The introduction of cattle to western North America has undeniably contributed to massive ecosystem change. But could cows be as much a part of the solutions as they are the problem?

In this 3-part series, we're hearing from all sides of this issue: 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.

Part 1 kicks things off with a look at the special case of California, and a challenge to the conventional environmentalist perspective that cattle are always a destructive force for biodiversity and ecosystem health.

— — —

Find credits, citations, a transcript and more at futureecologies.net/listen/fe-5-7-home-on-the-rangelands-part-1

This ad-free podcast is supported by listeners just like you! Join our Patreon to get early episode releases, bonus content, merch, discord server access, and more. Head to futureecologies.net/join to meet everyone who makes this podcast possible.

You are listening to Season Five of

Future Ecologies

Test test, one, two. Test test, one, two. Yeah,

that should be good. Batteries look like they're good. All

right, yeah, I think I'm ready.

Hey, everyone. So it probably won't surprise you.

But Mendel and I are voracious podcast listeners.

It's true. It turns out if you listen to

enough podcasts, you automatically become a

podcaster.

And we must have met that threshold something

like five years ago or so. And last year, I listened to a

series that challenged the way that I thought about a fairly

significant portion of the land on Earth.

How... how much of the land on Earth is fairly

significant?

Well, depending on the source between 50 and 70%.

What could that be? The suburbs?

No, not not suburbs, even though they do

sometimes feel like they go on forever.

You're gonna keep me guessing. Okay, well,

what was the series called?

The series is called Women's Work. And it was

produced by one of my favorite podcasters, Ashley Ahearn

So my name is Ashley Ahern, and I make

podcasts about the urban-rural divide and natural resources and

climate change and science and the environment

The series emerges out of a pretty big life change

that she made a little while back.

I guess, as a journalist, you're always

looking for the story behind the story, or you have that sense

when you're not getting the whole story. And I reported for

NPR in Seattle for seven years as their environment reporter

for the leading member station there KUOW. And I loved the job,

it was wonderful place to cover the environment, so much awesome

science and ecology to learn about.

The problem, she told me, is that public radio

can be a bit of an echo chamber.

And it was really hard to get outside of that

bubble, of sort of liberal-environmental groupthink

about what's right for the environment, and how to manage

our natural resources. From frankly, the urban jungle of

Seattle where, you know, if you wear REI, it's like you're a

card carrying member of the the Green Revolution, you know,

which I was part of, right? Like, that's what I was doing. I

was doing God's work covering the coal export terminals they

were trying to build and, you know, trying to get the word out

about this or that problem that was happening and how things

were changing and what was broken.

But that sense that she wasn't getting the

whole story, it just kept creeping up.

Yeah that sense that I was missing something —

that these questions about how we manage our natural resources,

how we live in harmony with the landscape, many of them can't be

answered from the city. So my husband and I decided, five

years ago now, to move to a little piece of sagebrush and

live in a very, very small cabin, and just cut back and

simplify and get closer to the land and closer to the

environment.

Naturally, being new to town, she needed to find

a way to connect with the community. And so she did what

you do when you move out to sagebrush country, apparently.

Which is?

She posted on a listserv.

I basically posted on the equivalent of

like, our 1997, Facebook, like Reddit type thing out here where

people share like "there's some loose goats on East County Road"

or "I have an old horse does anybody new pasture mate", you

know, blah, blah, blah. And so I posted and I just said, you

know, I rode horses as a kid, I've been away from it for a

long time, I just want to be around them again. I'll shovel

horse poop. I will like feed, whatever you need, I just want

to be near them.

What a pitch. Who could resist?

For sure. Before long, Ashley gets a response

from a local rancher.

And turns out she had nine horses, and there was

this one little mare, Pistol. And she and I hit it off. She's

kind of a pain in the ass. She's only partially trained. And she

kind of does what she wants to do when she wants to do it. And

this woman has become a very good friend. And about a month

after I got there, she said, "I think... I think you should have

Pistol. I've been sitting with this and I just think you should

have her". And and that started the journey.

Because it turned out that Pistol, in some ways,

helped her access the parts of the story that she felt that she

had been missing before.

That horse carried me into this community.

I can't really explain it any other way. And just the ability

to show up and ride for hours and not complain and work and

listen and ask sometimes really stupid questions, but to be

doing it from horseback... it's like that bridge into their

world that made it safe and made it different from me showing up

with my microphone to do a story to bring back to my listeners in

Seattle.

