Our series on cows and rangelands continues in the weeds and in the thorns, looking at a specific piece of public land where livestock are being employed to give some endangered species a new lease on life.

In this 3-part series, we're hearing from impassioned scientists and land managers with diametrically opposed opinions on the concept of "rangelands" — by some estimates, accounting for 50-70% of the earth's surface. Missed Part 1? Catch up here

— — —

Find credits, citations, a transcript and more at futureecologies.net/listen/fe-5-8-home-on-the-rangelands-part-2

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You are listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies.

All right, here we go.

Okay.

Welcome back. I'm Adam. And this is Mendel.

Hey!

And today we are continuing our discussion of

rangelands in the West, focusing on my home state of Cowlifornia.

So if you haven't yet, you want to catch

up with the first episode in this series, where last time

around Adam, you were 100% pro livestock, basically

unrecognizable. How are you feeling about cows today?

Well, today, I am basically on the fence.

Are you going to come down on the grazed or the

ungrazed side of the fence?

I mean, I always thought that I wanted to be on

the ungrazed side of the fence. And certainly, in places like

Cache Creek, which we covered earlier this season, I'd say

that I firmly want to be on that side of the fence, because that

is the side of the fence with all of the wildflowers.

Right, yeah cows were not doing that landscape

any favors.

I don't think so. But down here in California, I'm

just not quite so sure anymore. Because it seems like sometimes,

the wildflowers and all of the rare species might actually be

on the grazed side of the fence.

That would complicate your very

wildflower-centric worldview.

It does! And learning about how livestock can

be used for all sorts of benefits on California's highly

invaded rangelands has definitely rocked my world. But

at the same time, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm still

thinking, that's great and all on private range lands, but on

our public lands, can't we do better? Can't we be using other

tools? Do we have to be sharing our public lands with cows?

Right... you'd think on public lands, we could

find a way to have our wildflowers without relying on

an introduced ungulate.

That's been my contention. But of course, there

are a lot of important values out there on the land, and

wildflowers aren't the only one.

Hmmm that's surprisingly broad minded of

you, Adam.

I would take credit, but sadly, I can't. It's

when I put the question to podcaster Ashley Ahern, whose

work helped catalyze this series, that she reminded me of

that.

Well, as you know, much of the American West

is public lands, and the people who can afford to own tracts of

land large enough to support sustainable ranching — again,

there's a right way and there's a wrong way; there's a harmful

way, And there's a less harmful way to have cows on a landscape.

One key factor is the density of the cows over the the acreage

that they are grazing — So to have enough acres to graze

enough cows to make a living in the system in which we live, you

need a lot, a lot of acres. The people who can afford a lot, a

lot of acres anymore in the West, are millionaire and

billionaire ranch owners now. So for many of the small mom and

pop operations, they wouldn't be able to buy the land, they need

to raise cows sustainably, i.e. not overly concentrated on the

landscape. So that's where the public lands and the ability to

use those public lands becomes critical to be able to make a

living within the capitalist system that we have for beef

production in this country.

Hmmm... while you and I might be focused on

the ecological outcomes, Ashley is here to remind us that there

are also huge cultural and economic dimensions to the

issue.

Yes. For her, irrespective of the potential

ecological benefits that livestock can provide on public

lands, we should be considering the ranchers themselves.

Without the access to those acres, literally

just just the the space to do this job, it's not possible.

It's not as simple as just saying public lands belong to

everybody. We need to keep cows off because they're bad. Again,

it's how do we have cows on these public lands in a way that

does not prevent everyone else from enjoying them in the

various ways that they want to enjoy them, whether it's

hunting, whether it's mountain biking, whether it's hiking, or

cross country skiing, I do all of those things. And I also want

to do that on the public lands where cows are grazing.

Yeah, that's fair, I think. And even for

those of us who are focused on ecological outcomes, if small

ranchers can't make a go of it, then using cows for conservation

really just won't be an option.

Exactly. If we want the benefits livestock can

provide in certain circumstances, then we need to

keep small ranchers in business. And those small ranchers often

rely on public lands. That's the argument And if you accept that

argument, then the devil is in the details, or rather... it's

in the weeds.

Okay, if we're having cows, how much does it

cost per cow per acre, right? Or how many cows are allowed? Or at

what times of year? And how long can they be on a certain chunk

of public land? Those are really really thorny debates. And it's

where very different perspectives, lived experiences

clash.

So today, we're going to have some thorny

debates about what it means to have livestock on public lands,

or at least on public lands in coastal California. And we're

going to look at a specific piece of public land where

livestock are being employed to give some endangered species a

new lease on life. From Future Ecologies, this is Home on the

Rangelands, part two — The Beef and the Butterflies.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Okay, where do we begin? In the thorns or in

the weeds?

We're going to begin in the weeds, at Tulare

Hill.

Hi how are you?

Good morning, how are you?

Doing well. I'm Christal.

Nice to meet you, I'm Adam. Thank you so much for

coming out and meeting me here this morning.

Yeah, this whole hill is fascinating. It's

very different.

So we're starting in the weeds with a

case study. Who is this? And where are we?

My name is Christal Niederer, and I'm a

senior biologist with Creekside Science. I've been working here

17 years now. And one of the first places that I started

working out here was this site here, which is Tulare Hill.

We're in South San Jose.

Uhh... South San Jose?

Yeah. So a brief California geography lesson that

will be important later, I promise. The Bay Area, where I'm

from, is basically a gigantic urban sprawl wrapped around the

San Francisco Bay on the central coast of the state. There is San

Francisco out on the peninsula, Oakland across the way, and at

the south end of the bay, a city that is actually larger than

both of those, the city of San Jose.

