by a local rancher as a win-win situation for both the ranchers and the National Park service. Great Basin National Park will be monitoring the areas in which cattle are no longer grazing to try and understand the changes in the vegetation and the watershed that will ensue. The park will also now be able to continue its efforts to remove non-native plant species and reintroduce [beneficial] fire in the park’s ecology. Visitors are also free to enjoy the park without having to share hiking trails and campgrounds with cattle.”

An elegant solution, and one that has been successful in the park, though it will take decades upon decades to negate the effects of a century of overgrazing on such a fragile ecosystem. Aspen stands in the park were especially affected by the grazing regimes. Across the eight most western states in the continental United States, aspen acreage has declined by over sixty percent, and as much as 96 percent in some states. This has to do with the unique way in which aspen trees grow and regenerate. The beautiful white-barked trees propagate not through seeds but through growing “suckers” – small tree shoots that grow from the base of mature trees and spread, eventually replacing the older tree and expanding the aspen stand. This early step of aspen growth is known as the “seral stage”, and it is during this stage that those tender suckers are most delicious to grazing ungulates, including cows. The park’s current conditions, while slowly improving from the grazing days, reflect the magnified effect that landscape impacts have in arid environments, and how long those effects remain. Water infrastructure, used by the ranchers to pipe precious freshwater from streams into grazing pastures, is still visible in many parts of the park. One stream is still diverted from its natural course within the park to this day.

While by no means healed from its century of grazing, Great Basin National Park is an example to which other public land managers can look for a blueprint of how to phase out livestock grazing from degraded and vital landscapes. The park partnered with nonprofits, conservation groups, and a powerful senator to ensure that ranchers were fairly paid out for their allotments, and that outdated clauses in the park’s founding documents were updated when common sense showed them to be obsolete. According to the Great Basin’s official website,“While mandated in the original legislation, continued cattle grazing in Great Basin National Park conflicted with the National Park Service Mission.” The ability to adapt to the realities of a time period and ecosystem and the willingness to change our minds in the face of empirical evidence and reject the status quo is vital in the next chapter of this country. A lot more than a few park legislative documents are going to need to change, but that is a perfect place to start.

Long before the Cold War, North America was silently and speedily invaded by millions of Russian interlopers in a planned campaign - not by the Soviets or the communist party, but by the US federal government itself.

In 1889, in response to overgrazing concerns and poor range health, the federal government began encouraging Americans to plant Crested Wheatgrass, an extremely hardy grass species from Russia and Siberia. In effect, Crested Wheatgrass is a super species of grass; it lives more than thirty years, has incredibly high seed germination rates, establishes quickly and outcompetes nearly all other species, and can handle drought, cold, and heat with ease. Crested Wheatgrass spreads quickly, has deeper and wider-spreading roots than any native North American grasses, and produces more seeds than most grasses, allowing it to dominate soil seed banks. These superpowers let the species survive in the Siberian tundra, but in North America, Crested Wheatgrass not only survives, but more than thrives, spreading and dominating millions of acres of land.

Early range managers of the late 1800s and early 1900s were thrilled by this dominance because cows love Crested Wheatgrass, and the sturdy species can handle overgrazing and overstocking more easily than our sensitive native grasses can. It’s easy to think that more grass is better, but as we learned from our lesson biodiversity, more of the same grass creates a monoculture, which is never good for biodiversity or overall environmental health.

Crested Wheatgrass spreads and outcompetes native grasses, creating millions of acres of monoculture. And those monocultures have different qualities than diverse grasslands. Crested Wheatgrass stands lower the water and carbon storing capacity of their environment and create denser, less nutrient-rich soil. Stands lower habitat value for birds and small mammals, and provide poorer winter forage for wildlife than diverse native landscapes.

And yet, because it is cheaper and faster to establish than native plants and because it can withstand more abuse from cattle than native plants, the federal government continues to plant thousands of acres of public land a year with Crested Wheatgrass. Over 26 million acres of Crested Wheatgrass have been planted in North America, over half of that in the American west and mostly on public land. Crested Wheatgrass planting is one of the largest management activities in the entire Great Basin. And the government uses tax funds to do it; restoration activity funds are often used for Crested Wheatgrass planting because the government considers it a restoration activity. Why? Because it “restores” grass to overgrazed areas, despite the fact that it is not a native grass nor is it “restoring” any habitat.

Crested Wheatgrass is also often used on public lands as a “firebreak” plant, even though mature stands have extremely low moisture content and are actually a great fuel source for wildfire. But they are good for cows, and cattle grazing is the federal government’s preferred method of so-called “fire management” whenever possible.

Let’s get a little technical now and discuss carbon and nitrogen.

As plants grow, they draw in and absorb carbon from the atmosphere and into their roots. When plants die and decompose, most of their carbon is released back into the environment (thus completing the carbon cycle), but if left undisturbed, some carbon in their roots and decayed leaves may remain behind in the soil, effectively removing that carbon from the carbon cycle, or sequestering it. It is a delicate process, and relies on a whole host of factors from the soil’s nitrogen richness, the types of microbes and fungi living in the soil, and the soil’s moisture content. It is also the process that the cattle industry swears up and down that it is benefiting. But let’s look into that claim;

All soils contain carbon naturally. The carbon stocks stored in grasslands across the planet are huge, and since many of those grasslands are home to grazing cows, it would appear to make sense to connect the two. However there are two main ways that stored carbon is released – through habitat degradation and loss of plants and from soil disturbance like digging or plowing and both of these effects are natural byproducts of the cattle industry. Heavy grazing actually causes both; it reduces plant growth and disturbs soil or makes dust, which puts carbon back out into the cycle.

Plants sequester carbon if they grow well, but they only grow well if there is sufficient nitrogen in the soil that they can absorb. The less nitrogen that is present in soil, the slower plants in that soil will grow, and the fewer animals the environment can support. The cattle industry makes a lot of the fact that cow poop contains nitrogen, and therefore is a natural fertilizer for the landscape cows graze on. This is technically true, but the manure of animals like cows doesn’t magically bring nitrogen into an ecosystem; the cows get it from the plants they are eating, and they really just move it around.

In a natural grazing system, the nitrogen in plants is returned to the soil when they die, just like carbon. If a plant is eaten before it dies, some of that nitrogen goes back into the soil via the animal that ate it as urine or feces, but most of it is returned only when the animal that ate it dies and decomposes. The nitrogen therefore ends up back where it started; in the local soil. But with cattle, we don’t let that happen. We remove the cows from the natural cycle and eat them ourselves, meaning that nitrogen is never released back to where it came from. Ultimately, the range grazing system is a net loss of nitrogen from the landscape. And with less nitrogen, there is less carbon sequestration. On top of that, research has shown that the mean carbon stock of native Wyoming big sagebrush stands is 2.6 Mg C ha, and for converted stands dominated by the introduced Crested Wheatgrass, it is only 0.5 Mg C ha. That is a huge difference in carbon sequestration. Spending the time and money to combat Crested Wheatgrass at a federal scale isn’t going to happen any more than removing all cattle from public lands is going to happen. But we can stop planting more Crested Wheatgrass. We can lower the number of cattle on the range to meet the needs of our more sensitive grasslands and to increase the adaptability of our public lands in the face of the climate crisis.

There is a popular phrase in the ranching world to promote “good” cattle raising; “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.” Unfortunately, this phrase isn’t true. It’s not the how, it’s the how many.

Put on by the Quivira Coalition, Holistic Management International, and the American Grassfed Association, this conference brings together like-minded ranchers, farmers, landowners, and conservationists alike to collaborate and discuss the sustainable stewardship of working lands in the West. The theme this year was “Cultivating Adaptability”, which if you’ve read any of my work you know is a massive issue in the face of climate change, especially on our public rangelands.

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Sometimes referred to as biocrust, cryptobiotic soil, or even BSC, biological soil crusts are living carpets of bacteria which blanket arid ecosystems, acting as the protective skin of the desert. These carpets are made up of fantastically complex communities of organisms including cyanobacteria, nematodes, tardigrades, fungi, lichens, mosses, bryophytes, and algae, and science only recently began to understand the incredible ecosystem services these tiny beings provide: They prevent erosion and keep dust levels under control, they reduce rates of evaporation, and stimulate plant growth. They fix nitrogen and carbon, and absorb up to ten times their volume in water when it rains, slowly releasing that rain during dry spells and keeping desert soil hydrated. They keep invasive species at bay, and capture nutrients for plants.

Biological soil crusts are easy to overlook. They often appear as a crusty, dried-out film on top of arid soils, and are destroyed in a single careless instant – under boots, livestock hooves, and car tires. But these complex miniature ecosystems take at least twenty (and even up to 250!) years to re-form, and once they are destroyed, all those ecological benefits are gone. Moreover, those benefits are not only to the landscape; intact biological soil crusts keep soil from eroding and keep dust levels low. Dust, it turns out, is becoming a bigger issue in the world than anyone could have predicted. Dust storms have increased in frequency with global climate change, and all that dust doesn’t just dirty up your windshield. A huge increase in environmentally acquired diseases has been seen in recent years, and dust is a huge vector for those pathogens. Soil-borne (or dust-borne) pathogens including fungi, viruses, and bacteria numbers have risen with the global temperature. These diseases can target plants and threaten global food security, or they can target animals, including humans.

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Predators face the most intense destruction campaigns waged by the cattle industry, but the herbivores are not free from persecution either. Prairie dogs in particular have been singled out by the livestock industry as destructive pests, contrary to what ecologists and biologists might say.

There are five different species of prairie dog, but they all behave similarly – they live in large family units that group together into “towns” on the prairies of North America. That their large burrow and hill homesites are called towns is no accident; over 160 different plains animals depend on the food and habitat created by prairie dog communities. In fact, scientists classify the prairie dog as a keystone species, right alongside the bison. And like the bison, they were decimated by westward expansion. In less than fifty years, prairie dog numbers fell from an estimated 30 billion animals to about one million.

If bison were the historic landscape designers of the Great Plains, influencing the overall makeup of the prairie and spreading over thousands of miles to create wallows and hummocks and keep the grasslands free from forest encroachment, then prairie dogs were the gardeners. Prairie dogs fastidiously kept their colony grounds neat and tidy by clipping grass to their preferred heights and removing invading scrub species. Their meticulous pruning kept desertification from overtaking arid stretches of the plains by stimulating plant production and their burrowing aerated and mixed prairie soil to reduce erosion and increase both groundwater storage and carbon sequestration.

Studies have proven that prairie dog colonies support denser populations of other plains species, high diversity of vegetation and habitat types, and habitats that have more water and healthier soil. Prairie dogs are valuable prey for nearly every plains predator species. But what about cows? The cattle industry insists that prairie dogs strip the land bare and compete with cattle for precious grass. This belief is an unfortunate case of “correlation does not equal causation.” Prairie dogs do not cause poor, overgrazed rangeland; prairie dogs tend to move into areas that are already overgrazed. There is a simple reason for this. Since so many different predators eat them, prairie dogs prefer to avoid dense vegetation and tall grass, where predators can sneak up on them.