Her first series out in the country was about

Sage Grouse. And once she'd plucked that chicken, she moved

on to cows. And it's the series on cows that really captured my

attention.

Cows are the glue of so many rural communities.

They are the reason that certain types of knowledge persists. All

of these kinds have hands on, call it blue collar, call it

what you will, skills and strengths, to say nothing of the

way that the community comes together to help each other when

there's a branding that needs to happen or a roundup that needs

to happen or calving season is underway.

Okay. You say it's about cows, but the series

is called Women's Work?

And that's because while most of us grew up

learning all about the cowboys, Ashley's time with rancher is

really impressed upon her how women are so often at the center

of the work, to maintain and to create positive change in this

very old way of life.

This is ranch life, this is cowboy shit. Like,

you just get up and you work. And you work until the sun goes

down. And being able to be a fly on the wall with my microphone

to see that life in action was a really important part of this

series. And that kind of showed me the level of work and the

amount of heart that goes into the work for the women that are

doing this. This is really kind of an homage to them, I would

say

The series has all of these great stories of women

across the West, pushing the envelope in their literal field.

And these atraditional gender roles really

flipped your worldview, huh?

No, that part was fine. Mendel. What really got

under my skin was an environmental reporter, doing

all of these positive stories about cows.

What's wrong with cows? What did cows ever do

to you?

I don't like cows. I don't like them

professionally. I don't like them personally. I think they

are gigantic, methane-emitting non-native herbivores. And

they've played a pretty significant role in transforming

most of the landscapes that I hold, dear. So I generally see

them as a scourge upon the land.

A scourge! So I take it you... you don't like

ice cream?

Of course, I like ice cream.

Or cheese?

I like cheese.

Burgers?

They're okay, I guess.

Alright, I'm just giving you a hard time.

Right like, it's environmentalist orthodoxy at

this point that the cows are at least a problem, right? Like

there are too many of them. They're causing deforestation,

they burp greenhouse gas, we should all collectively eat less

beef, and so on.

Yeah, and all of those things, by the way, are

basically true. So we're not even going to get into them

here. They're established fact. What really got to me was the

stories that Ashley was telling about cows being portrayed as

beneficial to the environment, and even providing benefits for

Conservation and Biodiversity.

If you're coming at this conversation from a

place of cows are bad, we need to get rid of them — that's kind

of a non starter for me. Because frankly, that's lazy thinking.

To me, it's about how do we think more critically about

cows? What role do they have? Because the truth is, many

people in this country still eat beef. So how do we make it our

beef that's raised better, more sustainably and not involving

chopping down rainforests in South America to bring us beef

from another country that doesn't employ Americans or keep

our way of life alive in rural America.

And then, Ashley neatly summarized the entire

reason that you and I make this show.

I think there is this perhaps outdated thinking

among many environmentalists that, you know, we just need to

box it up and keep it safe, right? We just need to protect

it from the cows and from the people. And the older I get, the

more I've come to peace with... we changed it, whether it's the

climate that we're changing through our emissions, or the on

the ground decisions we're making with frankly, poor cow

management, which I am the first to acknowledge, because I've

seen it firsthand. We can't deny that we have changed the

ecosystems in which we live. And so to me, stepping back and just

saying we can't make them better, or we shouldn't be

involved anymore, is not okay. It's almost a shirking of

responsibility. And so that's where when I look at the cow

question, it's not as simple as just saying cows are bad, they

weren't ever here, we need to remove them and protect this

whole ecosystem from cows. What I would prefer to think about

is, how can we manage cows in such a way that is not

detrimental to the ecosystem and perhaps, in fact, mimics the

original grazers, bison, deer, other animals that were coming

through and grazing intermittently, and not

extensively in the same places, ruining riparian areas, all of

these kinds of known offenses that cattle commit, you know,

how do we think about them as tools and a means to improve the

health of a landscape or at least be part of a changed

landscape going forward?

So, in this three-part series, we're going

to have a wide ranging and sometimes contentious

conversation about the 50 to 70% of terrestrial Earth that is

referred to by some as Rangelands. And to do that,

we're going to return to the part of the world that I know

best. From Future Ecologies, this is Home on the Rangelands,

part one, Welcome to Cowlifornia.

Moooo.

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.

All right, here we go.

Okay, so we're headed back to California,

again.

Yep.

But before we get started, since we do have an

international audience, how representative is California

really for the issues that we're going to be discussing?