Okay, so a lot of people. How many, exactly?

Well, depending on how you define it, there are

about 8 million people in the Bay Area. And at the southern

tip of this region, just south of San Jose, is this little nub

of land called Tulare Hill. And Christal and I are standing on

top of it, looking out through the midwinter haze over that

urban sprawl.

It's a little bit foggy and smoggy right now.

So you don't see the whole bay area from here. But you can see

we've got a city here.

This is such a California view. You get the

there's a highway, there are subdivisions. There is a natural

gas power plant. There's agricultural fields, large ones.

A solar farm

And there's a solar farm. And then of course,

the the rangelands on the hillsides. I mean, it's quite a

quite a slice of this place, isn't it?

Yeah. Over to our right, we have the Mount

Hamilton range, kind of the Inner Coast ranges. And then on

the other side, we have the Santa Cruz Mountains, which goes

all the way out to the Pacific Ocean here. And so this spot

right here... I kind of call it The Plug. It's sort of where

these two mountain ranges converge. It's kind of an

interesting stepping stone or wildlife corridor between these

two mountain ranges.

So picture two mountain ranges, one on either

side. On the coast side, the slopes are green and forested.

And on the inland side, they are drier and grassy. And then

there's this little stepping stone of a hill in the gap

between them.

Okay, and that's Tulare Hill.

Yep.

Why does she call it "the plug"?

Yeah, so we're on the plug. So what on

earth does that mean? I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to that take a

little while.

That... that could be the description for our

whole show. But what is actually special about this place?

Well, for starters, Tulare Hill is special

because it has serpentine soils.

Serpentine is California's State rock. But

what's interesting about the serpentine soils, it's

chemically very strange. And so it's actually a very difficult

environment for plants to grow in general. So you have low

nitrogen, low phosphorus, generally. And so you think of

like your NPK, those three numbers on your fertilizer bag

that plants want. This is really low in those.

Yeah, we talked about serpentinite soils, way

back in episode 1.3. But if I remember correctly, they're not

only low in the sort of nutrients that plants need. But

they're also just kind of toxic. Right?

Yeah, it can have a lot of toxic heavy metals

like nickel and chromium, things like that. There could be very

different chemical compositions from site to site. But yeah,

it's a very harsh environment. And so a lot of people think,

oh, that sounds really bad. Like that sounds like a bad place for

plants. But it's, it's just... it's different. It's a difficult

environment. So we have different kinds of things. So

you end with a lot of rare plants. Just on this hill, we

have at least two endangered species that are just known from

this area. So things that can really only grow in Serpentine.

And then you have things that have a more widespread

tolerance. But because we have so many invasive plants,

especially in our grasslands. Our grasslands are really known

for being really invaded. Even though they used to have a much

wider distribution, they kind of end up having refuges here and

these weird soils. You still see the wildflowers shows here. And

that's kind of what people get excited about is just being able

to come out here where you don't have a lot of those invasive

grasses, and just seeing a ton of flowers.

Now I see why you chose this place.

Well, I wasn't actually there at the right time

for the show. So honestly, the place was a bit drab.

I mean, yeah, most people don't get that

excited about it. It's a rocky little hill. It's a very rocky

little hill.

But in the right season, I'm sure it's

spectacular.

Right. The point is that because of the soils on

this site are uniquely terrible. Those introduced grasses that

are so pesky throughout California, they can't get a

foothold.

That's it.

The Serpentine soils are very low in

nitrogen. And traditionally, historically, they've kind of

kept a lot of these non native invasive grasses out it's just

been a little bit too tough of an environment for them.

The serpentine soils keep out most woody

vegetation too. So the site stays open. It's a perfect place

for wildflowers and all those other rare species that like

open ecosystems, on the other hand, not a great place for

grasses. So that's why it was so jarring when crystal introduced

me to a special someone.

This is Dottie the cow. She's been

decomposing here for... boy, how many years now... several years.

But we were out here when she was freshly... freshly no longer

with us. And now she's just a scattered pile of bones.

Dottie... is a cow... skeleton.

Yes. And it's not just bright, bleached white

bones scattered across the top of Tulare Hill.

Yes, we are walking through lots of dried

cow patties.

So even on a harsh site like this one, there

are livestock. Why?

If this area is not grazed, it just really

grasses over to the point where it's hard to walk in here

because you can't see the rocks.

But I thought the whole point was that

serpentine soils, keep the grasses away. What's going on

here?

Well, to answer that question, might I introduce

you to Stuart Weiss.

So I'm a conservation ecologist in the San Francisco

Bay Area.

Stu has worked on a lot of issues, but he's

probably best known for his work on butterflies.

I started chasing Checkerspot butterflies, the Bay

Checkerspot in particular, back in 1979 When I was a freshman,

and I found myself up on Jasper Ridge biological preserve with a

butterfly net in hand, chasing butterflies through incredible

fields of wildflowers. And I'm still doing that today. The

butterfly has been my muse — kind of ecological and

conservation muse... because it's really well studied, lives

in a very unusual habitat and is tightly threatened with

extinction if we don't manage the habitats correctly.

And butterflies aren't just a pretty face.

They're a serious business.

Yeah, I consider them to be a pretty strong indicator

of the state of an ecosystem because the vast majority of

diversity is in the insect world. And butterflies are our

window into the insect world because they're large, they're

easy to tell apart... most of the time.

So Stu is out there, chasing rare butterflies

and studying their ecology, which is challenging because

butterfly populations are super dynamic.