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Furthermore, researchers have shown that when prairie dogs are removed (usually through brutal slow-acting poisonings – more on this in a bit) from an area, plant production is not increased. They even compared the weight of cattle grazing on land occupied by prairie dogs with the weight of cattle grazing on land without prairie dogs, and found no discernible difference. We need only look to the historic presence of millions of thriving bison with billions of healthy prairie dogs to know that prairie dogs don’t destroy the grasslands they live in. On the contrary, grasses and other grazable plants atop prairie dog towns consistently have higher protein and nitrogen content than other grasses, and are sought out by bison, pronghorn, elk, and, yes – even cows.

But look! The prairie dog-hater might cry. Look at the bare dirt on their burrows! Believe it or not, bare dirt can sometimes be a good thing. In healthy meadows, random patches of bare earth provide a spot for seeds to be blown to or dropped by birds, and establish roots. This is one of the reasons that the number of different types of plant species increases around prairie dog colonies; species that otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to sprout from a seed get the opportunity.

The beneficial gardener prairie dog once covered the Great Plains from southern Canada to northern Mexico, and prairie dog ecosystems are found nowhere else on earth. In the past century or so, their range has shrunk by ninety-five percent. This is particularly heartbreaking because we have found that not only are prairie dogs unique to the Great Plains, but they have the most complex language system of any known animal – including dolphins and chimpanzees. Their potential for animal intelligence research is immense. Their calls, whistles, chirps, and cries all have different meanings and give the colony warnings about predators, weather events, human hunters, and other threats. They even have a separate warning call for a human and a human carrying a gun.

Which leads us to the unfortunate reason for the loss of ninety-eight percent of our prairie dog population; the systematic eradication of prairie dogs from their natural environment. I’ve explained to you the inaccurate reason for their removal; now let's talk about how it's done. Just like with predator species, the easiest and most common method of “removal” is poisoning. For prairie dogs, poison gas is often sent into their burrows, or poisoned grain is left out near their homes as a lethal snack. The problem with gas and poison grain is that other animals breathe in or eat the food as well. Endangered and protected species like golden and bald eagles, black-footed ferrets, and lesser prairie chickens are all casualties in the war against prairie dogs. And I do mean all-out war. Counties in the Great Plains often require landowners to eradicate prairie dogs from their private land, or else to allow the government to step in and eradicate the critters themselves (and bill the landowner for the privilege). Some states even have the destruction of prairie dogs written down in their state statutes. In Kansas, for example, landowners have just fifteen days from the receipt of a written notice to kill all prairie dogs on their private land before state officials enter that land and do the poisoning themselves. The landowner then has thirty days to pay up – for the cost of the poison, the labor, the machines used to do the poisoning, and the salaries of the officials involved. It doesn’t matter if you want to keep your beneficial prairie dogs. State officials can do what they want on your land, ostensibly in order to keep prairie dogs from spreading to public lands.

To be fair to ranchers, it is no longer entirely the cattle industry pushing for the removal of prairie dogs (though they started the trend). Now, large poison-manufacturing companies have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and selling their products to state and federal agencies every year. In just one of these company’s plants alone, enough poison was sold in a single year to poison 3.1 million acres of land. The irony is that prairie dogs only exist on 2.1 million acres of land in the entire United States.

To date only two of the five species of prairie dog have legal protections– the Mexican prairie dog and the Utah prairie dog – despite their keystone status in the Great Plains.

The article I just published about the eradication of an entire species of tick by the cattle industry is not the only example of the federal government’s war on insects at the behest of ranchers. APHIS- the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who you may remember from my article about the War on Predators- only last year lost a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation for their actions to combat native grasshoppers and crickets on federal rangelands.

What were those actions? They sprayed chemical pesticides on tens of millions of public rangelands in western states. In my home state, 114,000 acres of Oregon’s public rangelands, including the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, were deluged by aerial spraying. In Montana, over 2.5 million acres were sprayed in a single year. These actions were taken because corporate ranching interests want every single blade of grass on our public lands to end up inside the money-producing gut of a cow, and native keystone species like grasshoppers eat those grasses themselves.

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In the late 1800s, a new challenger arose to threaten the booming American cattle industry; the “Texas Fever Tick”. Or more specifically, two species of cattle tick. Boophilus microplus and Boophilus annulatus were found to host a parasite that killed the beefy European cattle breeds favored in the United States. An infection caused massive red blood cell loss in the cows, who died less than two weeks after a bite. Northern states were lucky; hard frosts and snowfall killed off the ticks every fall and winter, keeping numbers low. But Southern state cattle herds were inundated year-round by the little buggers, causing a panic across the markets and an enormous federal quarantine line across the country.

It cannot be overstated how invested the US was in its cattle industry by 1880. Politics, economics, culture, and immigration were all intrinsically tied to the cattle market. Most political leaders had investments in the cattle industry, if they didn’t personally own cattle ranches, and entire states were being settled solely by ranchers. The Texas Fever Tick was public enemy number one. As one historian put it, “there was no greater obstacle in the way of developing a successful cattle industry than the cattle tick.”

In 1884 the United States Department of Agriculture created the Tick Eradication Program, the sole purpose of which was to save the cattle industry by completely removing cattle ticks from the entirety of the country. How could this possibly be accomplished?

From the late 1800s to the early 1910s, cattlemen in the south coated their cows in crude petroleum. Using mops, brushes, and hand-sprayers, ranch workers coated live animals in oil. It killed the ticks, but petroleum had is drawbacks. It was incredibly expensive to purchase, and barrels of crude oil were costly and dangerous to transport. Ranchers also reported their cattle literally burning in the summer heat after crude oil baths on hot days.

Enter arsenic. A 20% arsenical solution was much more cost-effective for ranchers, and soon 3,000-gallon dipping vats of arsenic solutions were a common sight on southern cattle operations. These “dipping vats” were constructed of wood or concrete and were essentially trenches which cattle were run through to soak their entire bodies in the tick-eradicating poison. Cattle dipping proved extremely effective and was soon a requirement in many Southern states. Ranchers were expected to dip their cattle every fourteen days.

The dipping laws were not just for ranchers who wanted to export their cattle to the stockyards and meat markets in the north. The laws covered entire states and did not benefit everyone. Smaller cattle operations were often for subsistence farming only and didn’t care about requirements for tick eradication to export cows. Many small-time ranchers in Southern states didn’t even have designer European cattle breeds, but instead had rangy desert breeds run up from Mexico, which were immune to Texas Fever infections. Why would these ranchers want to create, maintain, and use costly dipping vats on their properties or ship cattle to county dipping vats?

The government was not giving these smaller ranchers any wiggle room. Dipping requirements became widespread and federal inspectors roamed counties looking for noncompliance. For a successful eradication of a foe as widespread as the tick, the solution could only be scorched earth. As more and more jurisdictions passed laws requiring dipping, public outcry increased. In 1919, a rash of dipping vat bombings spread throughout Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama. Over 70 Arkansas cattle dipping vats were bombed in less than two months in protest of dipping laws. In response, the USDA Tick Eradication Program began hiring veterans as private militia to protect public vats in contentious counties, shooting protestors on sight.

In the 1920s lawsuits began to pour in. Dairy farmers reported losses in milk production from dipped cows and cows producing bloody milk after their poison treatments. Ranchers complained of cattle being injured in the dipping vats or emerging with blistered skin. Nonetheless, dipping and quarantines continued. In 1946 DDT replaced arsenic as the chosen method of tick eradication for cattle. Since DDT could be sprayed, dipping vat requirements were phased out. It was much more cost effective to spray cattle with the toxin every two weeks than to run them through trenches filled with 3,000 gallons of arsenic solution, and protests died down.

In 1954 the Tick Eradication Program declared the Texas Fever Tick fully eradicated in the continental United States. All quarantines were lifted. After 70 years of requiring the United States’ meat and dairy cattle to be coated with toxins and dipping vats to be installed in the landscapes, the ticks were defeated. Dipping still continued in some areas, and spraying DDT was still the norm until the 1980s, when injectables and Ivermectin swept onto the scene.

No studies were carried on the effects that coating the nation’s meat and dairy cattle in arsenic, crude petroleum, and DDT had on the American consumer during the reign on the USDA Tick Eradication Program. To this day, arsenic levels around the remains of Southern dipping vats are high, but there are no state requirements for mitigation of sites. Since dipping vats were dumped and cleaned every 14 days during their use, arsenic likely leached deep into the groundwater in these areas. Entire books have been written about the devastating effects of DDT across the country. We will likely never know the true impact of the eradication campaign of the Texas Fever Tick, but we do know this; it saved the United States cattle industry. But at what cost?

By 1870 there were 15 million beef cattle in the United States. Between 1886 and 1888- years now known by Historians as the “Beef Bonanza”- four million Longhorns were driven north to meet the railroad. Heritage British breeds from the Northeast began to be shipped west to improve the rangy Longhorn breed, as the Longhorn did not make for the best eating. Breeding British Herefords with the scrawny wild Longhorns would add 300 pounds of edible flesh to the produce more profitable offspring. With this newly booming western economy came an influx of colonists. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska doubled several times in the 19th century, and Dodge City became the cattle capital of the nation, with over 500,000 cattle passing through its railyards annually. During the Beef Bonanza and the intervening years cattlemen spread across the country to build their empires, and Cattle Towns followed in their wake. So too, did environmental destruction.

The Swamp Land Acts of 1849, 50, and 60 were federal laws created to encourage the “reclamation” and settlement of so-called “useless” areas which were keeping the US from the sale of contiguous swathes of federal land. The lands, generally called Swamp Lands by the government, included bogs, wetlands, estuaries, sloughs, and marshes. These moist, rich landscapes exist now in just a fraction of their former range and diversity. In the American southwest lush desert wetlands, known as cienega were once a common sight. In the grasslands of the Midwest, “looking-glass prairies’’ once reflected the endless sky and provided refuge for fish, mammals, and migrating birds. Entire states like Iowa and Indiana were once marshy swampland, teeming with life. The Swamp Land Acts destroyed these habitats by selling 91 million acres of wet land to be transformed into “productive acreage”. Cattlemen bought the majority of the land. Some of the land bought by ranchers was used as permanent pasture, which required only moderate draining, but other cattlemen used their extensive funds to purchase newly invented ditching machines and completely dry out the land. This newly created land was rich with nutrients from the destroyed habitats, and perfect for farming. Cattle barons began renting out their drained lands to tenants, creating small towns on their acreage and making fortunes. As the 20th century progressed, cattlemen came to depend on federal permits to run cattle, first in the new National Forests, then on the public domain. Most western ranch operations rely on irrigated hay pastures to provide winter forage, which drains rivers, degrading riparian environments. More than 75 percent of the West’s wildlife species are dependent to some degree on riparian habitat.