The volatility of these butterfly populations is

really a function of very high reproductive output, and really

high mortality. So when part of the population is doing well

another part may be doing really poorly. But then a few years

later, it will switch.

There are these really strong fluctuations

across landscapes based on things like topography, and

vegetation, connectivity, all of these different factors. Anyway,

one of Stu's subjects is the Bay Checkerspot butterfly, which

today is really endangered.

And I would venture to guess that the Bay

Checkerspot may at one point have been one of the most common

butterflies in the grasslands in the Bay Area. And then suddenly,

you get this massive transformation and it's now

isolated on these serpentinite outcrops. Then those, especially

on the San Francisco peninsula, they get progressively

developed. So now we're looking at like remnants of remnants.

So... Bay Checkerspots are now just in a

few places.

And one of those places is Tulare Hill. You

really only find them on serpentinite sites these days,

because that's where their host plants live.

Plantago erecta, which is the most important

plant in the world, believe it or not.

Is that a fact?

Well, the jury is still out. But I do have to

admit they're kind of cute.

Is this a plantain?

Yeah, it's a plantain. Christal showed me

some in the field.

It's actually kind of hard to tell what we're

looking at this time of year. To me this almost looks like a

little bit of like the fake lawn, you know the little

astroturm or something — these little tiny short guys, but this

isn't grass. Some of this is Plantago erecta. So that is

California dwarf plantain. That is the host plant of the Bay

Checkerspot butterfly. And so you can see where grass... a

non-native annual grass you know can easily be as tall as your

knee or something like that. So you're just not going to have

these tiny little, pinky-high plants when you've got knee-high

grass

Mendel, these guys are real small, like itsy bitsy,

teeny tiny plants.

Why would this butterfly choose such a tiny

plant as a host?

So Bay Checkerspot butterflies are

incredibly specialized. So they want to eat the Plantago erecta

and some similar species that have iridoid glycosides in them

Iridoid... glycosides.

Yeah, the iridoid glycosides. They

accumulate them in their in their body and they make them

taste bad, basically.

Okay. Are you up for a bit of butterfly biology?

Is that a real question?

That's, uh...

Of course I am!

Okay,so in California, we have a kind of

weirdly inverted seasonal calendar, where our kind of

winter rainy season is when things start to germinate.

Christal and I were standing on Tulare Hill in mid December.

So right now, when things start to germinate,

that's sort of a cue to the caterpillars. The caterpillars

have been in a dormant stage called diapause — over that

long, hot, dry summer, they've got nothing to eat.

And like clockwork, they're coming out of

dormancy.

So they're going to be coming up waking up

and starting to eat this plantain that's all over the

place. They're tiny. They're probably a quarter inch long,

maybe. Little blackish gray buddies

With orange spots on them.

They're just absorbing all that heat with

their little black bodies. And then the orange spots are kind

of a little bit of a warning coloration like "hey, birds"

"I taste bad. Don't eat me."

"I can lay out here I can actually bask in

the sun in full view of the world." It's a huge advantage

for them to be able to just lay out and get the sun. You know,

they're Californians — they're working on their tan, and

they're enjoying the sun.

Aw...

And their job right now is just be the Hungry

Caterpillar and eat as much as they can bask in the sun just

really absorb that energy.

And so they eat and they grow, and they eat, and

they grow. And eventually they get fat enough, hopefully, to

form a chrysalis.

And they'll do that right on the ground or

kind of in some vegetation.

Once they break out of that chrysalis, they're

full fledged butterfly adults. And immediately, first thing

they do when they are adults, can you guess?

Uh... they buy alcohol?

No silly, they mate immediately!

Oh of course.

And then of course, the females lay the eggs

in a big clump.

Which is interesting, because some

species will do it one at a time. But these will do it in a

big clump of you know, like maybe a couple hundred eggs

even, right off the bat.

And that's it, they've gotten it out of the

way. Now they can just fly around for a few days until they

die.

They only live about a week, maybe 10 days

as an adult butterfly.

It's kind of funny that we call them

butterflies when they're actually just caterpillars most

of their life.

I know, right?

So then what happens?

So they lay the eggs. The eggs, again, take

probably another week to 10 days or something to hatch, and then

the race is on. So at this point, things are generally

starting to dry up. And probably about 99% of them are going to

die of starvation. It's crazy. But again, if you're putting out

a few 100 eggs, you know, they can't all survive, or we'd have

too many Bay Checkerspot butterflies.

And if they're lucky, they can eat enough

vegetation before everything dries out to survive the summer,

through dormancy — diapause

They get in little cracks, might be under a

rock, something like that. They're just sort of on the soil

and they just kind of shut down and they wait for it to rain

like about the timer and now or things start to green up and the

plantago starts germinating and something there signals them —

it's time to get up start eating and laying the sun.

And then the cycle starts all over again.

Okay, so this little endangered butterfly,

which is actually really mostly a caterpillar is super reliant

on this tiny little native plantain, and therefore the open

serpentinite sites on which it grows.

Yes. And of course, the butterflies are just

one of many species reliant on sites like these. Just on my

visit, we saw several endangered plants, a jackrabbit, raptors,

and also signs of other inhabitants.

You and I both know there's a ton of

wildlife living in there, like you said, birds, there's

insects, there's mammals, all kinds of things live in

grasslands.

So sites like these are super important for

biodiversity. But butterflies are a key indicator. And back in

the 1980s, Stu started noticing something strange and kind of

alarming.

I've been working on some of these populations for

nearly 40 years now, so I've seen the booms and busts. We

have a good fix on the historical range of variability.

But then we saw these changes in the habitat when the livestock —

the cattle grazing — was removed. Suddenly, the field of

wildflowers over the course of a couple of years turned into a...

just a sea of non-native annual grass. And the populations just

nosedived or went extinct in areas that weren't being grazed.

We didn't know why. We just knew it was happening.

Grass.... growing on serpentinite... Why?

How?

We will get to that, right after the break.

Hey, me again. If you're listening to Future

Ecologies, and well, here you are, I'd bet that sustainability

is something that matters to you. And more than that, you've

probably asked yourself, "what does that word sustainable mean,

anyhow? How do we get there? What's my part in it?" You know,

the big questions. Questions that, as we're discovering in

this series, and in all of our episodes, have answers with no

shortage of nuance, or complexity. And that's exactly

why we make this show. Which brings me to another somewhat

smaller question of sustainability. That is our

ability to keep producing this podcast. We've never spoken

about it publicly before, but Adam doesn't get paid at all for

this work. He does it on the side of his day job as a

restoration ecologist. As for me, I make significantly less

than minimum wage for the time that I put in, which is

considerable. Together, the two of us research interview, write,

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that everyone involved can be paid a living wage. If just half

of everyone listening right now contributed $1 each month, we'd

be there already. To everyone who supports us, thank you. We

couldn't do it without you. Futureecologies.net/join. Okay,

back to the show.

Okay, Adam

Mendel. This is Future Ecologies. And we're

about to find out why introduced grasses started growing on

serpentine soils in California, putting all the rare species

that have been surviving in these little refugia at risk.

Yeah. And there's actually a pretty simple answer,

but Stu wasn't able to make the connection until the early 90s

When he learned about something called dry nitrogen deposition.

And it was suddenly like, Oh, now I know what's

going on. You know, like a proverbial light bulb. Took

about five years to learn enough about nitrogen. The nitrogen

cycle is like the most fiendishly complex part of

biogeochemistry. But after about five years, I've published a

paper called "Cars, Cows and Checkerspot Butterflies".

And this paper, "Cars, Cows and Checkerspot

Butterflies", has become a bit of a classic in the field of

ecology. The gist of it is that, and I don't know if you know

this, Mendel, California is known for its car culture.

Oh really?

And as a result for air pollution. And many of

those pollutants contain nitrogen, which eventually

settles out onto the land.

Smog is fertilizer, it acts as nitrogen fertilizer

on ecosystems exposed to it. For about a decade, I've been

staring at this brown cloud over the southern part of Silicon

Valley, that was all blowing towards me on the prevailing

winds. We start dumping large amounts of nitrogen on these

habitats, you know, on the order of 10 to 20 pounds per acre, or

kilograms per hectare, per year. And we do it for decades, the

nitrogen limitation of the soils just goes away. And the grasses

invade.

The nitrogen in the air pollution is fertilizing

the grasses. But I thought air pollution causes acid rain. What

is dry nitrogen deposition?

I mean, to simplify things dramatically,

basically, acid rain is when nitrogen or sulfuric compounds

are deposited on land through rain. So when it's wet, and then

dry deposition is when they settle out in particulate

matter... when it's dry. Dry deposition also includes

absorption of gases on the surfaces and directly into the

leaves of plants through their stomata. So California is mostly

dry, we have mostly dry deposition.

You know, I've been trying for a few decades now to

kind of get the nitrogen deposition on the map for

biodiversity conservation. And it's been like really hard. It's

the biggest global environmental change that very few people are

talking about. So the nitrogen cycle is more disrupted than the

carbon cycle.

And by the way, the implications of nitrogen

deposition go way beyond grass and butterflies. In addition to

this kind of terrestrial eutrophication, Stu points to

coastal dead zones and major health impacts, both direct and

indirect.

But in one sense, we're more addicted to using

large amounts of nitrogen than we are using fossil fuel because

we have to feed the planet, which requires large amounts of

nitrogen for high intensity agriculture.

Curse you, Fritz Haber!

I mean, this is probably far from the worst

thing that Fritz Haber did, but it still does have lots of

consequences. For example, I have super terrible grass

allergies, and so do a lot of other folks.

Even in non-serpentine grasslands, the

nitrogen deposition makes the grass grow a lot more. Annual

grasses love nitrogen. Well increased grass growth means

you're gonna have a lot more grass pollen in the air. And the

biggest allergy problem in California is annual grass

pollen. So you think about the billions of dollars of direct

cost, morbidity, some cases and maybe even mortality just from

respiratory distress, but then simply the unquantifiable amount

of human misery. So I tell people, atmospheric nitrogen

deposition really is something to sneeze at.

So for everything from allergies to

ocean dead zones, nitrogen is the culprit.

Guilty as charged. And on California's serpentinite

soils, it allows grasses to move right on in.

You need some way of cropping the grasses keeping

them from taking over. And that's where the cows come in.

They don't go after the wildflowers unless there's no

grass around. And they're quite good at it.

So back in the 1980s, when cows were bad, and

lots of land managers were pulling them off of public

lands, it revealed a problem that no one had been paying

attention to.

We sort of took the empirical observation that "Oh,

when we remove the cattle, we get the grasses coming in," then

found the driver of that from the smog.

So in the last episode, when Clayton and Lynn

were talking about how we really only realized all of the

benefits of cattle grazing for conservation in California,

after we lost them, they were referring to situations just

like this.

Just like this one.

Yeah, there's been this huge turn around with the

majority of the conservation community. With regard to cattle

grazing. We saw the consequences of pulling the cattle off of

this novel California annual grassland ecosystem that's just

like a mix of native and non native species, the non native

species are now naturalized and they're not going away. So we

have to manage them. So we saw the consequences of the no

grazing paradigm. And it doesn't work.