The original Swamp Lands Act of 1850 was so successful that two further acts were passed freeing up more land for development. Cattlemen became land monopolists, frequently obtaining land through legislative corruption. This corruption was easy; the laws were vague. In the state of Oregon, there was no limit for how much swamp land one man could claim, and only twenty percent of the purchase price (a dollar an acre) had to be paid up front. In the southeastern part of the state, swamplands were mainly marshy meadows around lakes, important water sources in the arid high desert plains. As cattlemen bought up the swamp lands in the state, they effectively fenced off water resources from anyone else in the area- including settlers. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the homestead size to 320 acres and brought about a wave of settlement into semi-arid western regions, including eastern Oregon. By selectively purchasing the swamp lands around lakes and rivers, the cattlemen made it impossible for anyone to settle near their land, and vastly increased the area where they could graze their cattle freely. The Oregonian wrote in a furious expose of the practice that;

“…selections were made with a view of cutting off every possible access to water. And as no one can live away from the water, the surrounding country for miles becomes a cattle range for the land grabber.”

In desperation to attract settlers, the Stock Raising Homestead Act was passed in 1916, further doubling the homestead size to 640 acres in semiarid regions. This size increase was ostensibly to allow settlers who had no choice but to settle away from water to raise cattle instead of farm. These homesteads tended to fail; the land suffered from severe droughts and often proved too dry even for cattle. The eastern half of the state of Oregon was permanently changed by the Swamp Lands Acts. Cattle ate the willow that grew along riverbanks, which caused those banks to degrade, making the river wider and the streambanks into steep drop offs. These steep banks created steam channel incisions, which lowered the water table. The region is in a perpetual state of drought, and very sparsely occupied, even today. The massive amount of land that has been used for cattle grazing for over a century is now an endless desert dotted with woody (and unappealing as food for cattle) sagebrush and juniper with hardly a wetland to be seen over millions of acres.

What wetlands remain in the United States enhance water quality, filter pollutants, sequester large amounts of carbon, and provide food and habitat for a vast range of species. Natural river systems and wetlands reduce flood risk by storing water and slowing water flows, and keep water table levels high, reducing the impact of droughts. Shockingly, cattle still graze on many remnant wetlands on our public lands. Cattle change the species mosaic of a habitat by selectively eating plants that they prefer and leaving those they find distasteful, causing long-term changes in the makeup of wetland plant communities and decreasing vegetation biomass. These vegetation changes affect the insect and invertebrate communities, which in turn affects vertebrates like frogs and fish, who feed larger species like birds and mammals. Feces from cattle has a massive effect on the water column in wetlands, disrupting the sediments and increasing the nutrients in the water, leading to algae blooms and changes in water temperature. Many wetland sedge meadows where cattle historically grazed become covered in shrubs when the cattle are removed. These shrubs invaded the landscapes when cattle disturbed the vegetation mosaic. Without the cattle there keeping them small, these invaders will spread and grow, further reducing the biodiversity of these meadows. The quick fix is to continue to graze cattle on these lands- therefore cattle are touted as a means of “restoring shrubbed wetlands.” Unfortunately, they are only necessary because of cattle grazing’s presence in the first place. Cattle grazing in degraded wetlands is not a viable long-term solution and does nothing to restore the original plant and animal communities of these rare landscapes, or to increase their water storage capacity to pre-agricultural levels.

On sloughs and coastal wetlands, studies have found declines in biomass and production of salt marsh vegetation where cattle graze, and that native pickleweed declined on coastal cattle lands, increasing invasive species encroachment. But still, the cattle are allowed to graze on public coastlines. In Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh ecosystem on the central California coast and the second largest wetland in the state, it was found that actively grazed salt marsh pastures were characterized by high percentages of bare ground and a loss of the native groundcover, pickleweed. By the early 1970s about half of the slough’s marshlands were diked and altered, mainly for grazing lands. In 2018 the Point Reyes National Seashore park service celebrated the “160-Year History of Dairy and Cattle Ranching” by listing modern industrial cattle ranches on the National Register of Historic Places. One third of this iconic National Seashore- nearly 28,000 acres- is leased to an elite group of commercial cattle ranchers, despite the fact that all land within the Point Reyes National Seashore is within the UNESCO Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve.

The effects of the draining and destruction of wetlands across the country cannot be overstated. The landscape of the continent was permanently changed, and the ripple effects of these changes are still felt today. Waterfowl bred on wetlands, and as drainage projects increased, their breeding grounds shrank. By 1934 it was reported that in all of North America only 27 million waterfowl of all species remained- less than one fifth of the population in 1900. The devastation only continued from there; from 1940 to 1962 over 45 million acres of wetlands were drained. Historian Tim Flannery described the destruction of North America’s waterways as “Arguably the greatest blow ever struck by the European Americans at the continent’s biodiversity”. It continues to this day.

“An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill, and pee on you.” - Laurie Penny

I am a woman writing about ecology and public lands usage in the West, and specifically about the cattle industry. This makes old white men absolutely furious.

I hold a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon, where my thesis focused on the utilization of wild and free-roaming horses and burros as ecosystem place-makers and their possible use in the restoration of degraded rangelands in the United States. In the course of writing that thesis I traveled throughout Eastern Oregon, exploring Herd Management Areas on Bureau of Land Management public lands, read through thousands of pages of BLM data and research publications, and took done photography of the range. As I conducted this research over the course of my graduate studies (and for years after graduation) I came to realize that my work was becoming more and more about cattle and public grazing interests. Moreover, I found that the issue of cattle in the west was an urgent and massive problem for our public lands and native species, and I began to write about it.

I research, I interview, and I read books about the subject, and I write research pieces on Medium and Substack under several publications. I have a prominent nonfiction book agent and a book in the works, and I’ve been asked by a few ecological publications to write op-eds. I don’t tell you these things to brag, but to emphasize that believe it or not, I know what I’m talking about. At nearly every turn I find what I have written makes old white men angry. What seems to particularly upset them- even more than the contentious topic of cattle management in the US- is that I don’t fit their idea of what a person writing about these issues should look like. (Thank god they cannot tell by looking at me that I am a quarter Syrian, or I’d never get a word in edgewise.) These men seem to assume that because I am a woman, I am misinformed, or (more likely, in their opinion) uninformed.

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While the violent clash between Ammon and Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge showed them to be antagonists, in many cases the BLM sides with ranchers over everyone else. During interviews with academic researchers, range managers expressed a belief “... that it was their job to advocate for the interests and values of the cattle ranching industry”. In theory our National Forests and Grasslands, National Wildlife Refuges, and Wilderness Areas are public resources for all the citizens of the United States to enjoy. So why do we allow private livestock owners to graze their cattle on public lands? Why are ninety-four percent of the grazing costs for private livestock owners grazing their cattle on public land covered by taxpayers like you and me? Why are there fences in protected “wild” landscapes? If the land belongs to the public, why does it need to be fenced? These are issues that you and I– the public who supposedly owns the land– should be angry about.

The deference of the people charged with managing and protecting our federal lands is blatant and unabashed. We need to realize that the Bureau of Land Management and the cattle industry are inextricably tied together, and this partnership dates back to the federal government’s first attempt at public lands management; the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. Bear with me for a quick history lesson.

Before the TGA, the range was a commons (meaning no one owned it) and grazing was free. But free grazing was dangerous to corporations because, by the nature of commons, it benefited everyone. In the late 1800’s, corporate ranches began illegally fencing in the public domain, and smaller ranchers caused an uproar. Range wars, gun fights, and violence were frequent as different ranches squared off for the best grazing opportunities. The government had to intervene. Under the Taylor Grazing Act, every cattle operation that wished to lease public land had to be owned by a tax-paying resident of the United States who controlled enough base property to take care of their cattle during the winter. This rule meant death to the nomadic lifestyle of following your cattle to warmer ranges when the weather turned; cattle (and the cattlemen) would need to stick out the winters in one place. Once cattle didn’t move across the land following the best grazing anymore it meant they stayed within the confines of large, fenced areas and stripped the land of grasses.

Ostensibly, the TGA was an endeavor meant to serve the public by managing public lands, but it quickly became apparent that the law was truly meant to manage public lands solely for the benefit of the western livestock operator. Congressman Edward Taylor, after whom the law is named, owned three ranches himself, and as part of the provisions of the TGA, created the “Grazing Service”.

The way the Grazing Service was set up, livestock grazers consulted “advisory boards” made up of other ranchers who weighed in on decisions about land use and grazing regulations. But there were no environmentalists or conservationists on the advisory boards, so their decisions never reduced grazing or overstocking. In fact, those few ranchers on the boards who did try to curb cattle numbers were pressured not only by their fellow ranchers but also by congressmen and lobbyists in Washington to keep cattle numbers (and profits) high. This political pressure to prioritize economic gain over ecological health has not lessened over the past ninety years.

The Taylor Grazing Act and the Grazing Service kept pace with the cattle industry for several years, ignoring the blatant rising signs of range degradation on the lands they were created to protect. In 1946 Congress combined the Grazing Service with the General Land Office to create the modern Bureau of Land Management, which in theory was supposed to manage the landscape better.

But under the new auspices of the BLM, mismanagement of the range continued. Politicians allied with the cattle industry pushed for greater profit margins, so further concessions were made to large cattle outfits. Finally, during the environmental revolution of the 1960’s, citizens became more aware of the ecological degradation in the United States, and outcry over public land health reached a fever pitch. A survey of the ecological health of BLM-managed lands was conducted, and in 1970 provided horrifying results; over 123 million acres of public land were considered to be “in poor condition”. In 1974, the National Resources Defense Council sued the Department of the Interior over the Bureau of Land Management’s abuse of the range. The court ruled that the BLM would henceforth be required to prepare environmental impact statements for all range areas. There is a loophole, however. While the BLM is preparing these statements (which can take years or even decades), livestock can carry on grazing those areas of the range anyway. In practice, that means that ecologically sensitive areas which should be protected in a timely manner continue to degrade under continued use. This loophole is still exploited today.

As part of their livestock management on public lands, the Bureau of Land Management currently administers leases and permits to ranchers over 21,000 allotments across the public lands of the west. The minimal fees charged to the ranchers change based on yearly calculations, but are laughably low. In 2023, the grazing fee was $1.35 per “Animal Unit Month.” An Animal Unit Month (or AUM) is defined by the Bureau as the use of public lands by a cow and calf for an entire month. That means a fee of only $16.20 per year for both animals. Far from a pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology, the incredibly discounted or even free use of public lands by the cattle industry amounts to subsidized welfare for corporate ranches.

Part and parcel with their cattle grazing permits on public land, cattlemen are allowed to partake in “range improvements”. So-called “range improvements” do nothing to actually improve the land–– at least not from the perspective of a healthy ecosystem. These improvements include installing pipelines and irrigation ditches, the creation of artificial ponds and roads, and placing cattle guards. In the past, ranchers have seeded public rangelands with invasive species, planted water-sucking alfalfa and wheatgrass, removed native animals from ecosystems, and drilled wells under this auspice. These projects are paid for jointly by ranchers, investors, and federal funds.

Well drilling, in particular, has wreaked havoc on our landscapes. In the Southwest between the years 1964- 2003 groundwater levels declined between 300 and 500 feet, lowering the water table so dramatically that some streams no longer support vegetation on their banks. In states where water tables have dropped, such as Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California, cattle conglomerates like the massive Riverview LLP (with revenue of over 528 million dollars annually) now move into the areas and drill incredibly deep, expensive wells on the cheap land . These deep wells (often deeper than 1,000 feet) undercut existing well owners and lower the entire water table even further, forcing residents and small farms to sell their land on the cheap to the same company that forced them off it. Our old friend the Cattle King would recognize these methods and be proud.

If, like me, you live in the Pacific Northwest where groundwater is not as threatened as in the Southwest, you are still feeling the effects of drought and degraded public lands. The massive increase in wildfires across western states (even those considered wet and green like Oregon and Washington) is a direct result not only of increasing global temperatures and extreme weather but of the diminishing biodiversity of the landscape, the decreased adaptability of overgrazed lands, and the ever-increasing presence of highly flammable invasive plant species. In 2024 I spoke with a wildlands firefighter who described the rangelands of the west as “one big tinderbox”. As for water scarcity, while entire cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix publicly clash over their rights to the drought-stricken Colorado river’s precious gallons, cattle and the alfalfa fields that feed them quietly guzzle down more of the river waters than any metropolis.

Everywhere you look, the cow’s influence can be seen or felt. The grass you mow, the fencing you pass, the terraced shapes of the hills near the highway and the depth of the river you fish in; the flowers you pick, the cattle guards you drive over, the taxes you pay, the layout of the town you live in. With a paranoid eye, you could go insane trying to tally all the impacts of the cattle industry in your daily life. And unless you are one of the few wealthy politicians or connected corporate ranch owners who control the industry, you aren’t seeing any benefits from all those impacts. In fact, you are being robbed of the beauty of healthy native grass meadows, the awe of encountering a herd of bison, the song of wolves at night and the sight of salmon spawning in your neighborhood creek. Your water bill is higher, the cost of drilling a well has increased, and the insurance for your home has skyrocketed or is no longer even available thanks to the ever-increasing risk of wildfire. The American ecosystem has been irreparably changed under the cloven hooves of the cattle industry, and the national landscape has suffered for it.

The cattle industry is also becoming more corporate with fewer and fewer independent producers on the range. In the past thirty years, 42% of small ranchers have hung up their cowboy hats, while the cattle industry at large has remained strong. This means that those small independent producers are selling their outfits to large conglomerates. When ranges degrade, climate change impacts create harsher winters and more volatile summers, and water tables in the west continue to plummet, more small ranchers are going to have no choice but to give up the fight and sell out.

Corporate ranches control not just the majority of cattle operations, but the conversations and marketing schemes that consumers encounter in daily life. They accomplish this through the subtle power of the shadowy Beef Checkoff program established as part of the 1985 Farm Bill.

A Checkoff program “promotes and provides” research and information for an agricultural commodity, and paying dues to the program is mandatory for producers of that commodity.

That means that both a corporate ranch worth 1.2 billion dollars with a Kroger foods contract and a local farm that sells steak at the farmer’s market must put money into the same pot and hope that they both see benefits.

So what does the Checkoff program actually do? The promise to “promote and provide” covers a whole laundry list of goals, including expanding the market for beef, increasing demand for beef, and developing new uses or markets for it. Since there is little way to expand or develop the market for beef, dues are mainly used to fund the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the Checkoff’s pet contractor and lobbying arm. About 73% of the NCBA’s lobbying fund comes directly from Beef Checkoff dues, though less than 4% of cattle producers in the country are members of the NCBA. Sound unfair? The NCBA president’s nearly $500,000 salary also comes from the Checkoff fund. With the rest of the money, the NCBA funds projects to “protect” the beef industry, including the creation of the Beef Digital Command Center.

Manned 24 hours a day, the Beef Digital Command Center looks like a sci-fi hacker’s den, full of servers and screens constantly updating data. The center alerts the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association when certain topics (including overgrazing, methane output of the cattle industry, and alternative meats) reach specific thresholds for engagement or “trend” on social media, after which they spring into action. Media relations experts push out beef-positive rhetoric, undercover social media accounts “correct” beef critics, and web ads are sent into the metaverse. If this article gets enough buzz online, the NCBA will certainly know about it, and may even send some staff to churn out negative reviews and rebut my statements.

The Beef Digital Command Center is the reactive arm of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, but they have a proactive arm as well. A NCBA leaflet to its constituents titled “There is no alternative to BEEF” states; “We are helping lawmakers understand how beef is produced in the US and the positive benefits it contributes to our diets and to our environment so they do not pass ill-informed legislation that could put beef at a disadvantage.” How do they help lawmakers understand? By paying them. In 2014 the meat industry spent approximately 10.8 million dollars on political campaign contributions and 6.9 million dollars on lobbying. Big Beef also backs political campaigns.

The number one recipient of funding from the cattle and meat processing industry is John Boozman, the bespectacled and clean-shaven Senator from Arkansas with prominent ears and a wry, “aw shucks” grin for the public. With a reported net worth of over 2.3 million dollars, he raises British Polled Hereford cattle. His campaign website boasts of his “key role in influencing policy that relates to the agriculture economy, nutrition programs, and quality of life in rural America” and describes him as a “consistent champion for Arkansas’s farmers, ranchers, and loggers.” A dyed-in-the-wool Republican endorsed by the NRA and Donald Trump, Boozman is the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee for Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, including the subcommittee on conservation, forestry, and natural resources, the subcommittee on rural development and energy, the subcommittee on livestock, dairy, poultry, local food systems, and food safety and security, and the subcommittee on food nutrition, specialty crops, organics, and research. He has his fingers in a lot of pies, and he uses those fingers to nudge things in the direction that will best benefit the cattle industry (and himself).

Senator Boozman and other politicians that the meat industry has funded back pro-ag bills and vote against climate change legislation. As of 2023, cattle take up nearly half of the landmass in the United States and are the number one agricultural source of greenhouse gasses worldwide. Each year, a single cow will belch about twenty pounds of biogenic methane, which is shorter-lived than carbon dioxide, but twenty-eight times more potent. Boozman recently introduced the “Protect Farmers from the SEC Act”, which seeks to amend a 1934 Securities and Exchange act from requiring agricultural producers to disclose information about their greenhouse gas emissions. This would be a massive blow for climate policy in the United States and allow for the unregulated output of greenhouse gasses by the largest polluters in the country, and it has the full support of the meat industry and lobbyists behind it. Proposed in 2022, the act is still being debated today. With the new administration, it is virtually guaranteed to pass.

Lobbying and political contributions are certainly powerful, but the main success of the Beef Checkoff program lies in influencing public opinions and perceptions. A Google search campaign funded by the Beef Checkoff delivers pro-beef web ads to anyone who googles “meat substitutes”, “beyond beef”, “impossible meat”, or other meat-alternative keywords and phrases. The meat industry spent over 10 million dollars in 2022 paying social media influencers like Top Chef Judge Hugh Acheson, YouTuber Rasheed Philips, and content creator Paul Saladino aka “Carnivore MD” to push pro-meat messages to their followers. In July of 2021 the Checkoff paid for a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal praising the sustainability of the cattle industry, and months after plant-based meat alternative company Beyond Meat IPOed with the biggest stock market debut in twenty years, the Checkoff aired a five-million-dollar Super Bowl Ad claiming that plant-based meat alternatives weren’t as healthy as beef.

How can Big Beef make these sweeping claims? Well, because they have the “science” to back them up. The beef industry provides grants to fund food scientists to produce biased research that supports cattle ranches and releases pro-cattle propaganda. Independent studies have proven that when food companies fund food science, their research questions are phrased and their results are skewed to allow the results to be used for marketing purposes. This is certainly the goal of the Checkoff in funding university research and even educational programs. The NCBAfunds a “Masters of Beef Advocacy” program, which provides students with pseudo-scientific narratives, videos, sound bites, infographics, and talking points about the false sustainability of the Big Beef industry. But the fact remains that per calorie, beef requires more land and produces more greenhouse gases than almost any other food.

If they have their way, corporate ranching is going to maintain its monopolistic stranglehold on the meat industry and push back against revolutionary techniques and environmentally friendly methods of ranching that could save our public rangelands. But small ranchers still have some avenues to push back, even in the face of the powerful beef lobby. In fact, some of the most innovative and environmentally friendly methods are being put in place by small ranchers already.

One of those methods is being pioneered by an independent rancher named R.P. “Doc” Cook, a retired veterinarian and owner of the 499 Cattle Company and Ranching School in Tennessee. Doc is a prime example of how greater management of rangelands and allowing natural ecological dynamics to take place within those managed lands can work together to prevent range degradation. A crinkly-eyed Tennessean with a penchant for red bandanas and a broad mustache, Doc appears to be an archetypical “old school” cattle rancher but his unique approach and his willingness to learn and adapt his methodologies to the requirements of the landscape break the mold. Since the seventies Doc has studied what he calls “the natural model” of cattle grazing and uses the insights from this model to inform how to manage cattle on his ranch. This approach is a type of adaptive grazing.

Within the natural model, predators such as wolves force herd animals like cattle to group into high density groups, rather than spreading out to graze over large swathes of land and forces the movement of these dense herds away from water and shade (those places where predators are most likely to lurk). Predation assures that the weakest, sickest, and oldest cattle become prey, while those with the strongest genetics survive to pass on their genes. Cattle move constantly to seek water, to find tasty salt, and to avoid being eaten. Using this natural model as a template, Doc keeps his cattle in high density herds, giving them little supplements and no hay to encourage them to seek out minerals and different forage as they would in a natural model. Since the populations of predators needed to keep cattle moving naturally aren’t around anymore, Doc plays predator himself. Astride a horse or a four-wheeler he moves his herds rapidly across his rangelands, making sure they don’t linger too long in one place. With this approach, Doc successfully grazes cattle every month of the year and his cattle subsist entirely on natural forage. Doc is living proof that a different approach is possible and can be successful if producers are willing to put in the effort, money, and active range management for the good of everyone.

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In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Kaibab Plateau on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon as a Natural Game Preserve. Roosevelt’s main goal was to protect a population of about three hundred healthy mule deer that lived there. To “protect” his precious deer, Roosevelt initiated a blanket removal of predators from the preserve. Over the first thirteen years of the preserve’s existence, 674 mountain lions, 120 bobcats, eleven wolves, and 3,000 coyotes were killed. In 1923 when the Kaibab Plateau Natural Game Preserve was triumphantly declared predator-free, the population of mule deer ballooned from three hundred to nearly 100,000. Overburdened by this massive increase of herbivores, the preserve became overgrazed of browse and grass, and the deer became weak from malnutrition. Diseases spread quickly through the overpopulated, weakened herd, and come winter Roosevelt and his fellow conservationists looked on in horror as the mule deer died by the thousands, too sick to survive the snows. By the time the federal government called for an emergency reinstatement of deer hunting to lower the population, the landscape was permanently damaged and the Kaibab Plateau to this day is not able to support as many animals as it once did.

Predators once abounded in North America and their usefulness in keeping wild lands healthy cannot be overstated. They cleaned up dead animals, effectively controlling disease transmission. They kept rodent populations in check, increasing biodiversity in their habitats. They removed sick and deformed animals from the gene pool of prey species, contributing to healthier populations. Wolves created “hot spots” of nutrients in their habitats by leaving the carcasses of their prey, not just feeding scavengers and smaller predators, but adding nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus to the soil, benefiting plant communities and the surrounding ecosystem. Grizzly bears were important seed-distributors, increased species richness, and fixed nitrogen in their environments. Cougars and wolves kept deer, elk, and bison populations in check, ensuring that landscapes were not overgrazed.