Okay, doing nothing doesn't work. But we do

have tools other than grazing.

We do. And I did push them on this. Like, aren't

there other ways to remove these grasses that don't involve

livestock?

The big three I feel like people talk about in

managing grasslands are going to be grazing, fire and mowing. And

it's... whichever site you're on, you know, one is gonna make

more sense than the other. It's really hard to burn here. Just

logistically we have... nobody, nobody wants their house burned

down.

So prescribed fire, while it can work really

well, it's pretty challenging in urban area, right? As we

discussed in the last episode, because people are both super

sensitive about fire risk, and also about air quality.

That's kind of ironic, given that it's air

pollution that's causing the problems in the first place.

It sure is. So prescribed fire is just not

going to happen on this site, and mowing. Well, Christal and

Stu actually do mow some of their sites.

Woof! You know, you wouldn't want to mow

this 300 acres, super steep, rocky area. You're making a

frowny face there, like, it would just it just wouldn't

happen. Like if you... just it would be... to make it happen

would be, you know, an enormous amount of money.

And, you know, working for a small conservation

organization, I can tell you just how compelling those

economic incentives can sometimes be.

There's an economic incentive to have

cattle, somebody's making money off of raising cattle. A lot of

these sites the grazer actually pays to have their cattle on

here versus if I wanted somebody to mow this. They're not gonna

pay me to mow this. So it's just it's great for us, who are these

Bay Checkerspot butterfly biologists — we're like "this is

the perfect tool" because these cows just really want the grass

and they don't want the specific Bay Checkerspot plants.

Which from this perspective makes cows even

better than fire or mowing, because they're more selective.

That makes practical sense. But, like,

really, let's be honest here. Can cows be a substitute for a

natural process like fire?

That is the million dollar question. And you

know, I asked the rangelands, folks, and they told me, "yes,

not a perfect substitute. But yes." And, you know, the reason

I first got interested in Tulare Hill, is that there was a

wildfire there in 2004 and It burned through both grazed and

ungrazed areas on the site that Christal and Stu and others were

actively studying.

Huh! Okay, so it was like a natural experiment?

Yeah.

What did they find?

We saw fire results that were very good. We

see, you know, the grazing results are very good. And when

I say very good, we have lower non-native annual grass cover.

We're generally wanting to shift from grasses to forbs — to the

wildflowers. And you know, the grazing, the burning the mowing

will do that. So it's kind of a matter of how long is that

effect going to last? Can you... Can you do this every year? Can

you afford to do it every year?

To summarize, both the wildfire and the grazing had

similar positive impacts on the site. But those impacts were

ephemeral. They just didn't last. The grasses would creep

back in to dominate after a couple of years, it was only in

the areas that were continuously grazed after the fire, that the

effects were lasting. I mean, you'd have to burn once every

year or two to substitute for the cows, and both Stu and

Christal feel that that's just not possible for this site.

You know, we get this great result for a couple of

years, but then the grasses just come roaring back unless you

have the cattle on there. And it might be changing, but the

ability to consistently pull off prescribed burns at the right

frequency to manage habitats. That is so far from the current

situation.

And apparently Bay Area firefighters are really

type A about putting wildfires out, even when land managers are

literally begging them to have a lighter touch.

They bring in the air tankers. And the air tankers are

dropping diammonium phosphate, which is like the ultimate

fertilizer for something like serpentine grassland.

They bring in the air tankers. And the air

tankers are dropping diammonium phosphate, which is like the

ultimate fertilizer for something like serpentine

grassland. Oh, whoa... so in putting up the wildfire, the

firefighters are just dumping fuel on the other fire, which is

the introduced grasses.

Yes, if fuel was fertilizer, that is exactly what

they're doing.

Okay, so fire is great. But we're back to

grazing.

Yeah, I just... I don't know, any method that can

work at a landscape scale to keep the annual grasses in

check, other than cattle grazing.

So we might say that Tulare Hill is a sort of

poster child for using cows in conservation — in California, at

least. But it's also the poster child for something else,

because it put a new spotlight on nitrogen pollution.

Back in 1999, just when the paper was in press,

there was a proposal for a 600 megawatt gas fired power plant

just right next to Tulare Hill.

A gas fired power plant... that means even

more nitrogen!

Yeah, speaking of adding fuel to the fire. And

after some public criticism, the company behind the power plant

proposal decided to develop a mitigation plan. And they ended

up hiring Stu to help.

I wanted to establish a precedent for mitigating for

the nitrogen deposition. They wanted to set a precedent of "we

can actually build a new modern, gas fired power plant in

California." This was the first one that had been proposed in

decades.

And there it was, at the base of Tulare Hill.

We're on the Metcalf Energy Center Ecological

Preserve.

Is that what that is?

That is the Metcalf Energy Center right

there. It's a 20 year old plant. It is a natural gas plant. What

is interesting about this plant is this is the first that had to

mitigate for its nitrogen impacts. That power plant is

down in the valley on the rich soil. It's not wrecking the...

it's not physically on the serpentine. It's not, you know,

like a bunch of condos on the Serpentine. But it's still

impacting something next to it. And that set the precedent for

power plants that are farther north. They ended up mitigating

and buying some serpentine property down here in South San

Jose. So again, very far from the impact, but that nitrogen is

in that plume that's coming down through the valley, hitting the

plug here, and dropping out under the soil. That's a whole

new thing people have to mitigate for now, which is

great.