I am a massive fan of nature documentaries. I grew up with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Be the Creature, and the dulcet tones of David Attenborough can still lower my blood pressure within seconds. The spectacular relationships between predators and prey that we tune in to see on Africa’s Serengeti once also played out here in North America’s plains. Cougars stalked mule deer across the tallgrass prairie. Packs of wolves hunted vast herds of elk and bison on the multi-colored grasslands. Jaguars ambushed pronghorns on the edges of meadows. Had we not destroyed the ecosystem of this country, families would not need to subscribe to Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel to get their safari kicks. Cougars, wolves, and grizzly bears were all originally plains species, and would have been found across the Midwest in Ohio, Nebraska, and the Dakotas feeding on the populations of bison, antelope, elk, and deer which migrated en masse across the great plains, just as wildebeest and zebras migrate across Africa pursued by lions. These North American plains predators only moved to the deep forest and high mountains after their natural habitat was destroyed, replaced by cities and farmland.

As settlers expanded west with their cows through the 1800s and early 1900s, they brought along two favored methods of “managing” predators: the first is creating physical barriers with fences or barbed wire and the second is poison. There is enough fencing in the American west alone to span the distance from the earth to the moon – three times. Often during my long road trip through the west, I found myself camping on National Forest or National Monument public land next to cow pies and barbed wire fences. In one National Forest campsite my partner and I awoke in our tent to find that a herd of Black Angus cattle had begun grazing around our campsite while we slept. And more times than I can count, we encountered cattle guards, fences, and livestock gates on trails and roads through National Parks, wildlife reserves, and other public lands.

While it might be annoying to have to skirt over cattle guards or tromp through muddy cow wallows to fill up your water bottle, you might assume fences are essential for enclosing pastures and preventing cattle from straying onto highways. No one wants to hit a cow with their car. But fences also block migration routes, increase disease transmission by concentrating wildlife in small areas, alter the hunting practices of predators, and impede wildlife access to key areas of water and forage.

Fences create ecological “no man’s lands” where only a narrow range of species can thrive, while also isolating wildlife populations so they cannot easily bounce back if they suffer losses due to disease, drought, or fire. Birds’ eyes cannot easily see strung wires on fences and die from collisions. Birds of prey are extremely vulnerable to fence collisions since the small mammals they hunt tend to hide in the shows of fence posts. Antelope, wild sheep (like Bighorns), and deer are also victims of fence deaths. A study of wildlife mortality along fences in rangelands of the west found an average of one of these hoofed mammals tangled to death for every 2.5 miles of fence, and one found dead for every 1.2 miles of fence. With over 600,000 miles of fences in the west, these numbers add up. And, in an increasingly drought-stricken west, being able to travel unimpeded to find water is the difference between life and death for a lot of wildlife.

And then we come to poison. The entire ecosystem of the west has become unbalanced due to the choices made by ranchers and the government to protect livestock. The predators that used to eat bison or elk were forced to turn to livestock as a source of food. So, to prevent livestock losses, ranchers and government agencies began an eradication campaign, a mass slaughter of North American predators. In 1895 the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service created the Wildlife Services Agency as a federal predator control entity. Cyanide, bombs, bounties, contests, gassing – no method was deemed too extreme to destroy the native predators and protect livestock from roving “monsters”. The Wildlife Services Agency is still alive and well today.

In just one hundred years, grizzly bears were eliminated from ninety-eight percent of their original range in the lower forty-eight states. As of 2022, there were only 1,500 left. The entirety of the eastern populations of cougars are now extinct, save from an isolated subpopulation of Florida panthers, listed as endangered and deeply threatened by the highways and heavy traffic which fragment their habitat in the sunshine state. Jaguars were effectively extinct in the United States by the 1960s. (A surprise sighting in 2010 reignited hope for the species, but the border wall doomed any conservation efforts). By 1965 just 500 wolves remained in the contiguous United States, from an original population of around two million. It is clear that as a society, we learned no lessons from Theodore Roosevelt’s mistake and the saga of the Kaibab plateau.

The same antiquated “control” methods are used today. In 2021, U.S. Wildlife Services killed 1.75 million animals. Many of these deaths were attributed to M-44s; sodium cyanide bombs baited to attract predators. Triggered when an animal approaches, M-44s kill indiscriminately by releasing a cloud of sodium cyanide which mixes with the victim’s saliva to dispatch them quickly. The EPA decided in 2019 to keep using the controversial devices despite public pushback, stating that ranches would incur higher losses without them.

So what exactly are those ranch losses? How many livestock deaths can be pinned on predators? Ranchers describe wolves and coyotes as methodical killers who lay siege upon domestic herds, destroying people’s livelihoods. The truth of the matter is that in the United States carnivores represent less than half of one percent of annual cattle and sheep deaths.

I’ll say that again:

Less than half of one percent.

If the predator-related livestock losses are so low, why do we keep killing predators with taxpayer money? Specific to cows (the main livestock on the public lands where these predators are being killed), predators account for just 2.4 percent of cattle deaths. The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) conducted a study on death loss in US cattle and calves due to predator and non-predator causes in 2015, which showed that “almost 98% of all deaths in adult cattle and almost 89% of all deaths in calves” were from non-predator causes. By far the deadliest killer of cattle, at a whopping 23.9% of deaths, was... respiratory problems.

Removing predators to protect livestock has many unintended consequences like the massive increase in elk and deer numbers across the country. Those pesky deer that overrun your town and eat your garden each year? You can trace the blame for their massive population back to the livestock industry. The increase in deer and elk numbers is touted as evidence of the health of the range improving under the Public Rangelands Improvement Act but actually represents the genocide of native predators like coyotes, cougars, and wolves.

If we know that predator removal for the benefit of the livestock industry is a huge problem for our ecosystems, what can we do to solve this issue? Do we reintroduce wolves into downtown Boulder, Colorado? Do we allow for two percent of cattle losses a year, knowing that it's worth it? No. I am not suggesting anything as “radical” as that. In fact, my suggestion isn’t anything new or revolutionary. It's been around since ancient Rome.

Livestock guardians are animals specially trained or with the natural instinct to protect a herd. Guardian animal species vary from geese to camels, but the most effective and popular in the United States are llamas and dogs. Livestock guardian dogs are an investment in time and money. They must be trained over two years to be completely dedicated to their charges. They are alert for danger and on duty 24-hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in all weather.

Not every dog can be a guardian. Livestock guardian dog breeds are typically very large, around 100 pounds, and have guardian blood in their ancestry for thousands of years. They are hardy, able to withstand the elements, and usually have thick coats. The most commonly used breeds are Great Pyrenees, Komondor, Akbash, Maremma, and Kangal. Puppies from guarding breeds are selected based on their play, toy-guarding instincts, and personality. Studies show that properly trained livestock guard dogs can reduce predation by as much as 93%, and these canines deter everything from coyotes and foxes to mountain lions and bears. Guardian dogs are not a lethal method of predator control – the presence of a large dog is usually enough to send predators packing. However, in the event of a rare, aggressive predator who initiates contact, guardian dogs will respond in kind.

Llamas also offer an extremely effective and non-lethal means of predator control. Unlike livestock guardian dogs, llamas need no special training and only require a few hours to become attached to the herd they are protecting. More than half of guard llama owners report a whopping 100% reduction in predator loss, and their strange honking alarm calls are excellent at scaring off predators. Rather than remove predator control programs from the federal budget, land management programs could focus on non-lethal control methods like the use of livestock guardian animals. By subsidizing these non-lethal alternatives, the government could not only improve the quality of our public lands by allowing natural predator-prey dynamics to take place but save money by providing long-term solutions which don’t require costly chemical weapons or reimbursing livestock owners for lost income.

Of course, using guardian animals alone is not enough to ensure that the impacts of cattle on the landscape are minimized; it is one useful tool in a toolkit of ecologically sound management principles that, when used together and adapted with the seasons and the particulars of the landscape, can ensure that the health and biodiversity of our public rangelands is preserved as much as possible. So why doesn’t it happen? Current lethal and ecologically devastating predator control methods are popular because they require the least amount of effort on the part of the corporate rancher. The main type of cattle management on western public lands is known as passive grazing; cattle are released on public land when the grazing season begins and left largely to their own devices. Livestock managers track cattle down when temperatures drop, and winter begins and remove them to warmer ranges. More ecologically sound methods of management are active; they require work and skill and a knowledge of the land. It cannot be done on a massive corporate scale without some serious money going into labor and training. Therefore, the corporate powers that be are going to fight the change to active management until their last breath.

The biggest stopping block between more ecologically sound management and our current status-quo is the nature of humans (and corporations) to balk at change – but change is coming, whether we like it or not. In the face of the climate crisis and the continued degradation of our public lands, the smart move is to make the right changes ourselves, before more devastating changes take place that we have no say in.

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You have seen a gully, whether you know it or not.

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As the sun set on the bison’s dominance over the plains, it rose on the era of the cow. Cows remain deeply entrenched in American history, culture, and ecology. We drive down streets designed for cattle, we watch TV shows depicting rugged cattlemen, we decorate our homes, offices, and hotel rooms with paintings of cowboys on the open range. Thousands of Instagram influencers make a living depicting their cowboy lifestyles, and cowboy boots are the trendy footwear of choice at Coachella each year. Millions of people living in rural areas across the US connect with cattle on a deeply personal level. Even our language is influenced by our bovine friends; Upset children are having a cow. You mess with the bull, you get the horns. Alternatively, you could grab the bull by the horns. Perhaps that bull is in a china shop - Holy cow! We could think of cow-related Americanisms until the cows come home. But where is “home” for the ubiquitously American cow? Certainly not America.

Cattle are not native to anywhere in the western hemisphere. All cows entered the North American continent thanks to Europeans eager to colonize and exploit the region. While we associate modern day cattle with the western United States, in the early late 1400s and early 1500s colonies in Florida and South Carolina kept cattle of Spanish stock on islands off the coast while French and Dutch colonists brought their doe-eyed dairy cows to settlements in New England. The first cows to touch American soil served as beasts of burden for these early New Englanders, pulling plows and hauling building supplies while providing milk and familiar meat in a strange new land. It wasn’t until 1540 that the first cattle drive entered the southwestern plains of what would one day be the United States of America. The pioneering cattle driver was not a slow-talking cowboy but a powerful Spanish governor of noble blood named Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and he was looking for the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola which promised vast riches and populations of prosperous, wealthy natives.

Coronado didn’t find these mythical treasures; however he did locate the Grand Canyon (which in my opinion is nearly as good), and in the process spread Spanish cattle across settlements in the Texas panhandle like an Iberian Johnny Appleseed. Coronado returned to New Spain a bankrupt failure, but the El Paso region of Texas became a highly successful cattle operation. The massive cattle outfits that define the state began to form in his wake. Cattle ranching in the western United States had begun, with cattle replacing bison as the most common sight on the plains.