Oh, she calls it "the plug" because it's kind of

at the bottom of a funnel of these mountain ranges...

catching all of the nitrogen coming from all of the air

pollution from the entire Bay Area.

Bingo.

The prevailing winds pretty much

come down from San Francisco, they go through the Gate, they

take a right hand turn down the San Francisco Bay, and then they

kind of get blocked right here, because this is that little

stepping stone, that little tight spot between these two

mountain ranges. Everything kind of just halts a little bit here.

So this site gets a lot more of the nitrogen pollution than a

lot of other sites regionally.

Hence, the plug. And the precedent set by this

rocky little hill has translated into hundreds of millions of

dollars of mitigation funding for conservation in the Bay

Area. And it helped spur the creation of the Santa Clara

Valley Habitat Conservation Plan.

That's gonna target 42,000 acres, of which about

12,000 is Serpentine grassland and Bay Checkerspot. Rest of the

land base is for California Red Legged frogs, California Tiger

Salamanders. There's like 19 species that are covered under

the plan.

Yeah, and we can all have our nice city and

our big economy and all our businesses, and still have, you

know, open space and a lot of conservation and all these rare

species that we're so interested in.

So today, Tulare Hill is protected by a mix of

public and private landowners, and managed for conservation and

mitigation. But the nitrogen hasn't stopped falling from the

sky.

Forecast today, same as yesterday — 100% chance

of nitrogen

This whole question about mitigation and

cows, really begs the question of... is this just a bandaid for

all the other things that are going wrong? Or is it actually a

way to deal with the root problem?

I mean, what I hear from Christal there is this

sort of articulation of kind of like status quo

environmentalism. And I feel about this statement, kind of

like how I feel about the use of cows and conservation in

general, right? It sort of is a comfortable idea that we can

have our status quo way of doing things, we can have our status

quo economy, we can have our status quo land management vis a

vis cows, and we can still have nature and species. There is

really good evidence on the side of people who are saying these

things, who are showing results from mitigation funding and what

it can do in terms of protecting land and making space for

species at risk. And, you know, showing that cows are also a big

part of providing that space. At the same time, I think it limits

the conversation and underplays the costs of doing things this

way. And, you know, maybe a lack of imagination for what's

possible.

And then on the flip side, maybe it's simply the

most practical way of dealing with the situation that we have

under the condition of a really urbanized space with lots of

cars, and lots of people, and lots of... lots of impacts.

Maybe, Mendel... maybe. I'm a... I'm a strong

maybe.

Well, okay, I guess now that now that we've

got the weeds out of the way, and it turns out, the cows are

eating all of them. I'd say it's time we get to those thorns,

shall we?

Yes. For all of you anxious listeners who have

been suffering through over 90 minutes of pro-cow content at

this point, I think it is time to take the bull by the horns.

Or maybe to take the bull by the thorns?

Ok ok ok, before you go any further, I think we

have to talk a little more about the elephant sized cow in the

room.

What do you mean?

We kicked off this series with the preface

that livestock agriculture emits greenhouse gas and results in

deforestation and that we should all collectively eat less meat.

Yes, those are the facts that I was hoping would

frame this conversation. And, you know, I want to reiterate

that, in this series, I'm looking at a pretty narrow

topic, which is the benefits and the drawbacks of small ranchers

grazing livestock on public conservation lands — that are

already open ecosystems, critically

Yeah.

And even within this discussion, obviously,

there is a lot of disagreement.

I get you have a more narrow focus with that, but

I think it is important that we take those starting facts and

put a little bit more meat on those bones.

Sure, yeah. Okay, let's do it.

So just the hard numbers — livestock agriculture,

globally, accounts for about 14 and a half percent of all human

caused greenhouse gas emissions.

That sounds about right. Although the number might

vary a bit depending on what you're including.

Right, and cattle for beef and dairy

account for 60% of that total.

Sixty percent!

About half of those emissions are related to

feed production, deforestation, and transportation.

In other words, all the carbon associated with

clearing land for cattle, and growing and shipping crops to

support them.

Yeah.

And most of that land clearing is happening in

South America, by the way.

The other half of those emissions are

attributed to enteric fermentation.

Cow burps, the side effect of the rumen.

And from manure management.

Right, there are problems at both ends.

To say the least. So just to put this all

in perspective, beef requires about 20 times as much land and

produces about 20 times as much greenhouse gas as an equivalent

plant protein.

Right, which just underlines the point that most

of us should be eating less meat, and especially less beef.

Definitely. And it's about to get even thornier

because we've been exclusively discussing grass fed, or free

range livestock.

Actually, that's that's not entirely the case,

Mendel.

Uh...?

This gets complicated, but most beef cows

in North America are raised on pasture for some portion of

their life, and then finished on grain, often on a feedlot. When

you're picturing, you know, like industrial agriculture, that's

what you're picturing.

Yeah.

Beef that are sold as grass fed, comes from cows

that live out their entire lives on the ranch, but that's not

very common. Clayton's ranch, for example, advertises itself

as grass fed, and grain finished. So it's not as if

ranchers who graze their livestock on conservation lands

are exclusively grass finished. Some are and some aren't. Some

of these cows are destined for the feedlot.

How do grass and grain finishing stack up in

terms of climate?

That is a very complicated question. My

understanding is that grain finished cattle mature faster,

and get bigger faster, and so require less pasture. And that

means that proponents often claim that they produce less

greenhouse gas over their lifetimes. Then again, when you

take into account the full lifecycle of producing and

transporting all of that grain, and also adjust for carbon

sequestration benefits associated with well managed

grasslands, you could claim that feedlot cattle are worse for the

climate than grass finished.

Yeah, classic. Intensifying production will

create efficiencies in some places, while also concentrating

and exacerbating the problems in others.

And you really do have people making arguments in

both directions. You know, people arguing that intensive

feedlot associated cattle production is better for the

climate and people arguing the exact opposite based on the data

available. And then of course, you have to take into account

the climate opportunity cost of devoting farmland and rangeland

to livestock production, which is something that I'm planning

on covering in depth in the next episode, by the way.

Hmmm well that's good. But I guess what I'm

saying is that we actually need to be taking the climate crisis

into account even just within this narrow discussion.

Okay.

Well, because we've heard arguments that

livestock can help fight climate change by preventing wildfires

and promoting soil carbon sequestration. But the reality

is that it's just hard to quantify those benefits or be

certain that they are lasting.

Right in carbon lingo you would say that it's

hard to guarantee their additionality and permanence.

But

But we can quantify the climate impacts of

cattle. And they are massive, we just have to reduce the

emissions associated with livestock agriculture in order

to mitigate climate disaster. And that's not going to happen

just through intensification or feeding cows seaweed. There just

need to be fewer cows, period. Yeah. And just because you see

some happy looking cows grazing in a nice oak woodland, doesn't

mean they aren't part of that problem.

We are on the same page. Also, Mendel speaking of

happy cows, we haven't even touched on the issue of animal

cruelty within industrial agriculture.

Right. Yeah, that's... that's a whole other

issue. And no doubt there's a seriously dark side to all meat

production

And feeding cows grass doesn't necessarily

sidestep it. All of the cattle that we're talking about whether

grass fed, or grain finished, are destined for the

slaughterhouse.

Yeah, that's an unavoidable reality.

And that's because cows aren't native to North

America, they are only here because we find them useful and

tasty. So as long as most humans remain omnivorous and like to

eat beef, I think that it is fair to assume that the best

life that a cow can hope to have in this part of the world, at

this point in time, is living in herds on public conservation

lands.

At least relative to the typical

alternative.

Yes.

Okay. Well, well, those are the big thorns

in the background of all of this. Maybe now we zoom back to

just the negative impacts that livestock can have on the land

itself.

Yes, let us get back to the incredibly complex

and controversial conversation I was intending to have with this

series.

Yes, please.

Frankly, the list of impacts that cattle have on

the landscape is long. There's soil compaction, erosion,

destruction of riparian areas, grazing on desirable species,

spreading weeds, and undesirable species, water quality issues

associated with manure runoff, and preventing other wildlife

from using the landscape, either due to their physical presence,

or the fencing or hunting that often accompanies their presence

on the landscape.

What do the rangeland people have to say

about it?

Well, among the rangelands folk that I spoke to,

there were some common refrains. For example, "no solution is a

silver bullet," right? Here's Stu again.

Everybody always wants there to be like, "Oh,

here's the perfect solution that has all positive impacts and no

negative impacts. And that applies everywhere." And it's

like, it just doesn't work that way.

And when I asked Lynn and Clayton from the last

episode, they did admit to some of these downsides. But they

framed them as mostly having occurred in the past.

Oh, it could have been previously damaged by

livestock. You know, at some point, there were too many in

the state as a whole. Because after the gold rush, everybody

left, leaving these herds of cattle that in brought in to

feed miners, you know, behind. So we had kind of an excessive

number.

During the 60s and 70s and 80s, there was

probably some grazing practices that went on that weren't

necessarily beneficial — Potential damage to riparian

corridors, to some aquatic habitat. There was probably some

overstocking. I prefer to use the term overstocking as opposed

to overgrazing because it's, you know, poor management practices

by the operator. He had too many cattle on the property.

As far as admissions of downsides go, I

have to say that those are pretty weak. I mean, can you

seriously say that cattle haven't still been overstocked

in some places or allowed to overgraze more than occasionally

since the 70s. I mean, let alone the gold rush.

I tend to agree with you. From my perspective,

both Lynn and Clayton are waving away ongoing issues that, you

know, are pretty apparent. But I suspect that it's because

they're sensitive to the fact that cows still have a bad

reputation in many environmental circles, you know, myself case

in point. Despite the benefits that, you know, folks like Lynn

have spent their careers demonstrating.

Yeah, no doubt, they're touchy about it.

It's understandable. The other thing

that all of the rangelands proponents I spoke to told me is

that almost all of the downsides I just listed, are result of bad

management. And that well managed cattle can provide

pretty much all the benefits that we've been discussing,

while also mitigating away most of the negative impacts. They

also emphasized that not all cattle grazing has a

conservation benefit. So whether the benefits outweigh the costs

depends on the management and the context. Here's Christal

again.

A lot of people really, you know, "cows

are bad." And it's like, well, it's not... it's not that

simple. So I mean, cows change vegetation. So how are they

changing it? Are they changing it in a way that's helpful for,

you know, what you want for the biodiversity there? Or are they

not? And that's really specific to the site?

And here's Lynn again.

Well, I think we need to realize that the

future ecology is one of increasing trade offs. I really

believe that. I've seen that all this time. Cattle or sheep or

goats, all of those things, they're not to blame, right for

anything that they do that really is damaging. They are

subject to the management of people. And one of the reasons

why managers value them is because you can graze them some

places and not graze them others, you can take them off

and they're causing trouble.

So one could manage, for example, to reduce

soil compaction.

So much of that, I think, is stocking rates and

seasonal use.

And you can reduce the pressure on riparian areas.