So the cows replaced the bison on the prairies. So what? Surely one big grazing species is similar to another. Alas, despite some modern ranchers’ insistence that cattle emulate the effects of wild bison on the landscape, there are major differences in the two species’ impacts on grasslands, and many reasons for the degradation of the original landscape into the parched lands we know today. The crucial issue at play is biodiversity.

Biodiversity is a huge topic, but easy to break it down into a simple rule; the more diverse a habitat, the more species it can support. And more species equal more dynamic and healthy landscapes. The more biodiverse, dynamic, and healthy the landscape, the more resilient it is in the face of droughts, wildfires, climate change, and other stressors.

For example, a manicured lawn of grass will perhaps hide a few beetles and the spiders that eat them. Because there is one single species of vegetation (the grass) and one height of the grass (probably a few inches if you are keeping up with your HOA rules), only critters that like one species of grass and a certain height of vegetation (the beetles and spiders) will live there. Throw in a handful of invading dandelions, and you might have some native bees and flies visit, or even a butterfly or two. Still, even with a few blooming weeds, this landscape is basically a blanket of sameness – a monoculture. In the event of a drought, the entire lawn will dry up and turn brown, since it is entirely one species of grass. It’s a landscape with low biodiversity.

An unmowed mosaic meadow of different grass species and wildflowers, however, has much higher biodiversity. Some of the grasses are shorter than others, and support those beetle and spiders like the lawn, but other grasses are higher and provide cover for bigger species, like field mice or rabbits. These little mammals are food for birds of prey and small predators like foxes and coyotes. Those foxes who come into the meadow might dig holes while searching out their prey, which could collect rainwater and allow certain insects to lay their eggs, or frogs to spawn. The wildflowers attract pollinators and birds, and the birds leave poop behind; poop which contains the seeds of different plants that might grow trees or bushes, providing shade and hiding spots for deer or elk. Every species has a niche in the landscape and interacts with the other species in the area to create even more niches. In the event of a drought, the plants which need more water will dry up and turn brown, but the more hardy species will thrive, ensuring that there is always something growing and providing habitat. This landscape has high biodiversity.

Bison support high biodiversity landscapes because they are aggregate grazers. Aggregate grazers eat their herbaceous foods in a way that keeps vegetation from fully maturing. When grasses and forbs are kept in their early growth stages, they compete with each other and this competition creates more diverse vegetation types and heights.

Cattle, on the other hand, are individual grazers. Individual grazers are picky eaters. They have a favorite species of food and preferentially graze on one vegetation, which allows the other species to grow to maturity and become woody. This is a huge issue in North American rangelands. As the native bison population decreased and the invasive cattle population increased, the biodiverse grass plains became overrun by encroaching woody plants and invasive European grasses. Without bison, the unpalatable woody plant species which other herbivores like elk, deer, pronghorn, and cattle can’t stomach spread, overtaking the more edible grasses and forbs. As grasses decline, erosion increases, and less moisture is allowed to infiltrate into the soil, lowering the water table. Invading juniper plants thrive in these conditions – their taproots can extend 150 feet below the soil to find water – while short-rooted native grasses dry up and die.

Not only do bison eat differently than cattle, but they also use the land differently. Bison spend less time at and roam further from water sources than cattle do, so they don’t erode riverbanks in the same way. Bison “smooth” cut banks in rivers through their usage of the land, while erosion from cattle deepens channels and creates gullies (more on gullies later for my paid subscribers!). Bison have small, pointed hooves which act like miniature spades, aerating the soil and contributing to prairie ecosystems through the sowing of seeds and the creation of small water holes (more of that biodiversity in action). Cattle, on the other hand, have flat, wide hooves which compact soil, reducing its ability to absorb water and nutrients. Even bison urine has a unique relationship with the Great Plains – its particular vitamin make-up provides fertilizer for prairie grasses. Large agile bison created wallows, dust baths, and knocked down trees increasing the varied topography and diversity of the grassland. Cows make everything more uniform. Uniform landscapes do not provide the microbiomes that smaller species like birds, amphibians, and rodents need to survive. Range researchers have found that when megafauna like bison or elephants go extinct, the ranges of other smaller species in that area also dwindle. And the surface area where bison went extinct and were replaced by cattle was massive.

By the early 1800s more land in North America was devoted to raising cattle than to any other economic activity. Most of the cows were hybrid breeds from Spanish stock. During the War of 1812, many Texas ranches were abandoned, and their forsaken cattle strayed into the southwestern grasslands, forming feral herds and becoming leaner, tougher, and more adapted to their new environment. Thus, the iconic Texas Longhorn was born.

If you have ever encountered a Longhorn, you will understand that these cows are as different from placid Angus beef cows as a coyote is from a bulldog. Longhorns are lean rather than lumbering, and their smaller physiques allow them to move with greater speed and dexterity than their ponderous European cousins. Modern-day Longhorns are much larger than the original models were, but they are still agile. Looking into their eyes, you are struck with an impression of intelligence and moxy, and their massive horns add an element of danger to the mix. I have had the opportunity to meet Longhorns a few times in my life, and I’m always struck by their presence; the beautiful colors of their speckled hides, their quick-moving bodies, their upright postures. In many ways they feel less like the plodding cattle we are used to encountering and more like horses, alert and responsive to their surroundings. It is no wonder that they thrived in feral populations.

The ravenous armies of the Civil War depleted European cattle stock in the eastern states, so settlers turned their hungry eyes towards the untapped source of meat ranging free in the west. With the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 adding vast regions of New Mexico and Texas to the United States, the land and the cows were ripe for the taking. After the Civil War ended in 1865, there were more than five million feral Longhorns roaming the southwest. Settlers and Native Americans hunted them for their hides and tallow, but these wily herds were not truly ranched by anyone. This changed when the first transcontinental railroad began to snake its way across the country.

The transcontinental railroads became the lynchpin that transformed the cattle industry into the industrial behemoth it is today. The railway allowed for cattle to be shipped from the west to the east, and the feral Longhorns were abruptly worth up to $40 a head in northeastern markets.

There was just one problem; traveling by rail was tough on cattle (especially wild cows unaccustomed to being contained and handled). Packed into tight shipping cars, live cattle could not move for days and suffered terribly during their long journeys.

Even when the cattle didn’t get sick or die of injuries or stress on their exhausting railroad trips, they inevitably lost weight and were worth less once they reached their destination than they had been when they were loaded onto the train cars. Ranchers, butchers, and the cattle themselves weren’t too pleased with the situation.

Though he didn’t invent refrigeration, it was a Massachusetts-born butcher and shrewd self-educated businessman named Gustavus “Stave” Swift who marketed the technology that solved the cattle train problem. In 1876 he sold refrigerated rail cars to the railroads, which allowed producers to slaughter cows in the west when they were healthiest and ship their meat to the east. This let cattlemen fatten their cattle for slaughter rather than for travel. Swift’s ideas became the blueprint for the feedlot beef industry of today and catapulted him into the ranks of the wealthiest stockyard men in the country.

Suddenly western settlers were able to roundup and breed feral Longhorns to rake in staggering profits. Little settlements in the Midwest and Southwest were connected to the rest of the country by railway lines and became booming “Cattle Towns” practically overnight as cowboys flooded in to ship their newly caught Longhorns east. These iconic cattle drives became the basis for the cowboy archetype of life on the open range, but their reality was very different from the romanticized imaginings we have today. Cattle drives were business, plain and simple, and required massive infrastructure and careful planning to go off without a hitch.

At least ten hired cowboys worked in shifts along with a range boss, a cook with a chuck wagon, and a wrangler with a remuda (a herd of spare horses so cowboys could switch out mounts) in a cattle drive. Careful math was done to ensure that cattle didn’t lose any weight (and therefore money) on the journey, which meant the going was slow – typically a cattle drive didn’t travel more than fifteen miles a day. Trails were not as the crow flies, they were well-established and expertly planned to skirt native settlements, avoid towns so as to not mix with other cattle, provide ample grass for the cows, and give easy access to water for the whole company. Rather than being a rough-and-tumble good time, drives were regimented and full of rules. Cowboys were not allowed to drink or gamble en route, and some outfits went so far as to ban card or dice games of any kind. Drives could take two months or more to complete, with paltry payouts in the cattle towns at the end of the line.

The growth of cattle enterprises changed the way western cities were designed. With wide streets built for cowboys to drive herds down and large stockades next to railroad stations to hold cattle before slaughter and shipment, cattle towns were laid out for cows more than they were for people. They featured broad avenues lined with raised wooden walkways and dotted with hitching posts and swinging saloon doors; exactly what we picture when we think of a quintessential “Old West” town. Built around ease of access to the railroad rather than proximity to any natural features of the landscape which would normally draw settlers, cattle towns popped up in lonely and desolate places, establishing business connections to the eastern markets. Many of these towns still thrive today; Wichita, Kansas; Fort Worth, Texas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Dodge City, Kansas, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Abilene, Texas, the “first cattle town”, was nothing more than a collection of cabins and a dirt street in 1867, its first year connected to the railroad, but it still shipped over 36,000 cows east. By 1870 it was shipping a whopping 300,000 cows a year, and the town had transformed into a lively center of commerce with enough crime to require its own Marshall to maintain law and order.

Today, Abilene retains its cattle town layout, though there are far fewer crimes (and cows). Multiple rail lines still bisect the town, and streets follow close alongside them. These streets are part of the clue to recognizing a place that developed as a cattle town – the main drag through Abilene is five lanes wide; far wider a road than a city of 125,000 souls would appear to need. Even arterial roads in smaller sections of town are massive, with four lanes and ten-foot sidewalks. Everything is bovine-scale rather than human-scale. Pickups and minivans seem dwarfed by the roadways around them. It is easy to picture hundreds of cattle being shepherded down these thoroughfares by men on horseback. If the desire struck the current-day residents of Abilene, the infrastructure remains for them to have a hell of a good cattle drive through town.

During the boom years, cattle, cowboys, and trains rolled into the newly minted cattle towns, and season after season the demand for cows back east grew to meet the supply.

To support this explosion in demand, cattlemen began to breed for weight rather than environment. The breeds we have decided are the most profitable, due to their weight and growth rates, are cattle designed for lush green European pasturelands, moors, and alpine lowlands rather than dry western plains. These cows belong in The Sound of Music, rather than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Butchers at the time uncharitably described the Longhorn as “eight pounds of hamburger on 800 pounds of bone and horn”. In other words, not worth the effort for the meat. Breeding hefty British Herefords with the scrawny wild Longhorns added 300 pounds of edible flesh to the produced offspring but greatly decreased the cattle’s adaptability to the arid western environment. The new-and-improved heavy European cattle hybrids were designed for water-rich habitats with plentiful rivers and streams. Today, in the drought-stricken western United States, they linger near precious water sources and pollute the water with their feces, trample amphibians, and munch on riparian vegetation to devastating effect. Their heavy bodies collapse stream banks and deepen stream beds, speeding up water currents and changing water temperatures. It is not the fault of these European hybrids that they have been thrust into inhospitable rangelands in the arid states where the majority of our public rangelands lie. They were brought here so corporations could increase profits, and to “civilize” the wild west.