Well, with riparian zones... fence them off, and

allow occasional grazing. Because sometimes it's good to

muss up the ecosystem a little bit every once in a while, but

try to avoid having the cows just hanging out in the riparian

zones.

And, of course, Lynn told me, the key to all of

this is monitoring,

To monitor, and then adapt. If your monitoring

shows that grazing is doing bad stuff... I hate to say bad, I

don't mean bad. If grazing is doing what you don't want, or

protection is doing what you don't want, or fire is doing

what you don't want, change it or stop it. You know, that's

what we do.

Okay, to recap, cows are not inherently bad for

landscapes. But poor management will definitely create negative

impacts. Good management can mitigate those impacts,

especially if you monitor carefully and adjust in response

to any issues that arise.

That is the resounding argument that I heard

from the rangelands folks. And you know, from what I saw,

Tulare Hill is a good example of a place where cows might

actually be the best tool for the job.

So good management is... good.

Amazing, right?

Yeah, I smell a Pulitzer. But there's no denying

that there are places suffering the consequences of bad cattle

management. What about all of those areas?

Well, in the next episode, I'm going to tell you

exactly what I think about those areas. And beyond the areas

where management is clearly poor, of which there are many,

I'm also not willing to concede the argument that good

management can sufficiently mitigate away all the negative

impacts we've been discussing.

Adam, you've got me all mixed up here. On the one

hand, we've been talking about all the ways that thoughtful

land managers are learning how to use cows to help wildflowers

and birds and amphibians and butterflies, basically, entire

ecosystems. And then on the other hand, there's land

conversion, and over grazing and erosion, and the climate, and

industrial ag. Plus what sounds like it might be a whole heap of

other issues we're going to learn about next time.

Are you not feeling particularly at home on

the rangelands?

No! Not at all. I live in a basement apartment

in the city.

That's fair. And you know, I live on an island

covered in Douglas Fir trees. So here's what we'll do. Before we

continue, I want to share one piece of my conversation with

Ashley, that changed the way that I look at land that has

been obviously damaged by livestock, the bad management

areas. To be honest, she has seen a lot more of that kind of

land than either of us have.

So, I guess I look at public land a little

differently than when I lived in Seattle and wanted to come out

and mountain bike on the weekend. Now, if I ride through

a place where yeah, there's some cow patties around. I think,

Gosh, I'm sure this rancher is pretty glad that he or she can

have their cows out here. I wonder how many head they have.

I wonder what their profit margins are? I wonder where they

sell their beef. I wonder if they're selling directly to

their community, as opposed to riding through and saying, "God,

there's cow shit on my tires again, and look at how

overgrazed this is." Now I ask, "how thin are this guy's margins

that he has to have these cows out here for the maximum amount

of time that he can possibly have them on this piece of

public land, because once he takes them home, he has to buy

hay for them and feed them himself. And maybe he doesn't

have the money to do that." There are all these extenuating

factors and contexts that I understand a little better now

that make me a little bit more sympathetic to all of the

factors that that go into the decisions that cattle ranchers

make every day.

What Ashley reminded me of here is that most

ranchers do have the know how and the desire to keep their

lands healthy, so that their businesses can continue to

thrive. It's if nothing else, personal self interest. So if

you're keeping that in mind, you do start to ask different

questions about why some rangelands are so clearly

hurting.

When you see land getting trashed. That is a

symptom of something that is out of balance, a system that is out

of balance, not just the ecosystem, the human system.

That rancher is... is not doing well. And they're not dopes

right, like they know they need that grass to grow back. If you

let a cow eat it down to the nubs, that plant dies and then

you have a dust pasture. Like, they know that. So when people

depend on the land to make a living, they are not

incentivized to trash it. So if they're trashing it, there's

probably a pretty sad reason for it, I hate to say it, or a

concerning reason. And you know, that's a question for everyone.

I don't want to be callous in the face of

suffering, but you know... part of me wants to ask. "So what?"

You know, if they're going through problems, maybe personal

ones or economic ones? Does that make it okay for them to pass

along? All of that pain to the land? Does it make it okay for

them to be bad stewards of shared spaces?

No, it doesn't. I think that Ashley's point is

that when we see damage occurring on rangelands, the

causes are complex and systemic and also sometimes human. So

even as we're making our critiques, it's important to

resist jumping to conclusions.

But that's the hard thing is like, I don't deny

anything that you're saying or that people see when they go out

on public lands. It's just there's always more to the

story, right? There's always more there's always another

angle. I think that's how I live my life is like that feeling of

like, I'm missing something. What am I missing? What is the

other layer here? Like what are the other factors that are at

play here? How do I understand them? How do I help other people

understand them?

Well, Adam, I appreciate you bringing us a

compassionate way to think about these issues. And, you know, a

good place to wrap it up for today. But next episode, let's

take the gloves off, shall we?

Oh, we shall. We shall talk until the cows come

home. We shall not be cowed.

Until then. Remember, only you can keep

nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

Yes, and also...

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy

divey.

But cows...

Cows eat grass. And for that at least, they have

our thanks

This episode of Future Ecologies features the

voices of Ashley Ahern, Christal Niederer, Stuart Weiss, Lynn

Huntsinger, and Clayton Koopman, music by Saltwater Hank,

Thumbug, C. Diab, Meg Iredale, and Sunfish Moon Light, cover

art by Ale Silva, and was produced by Adam Huggins and me,

Mendel Skulski, with sound design help from our intern,

Brennen King.

You can find citations, a transcript of this episode, and

lots more on our website, futureecologies.net. This

podcast exists because of support from listeners just like

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appreciate it. Till next time, thanks for listening.