Civilize the west? Weren’t cowboys the poster boys of the uncivilized rough-and-tumble frontier lifestyle? Sure. But cowboys were not the ones making decisions in the cattle industry. Cowboys did not own the cows they drove on the range. The cowboys were hired hands, often working for a boss they had never met living in a distant metropolis.

Most cattle operations were in fact owned by corporations organized in large cities in the east, like Boston and New York, or by rich investors from the United Kingdom or mainland Europe. Many of these investors had read a book called The Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains. The how-to book from 1881 sold like hotcakes across the pond, spurring a new era of European investors forming vast cattle corporations on the public lands of the western United States.

One of these investors was German immigrant Heinrich Kreiser, who came to California in 1850 with less than ten dollars to his name and bought his first cattle herd three years later. Eventually, through fraud, cunning business acumen, and the exploitation of land and labor, he controlled over 1.5 million acres of land between three states and over a million cattle. Heinrich changed his name to Henry Miller to better appeal to Americans, but he is remembered today as the “Cattle King of California”.

The Cattle King knew that land was the key to success in the cattle industry. Miller lived by the motto “wise men buy land, fools sell”; and though he was many things, he was no fool. In the late 1800s two new laws were passed by Congress to encourage settlers to “improve” so-called “useless land” like wetlands and deserts. The Desert Land Act of 1877 permitted individuals to apply for a Desert Land Entry, which allowed them to “reclaim, irrigate, and cultivate” public arid lands. Only one eighth of the land applied for was required to be irrigated, and the rest was generally used by individuals as cattle grazing land. One of the vagaries of this law was that the claimant didn’t actually have to live on the land — merely use it. This loophole meant that Miller and other large cattle barons could grab thousands of acres of land through fake claims known as “dummy entry men.” By taking control of strategic land claims along rivers, cattle barons effectively blocked settlers from access to life-giving water, forcing them to then sell their claims to the barons for cheap, increasing their holdings even further. Through his misuse of water rights, his land-grabbing, and his massive cattle holdings, Miller became a billionaire, and in the process permanently skewed the scales of the agricultural economy in California. His empire fostered the development of the mega-farm and mega-ranch corporations that now rule California such as the Harris Ranch Beef Company, known by most west coast travelers for their miles of stinking feedlots along Interstate 5 (sometimes referred to by locals as “Cowschwitz”). Cattle may live some of their lives on rangelands, but they always end their lives in feedlots like these.

The cattle industry never really functioned on a spit and a handshake like in stories and movies. Rather it involved complex economic planning and industrial power. To broker the buying and selling of cattle, a host of middlemen popped into existence in cattle towns, and cattle companies began organizing themselves into local and state associations, which quickly gained power. In 1883 the National Organization of Cattlemen was established, and the mass marketing of meat products to consumers began. America entered what would later be called the “Golden Age of American Beef”, and advertising campaigns spread the rosy-colored portrait of cattle-raising life as one of rugged individualism across the country. One hundred plus years later we still regard beef products as patriotic and all-American, and associate red-blooded men and the great outdoors with the cattle industry. The working cowboy became a mythic symbol of the industry (and the country itself) but reaped few of the capital benefits. Those who did benefit financially were far more likely to wear a top hat and tails than a cowboy hat and spurs. And those who suffered the consequences were the wild things that lived on the land the meat monopolies were gobbling up.

Cows are not going away, and nor am I suggesting that they should. They have become, for better or worse (I’ll let you decide), as American as apple pie. There are some land managers, such as the celebrity TED-Talk speaker Allan Savory, who tout that cattle can be good for the land of the arid West. They are wrong. Due to the limitations of modern ranch ranges and management practices, cattle can’t migrate the way native bison did, following the best grass conditions. Cattle herds are not allowed to dwindle during droughts or winter storms as bison populations did, ebbing and flowing with the carrying capacity of the land they inhabit. Any cow lost is income lost, and the carrying capacity of the land is not a factor that income cares about. It is impossible, on limited, degraded rangelands overwhelmed by invasive species and plagued with drought, for cattle to come even close to emulating the effects of wild bison on their native environment. Only bison, a species perfectly adapted to their native environment over millennia, can shape and heal the range in that particular way.

Though we can’t turn back time, we can try and return to the types of cattle we ranched before we started mixing those heavy northern European cattle genetics with our rangy desert cows to increase profits. There are still some desert cows out there; they are known as Criollo cattle. Criollo are a type of cattle found in the Americas that descended from the Iberian cows explorers imported to the New World during the time of Columbus. The breeds lived feral in Central America for over 500 years, evolving through natural selection to be tough and hardy and thrive in desert ecosystems. Criollo-type cattle are starkly different in form from lumbering European breeds, more like the original Texas Longhorns of old. They are bony and long-legged, with smaller hooves and leaner conformation. They weigh significantly less, drink less, and sport horns to shove scrubby, thorny vegetation out of their paths. In short, they look like they belong in the arid, rocky terrain of the Americas. They eat a more diverse diet, giving those fragile perennial native grasses a chance to regenerate, and munch on shrubby plants that their European cousins snub. They also utilize their environment more fully – traveling further for water and not lingering at water sources and climbing steeper slopes due to their lighter weight and more agile bodies. While not acting quite like the landscape-creating bison did, they are a much healthier option for western ecosystems.

Requiring even a small percentage of European cattle grazed on public lands to be replaced with Criollo-types could make a massive difference for the health of our overgrazed natural resources. While cattle corporations may cry that light-weight Criollo produce less meat and therefore less profit, they also require less supplemental feed, potentially less medical care, and (crucially) less water resources. The Nature Conservancy is working on experimental rangeland in New Mexico to further study the potential benefits of Criollo cattle on American rangelands. Adele Schott is a fifth-generation rancher in northeastern Oregon. After hearing about the Nature Conservancy's project, she invested in a herd of Corriente Criollo-type cows. Her ranch, called 6 Ranch, now exclusively breeds Corriente cattle, which weigh about 2⁄3 less than traditional European hybrid breeds. Schott and her ranch hands report that the Corriente herd requires very little water and withstands the weather extremes of the ranch’s location with ease.

“They don’t wreak havoc on soft or muddy ground, either. They coexist with and benefit our environment as naturally as wildlife does.”

Keeping an open mind as consumers and as lovers of our public lands could mean that those lands are around and healthy for generations to come, rather than disappearing under the weight of tens of millions of European cows. Maybe your Criollo steak will be leaner than your Angus steak – but isn’t that worth it in the long run?

Harney County is one of the largest counties in the United States, but seventy-three percent of its land is federal public domain. Cattle outnumber the 8,000 county residents fourteen to one, and nearly everyone in the area is involved in the cattle industry to some extent. Armed with AK-47s, fully-automatic weapons and even a Browning heavy machine gun, the extremists were mainly ranchers from western states. Their leader, Ammon’s father Cliven Bundy, had once been allowed to graze cattle on federally owned land in Arizona, like many ranchers in the West. But after a change in regulations in 2004, he, unlike many of his peers, chose to keep his cattle illegally on government acreage claiming he had a “vested right" to keep the land on which his cows had historically grazed.

For the ten years between 2004 and 2014, the weather-beaten and charismatic Cliven and his son Ammon continued to profit off the protected public landscape. No one removed the Bundy cows or the family’s ranching infrastructure – but the government was quietly keeping track of all those unpaid fees, past-due payments, and permit costs. Once the unpaid total passed one million dollars, the government at last sent agents to remove the cows.

When the Bureau of Land Management agents showed up in Arizona on March 27th,2014, they were quickly surrounded by armed protestors. The Bureau and local law enforcement were far outnumbered and out-gunned. To avoid a firefight, the local sheriff agreed the cows could stay where they were, and the government officials left without bloodshed. The cattle (and the Bundys) remained on federal land, and the Bundy men remained angry with the system as a whole.

Two years later in 2016, Bundy and his cronies, though not local to Harney County, brought their grudge against public lands management to Oregon and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Government agents found themselves up against not only disgruntled ranchers, but white supremacist groups and militant factions who had joined the Bundy cause since the previous standoff. In the ensuing firefight for control of the refuge headquarters one man was killed, another was wounded, and over 27 people were arrested. The headquarters were vandalized and local refuge employees were intimidated and stalked by extremists, as Oregonians watched in disbelief from their TV sets.

Bundy cattle illegally graze public land in Arizona to this day. In fact, as of 2024, the Bundy clan has doubled the number of cows they run on the protected acreage and have never paid any fees. No one has done a thing about it. Over a dozen felony charges, including conspiracy against the United States, were brought against the Bundy clan and their supporters, but all charges were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct during the trial. Neither Cliven nor Ammon have ever been convicted of any crimes.

While the media may call men like Cliven and Ammon Bundy deluded domestic terrorists, they are really only following the path that the federal government has laid for the cattle industry; a path paved with decades of allowances, special treatment, and subsidies.

Their story may seem extreme, but it illustrates how the United States government repeatedly kowtows to the cattle industry and mismanages public lands. It has been doing so since this country’s inception, and is the reason for the challenges we currently face, from climate change to political polarization and even the deer eating your backyard garden. But before we examine the present we need to go back to the very beginning of American colonization to understand how cows have led us to the mess we are in today.

The Bison

Thirty to sixty million bison once lived in North America. Try to picture a pre-cattle landscape in the Texas Panhandle. Much like today, the rolling hills spread for miles and gorgeous red mesas jut up from the plains like alien ships along the horizon, but the similarities to the modern day stop at geography. Once, pristine rivers snaked and meandered through the riparian areas, oxbowing out and creating pockets of lush wetlands and vernal pools. Tussocks of native grasses swayed in the light breeze, and the cacophonous sounds of millions of birds filled the air. When flocks flew by they were so dense and numerous that the sky darkened as if before a storm and one’s ears popped from the pressure of so many beating wings. These birds landed upon the bison that dotted the hillsides like great roving boulders, where they gathered fur and removed ticks from the kings of the plains. And there were so many bison! For as far as you could see – miles in every direction – the awesome sight of the massive herd stretched into the distance with no sign of diminishing. While entranced by the sea of bison, perhaps an onlooker could notice a slight movement out of the corner of their eye – a patch of color amongst the grasses: a jaguar on the hunt. On the edge of a stand of scrub oak, she blended perfectly with the varied colors of the different grasses on the plains, the dark browns and reds and golden yellows of the various native species that create a mosaic of warm textures. In the blink of an eye, she ghosted away into the hills. Blink again and come back to modern day.

The hills are still here, of course, and the mesas, and even quite a bit of the scrub oak. But the collage of native grasses has been replaced with a monoculture of European grass and millions upon millions of pinon and juniper bushes. The deep tap roots of these shrubs have lowered the water table, so those vernal pools and oxbowing streams are gone too, replaced with dry soil that kicks up little dust devils in the wind. The river you were looking at is still there, but overgrazing has gullied and channelized it, removing its meanders and making it faster, straighter, and deeper. There hasn’t been a jaguar in these parts for generations, but if you are watchful a few skinny coyotes might trot by. Be careful where you step, because traps and poison-canisters to kill those coyotes are also among these hills. There are still hawks and some turkey vultures, and perhaps some red winged blackbirds, but the symphony of birdsong is silent. The only large flocks of birds you will see are invasive European starlings. There are cattle here, but they are not spread across the landscape like the bison had been. The black Angus cows languish in the heat, and don’t stray far from the gullied river trying to stay cool, creating muddy pits. This is the landscape we know, the landscape that we deprived contemporary Americans consider “the wilderness”. Here are our public lands: degraded, misused, mistreated, and bereft of the iconic species that shaped them for millennia.

It is hard for modern Americans to fathom what several million bison would have looked like, let alone how they would have smelled or sounded, or how the basso beat of their hooves would have rattled our very bones. By contrast, when colonists came to North America, it was impossible to imagine the herds’ numbers could ever be dented.

But in less than a century, these massive herds dwindled to just twenty-three individuals. I’ve read many a history book that describes the bison as “vanishing”; a fantastical term that calls to mind great numbers tragically but peacefully disappearing into the mists of time. The reality was much more brutal. Early settlers discovered that bison hide was perfect for making cheap leather machine belts, and as industrialization took hold in New England, demand drove prices up, sealing the bison’s fate. The railroads striking boldly into the plains of the west in the early 1800s made it cheap to ship bison hides to the factories back east, and hunters made fortunes on the seemingly endless resource. Trains in the mid 1800’s could find their journeys delayed for hours as massive bison herds wandered across the tracks, which left important industrialists in the east impatient (and hurt profits). To remedy this issue, the railroad companies invested in the promotion of bison hunting not just as a way to make a living, but as an iconic frontier sport. Even highbrow ladies of the era took part in shooting bison directly from their perfumed train car windows. But no one was more delighted by the bison slaughter than the cattlemen.

The burgeoning cattle industry of the 1850’s found the grassy plains of the west too packed with bison to support as many cows as it wanted to breed, so cattlemen enthusiastically joined in the bison hunting craze. The math was simple: the less bison on the range, the more cattle there could be. The slaughter of the bison also provided one further benefit for cattle ranching and white settlers in general; it began to starve the Native Americans and open up even more land for ranching. As the bison became scarce, desperate Sioux, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples, unable to find enough of their traditional meat source, turned to the new and very edible inhabitants of their ancestral grasslands, which were suddenly everywhere: the cows.

In 1873 a band of Cheyenne in the Arkansas valley killed a herd of cattle and were reported to have said “the White man killed the buffalo...and now they are going to kill all the cattle of the Whites.” In response, local cowboys slaughtered the hunters for theft. In a cruel irony, once these same tribes were diminished and strong-armed onto reservations, they were forced to eat food provided by the US government or starve. The food the government provided was beef shipped in from the plains. Bison carcasses –– deemed worthless once stripped of their hides, hooves, tongues and horns –– littered the prairies. Theodore Roosevelt recorded meeting a rancher who had traveled 1,000 miles and told Teddy that he was “Never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one.”

A few isolated populations of wild bison still exist today. In the summer of 2021, my partner and I went on a road trip visiting over twenty-five National Parks and federal public lands to celebrate our dual graduation from our master’s degree program in landscape architecture. We had been on the road for over a month, camping in a tent and living out of my beat-up Subaru Forester. About midway through our journey, we drove through Yellowstone, or rather inched through Yellowstone. A huge line of cars had come to a dead halt on the main road through the park so that people could take photos of a herd of bison peacefully grazing in a meadow spread out under the big sky. It would have been an idyllic scene if it weren’t for the tourists blatantly ignoring the warning signs and stepping out of their cars for selfies with the 2,500-pound bovids. The small herd ignored the idling cars wafting exhaust over their meadow, chewing dolefully as phone cameras flashed and selfie sticks waved in their faces.

The remaining bison within the confines of the park face habitat fluctuations due to climate change, increased natural disasters, and hordes of tourists gawking at the last living remnants of the kings of the American plains. One massive bull crossed the road in front of us. He seemed hardly able to support the weight of his ponderous head upon his enormous shoulders, and every movement he made looked like a colossal effort. A man nearby opened his car door not four feet from the bull to stick out his phone for a picture, laughing as his daughter squealed in terror. I took my own obligatory photos from the car window as we finally passed by and felt slightly sick. Hard to believe that these sideshow creatures once shaped the landscape as keystone rulers of the prairie.

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Let’s Start Here

It is a brilliantly golden morning in the rolling hills of Eastern Oregon, as the first rays of sunlight illuminate the frosted grass upon the plains. A herd of placid Angus cattle, jet black and massive, are silhouetted against the sunrise as they make their way down a beaten trail. A rugged young cow hand doles out bales of hay as if they weigh no more than pillows, his thick leather gloves protecting his fingers from the sharp twine holding the bales together. The cattle jostle each other for access to the food, huffing and puffing out great plumes of hot breath into the freezing air. It is a scene which has played out daily on these hills for over a hundred years; a cowboy feeding his stock, in harmony with the land; a quintessentially American morning.

This scene is – if you’ll pardon the pun – bullshit.

We have romanticized ranching as being the difficult role of a few good men toiling against the odds of urban life and rapacious corporations. In films like The Cowboys, TV series like Yellowstone and even comedies like Billy Crystal's City Slickers, the cattle industry is depicted as the noble work of rugged individualists living lightly on the land, at one with nature and themselves. The reality is that some of the largest corporations in the world are cattle ranches, and that the cattle industry itself is one of the greatest unseen capitalist forces shaping America today. The way our towns were created, our states settled, and our water resources managed were all influenced by ranching. Apocalypse Cow will reveal the profound ways in which one animal and the industry surrounding it has shaped history, society, and the very landscape beneath our feet.

Why does this matter?

Wealthy cattle monopolists drained millions of acres of wetlands for grazing, forever changing the landscape of the West. Barbed wire was invented and the fencing in of the range began due to cattle operations. The cattle industry came part and parcel with manifest destiny, and cattle were the basis for the creation of railroads, refrigeration, and urbanization.

Present day pro-cattle slogans like “Beef. It's What’s for Dinner” touts the idea that beef is “All-American” and equates the cattle industry with patriotism and the support of rural America. But beef farmers are not feeding America. We import just as much beef as we export, bringing in beef from Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and New Zealand while we send our steaks to China, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Yet the cattle industry whitewashes its outsized role to appeal to its conservative base.

Cows graze on roughly half of all land in the United States. Presently, over 93.8 million cows trample across public lands in western and middle America. In the state of California, over 60 percent of open space consists of privately owned rangeland, and 85 percent of increasingly precious freshwater runs over ranches. With staggering numbers like these, we have to ask: what is the cattle industry doing to our country? The answer is nothing good. Cattle create terrible impacts to our land and water, yet ranchers pay very little money to offset these environmental costs.

Drive down any rural highway in America and you’re virtually guaranteed to see cows. Black Angus are the most common, followed by beefy red and white Herefords. In Texas, you might spot a herd of iconic Longhorns. We assume these are American cows but none of these breeds are native. Colonists imported stock from Europe because they considered their domesticated animals superior to the ‘savage beasts’ of the New World. If you look closely at the fence line between the highway and the cattle ranges, notice the mosaic of high grasses and greenery on the roadside of the fence and the dense low shrubland on the cattle side of the fence. Most of us believe this shrubland is a natural landscape. It isn’t –– cattle grazing has impacted native growth. In most cases, that space between the highway and the fence line are the last remaining strips of natural western prairie, collecting the litter blown by passing cars. The shape of our states and the species that live there have been changed by the cow.

Cattle trample riverbanks across the West, creating great gullies in arid states, deepening and speeding up rivers, which affects water temperature and pollution, and leads to the decline of fish species. Before cattle became the primary occupants of grasslands, wolves and cougars were there first and helped balance the natural ecosystems. But these predators were hunted to extinction in many states to protect cattle, leading to increased populations of prey species like deer, which changed the makeup of plants in wilderness areas. The effects of these changes are almost unfathomable and means almost no land in America is truly “wild.”

Why me?

I did not set out to write this book because I hate cattle. On the contrary, I like cows. I like their big baleful eyes and their wet noses. I love seeing a herd of cattle snaking down a hillside at sunset, and cows as a species are in my blood. My father and his two brothers grew up raising cattle, first in Illinois and later in Missouri. My uncles continued their involvement in the cattle industry for the duration of their careers. I got to visit cattle farms growing up, and watch cattle auctions in places like Madras, Oregon and Berryville, Virginia. I fell asleep listening to my dad’s stories of life on the farm as a kid; my favorite was when one of his prize steers pooped on him while he was cleaning his hooves before a show. I listened to his fond recollections of cows that were special to him, like Peaches and Cream, and his heartbreak when they were sent to slaughter. At age eleven (and cruelly denied a pony) I befriended one of my uncle’s new breeding bulls while he was in quarantine before meeting his new herd. I named the 2,000-pound bull Oscar and spent hours brushing his curly forehead and humming to him. My uncle and his farm manager warned me away from him, but I continued to play friends, lying on his broad back while I listened to him munch on hay.

In graduate school, while studying landscape architecture and delving into ecological theory, my rosy outlook on the cattle industry matured into a more realistic view. Cattle ranches have shaped the social, economic, and political identity of the western United States since the 15th century, and given the pace of climate change, our relationship with cows now needs to change for the better. This Substack and my book will urgently describe the current range crisis on our public lands, the iron grip that the cattle industry has on our politics and legislation and call the reader to action. Apocalypse Cow is part personal exploration of a romanticized version of the American West, part historical timeline of the rise and fall of the cattle industry, and par contemporary journalism exploring the future of cows and environmentalism in the United States.

My goal in writing Apocalypse Cow is to change the way that readers see the landscape. I am a landscape architect by training, and my master’s degree in the subject has provided me with a unique way of seeing the influences and ravages of the cattle industry upon our world. When I interpret the landscape, I observe all its myriad forms, from the cultural and historical, to the ecological and political. Weaving together personal anecdotes, history, interviews, and contemporary storytelling, I want to expose how the humble cow created, shaped, and destroyed America. A reader will never see the golden pastures along highways in the same way again. They will notice engineered aspects of geography that they once thought were completely natural. They will recognize the way towns in the western United States are laid out for ease of cattle driving, the way cities are named for former cattle kings. They will shake their heads at the invasive plant species along their roadways and in their very backyards, which originally hitchhiked to America with Spanish cattle nearly 500 years ago.

In the United States, public lands make up the majority of our natural resources and ostensibly provide access to the great outdoors for any citizen in the country. While these millions of acres – National parks and monuments, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges, National forests and seashores — are managed by various federal entities like the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, the land itself is supposed to be an asset to the American public as a whole. Like the song says; “this land was made for you and me” –– except reality doesn’t line up with this patriotic ideal.

This is not a Substack about the need to remove cows from North America, and I will not propose lofty or radical “solutions” that can only happen in an ideal scenario. I will focus on practical actions that are ready today, and which can mitigate the negative effects of cattle ranching to set us on the path towards a healthier American landscape which we steward responsibly, together.

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