That is a really good question. And it is one of

the questions I've been trying to answer for myself with this

series. So as always, with Future Ecologies, there are some

important ways that this conversation should feel very

relevant for other parts of the world. But there's also

something different happening in California.

Well, then, let's carry on.

Alright. So in my experience of growing up in

California, every afternoon, like clockwork, two items

emerged from the pantry — a bottle of wine, and some cheese.

Of course, these are civilized people.

And as a kid, I didn't like either of those

things. I would eat the crackers, no wine, no cheese for

me. But as I grew older, and a bit more discerning, when I

looked around the Bay Area, I noticed that anywhere that

hadn't been turned into suburban sprawl, it's either vineyards in

the valleys, or ranches up on the ridges.

It's almost like you have this direct sense that

you're consuming the landscape each and every afternoon.

Yeah, wine and cheese. And focusing in on the

cheese, or on the ranches, according to the California

cattlemen Association, there are over 660,000 cows in California

That's a lot of cows!

Ranchers manage over a third of the landmass of

the state.

So we're not just talking about like, your

neighborhood, your neck of the woods, this is everywhere in the

state,

Everywhere. California, and of course,

everywhere else west of the Rockies. Really anywhere where

trees or pavement or farms aren't the predominant land

cover.

Right. And that's rangelands? What does

that term actually mean?

Honestly, I have some issues with this term,

which we will get into later. But for now, I will give it to

you straight from one of the foremost experts on the subject.

My name is Lynn Huntsinger. I'm a professor of

Rangeland Ecology and Management at the University of California,

Berkeley, and I find that most people don't know what rangeland

is. So I'll say it's pretty much all the vegetated areas that are

not commercial forest, and that includes grasslands and

woodlands and shrublands.

That's a pretty expansive definition.

It is. Rangelands folks — That's what I'm going to

be calling them. The range lands people, the rangelands folks —

they consider their field to encompass grasslands, prairies,

savannas, woodlands, shrublands, tundra, and sometimes even

deserts.

... even deserts.

The World Wildlife Federation has mapped 14 global

biomes, and rangelands encompass seven of them. So, only half,

Mendel.

And so that's why they are 50 to 70% of the

Earth's surface.

Yeah. The Rangelands Atlas, just published

a few years ago, pins it at 55%. But I've seen estimates as low

as 30 and as high as 80%, depending on whether you include

desert or tundra, and also on whether you include the

approximately 15% of land that was forested in the recent past

and has since been cleared for agriculture or livestock use.

So wait, it's a... is it an ecological

category? Like, is it still rangeland, even when there

aren't cattle grazing on it?

Well, a lot of people think that it's a land

use, but it really isn't not. For us, it's really vegetation

types. So we have foresters managing the forest and we

handle the rest. The most common use of rangeland is for

livestock grazing and for wildlife. So there are land uses

mixed in there, but range people work on anything to do with the

ecosystem and the ecology of the plant communities on it. Or in

it.

Okay, so everything that isn't forest.

More or less, yeah. And talking to Lynn, I got

the distinct sense that rangelands folks may sometimes

feel that rangelands just don't get the attention that they

deserve. Especially in relation to their more popular cousins —

forests.

People have an unnatural love for trees. I like

them too, but a tree belongs where a tree belongs. It's not

necessarily good. You know, in some places,

That's pretty hot take, for this show.

Us tree people might consider rangelands people

to have an unnatural love for grass. But Lynn is unabashedly

all about grass. Or rather, she is all about the rumen

The what?

The rumen. You know, the specialized stomach of

ruminants grazing animals, like cows.

Grass is very hard to digest. That's why

people haven't started eating it yet, despite wanting to eat

everything else. Grass is full of glass particles and it's full

of fiber. And so it takes a ruminant to really digest it and

you know, that is a gift to humankind, the rumen. Despite

the fact that it emits methane, it has supported humans for

millions of years.

Okay, so rangelands management is applied

ecology with a healthy dose of rumen.

Yes. And if you ask ranchers, they'll tell you

I mean, there's so many different facets

the same.

to these rangelands — to the habitat, to the management.

Whether it's the cattle, whether it's the wildlife, whether it's

the fisheries, whether it's the people and the recreation. It's

really unique that everything can coexist all at the same

time. And we've done you know, a lot of work to make that happen.

Hey, who's this?

Mendel, meet Clayton.

My name is Clayton Koopmann. I live in the

East Bay Area in California. I'm a fifth generation rancher. My

family's been here since the late 1800s, and running cattle

up down the central coast here.

And I'm going to stop right here and say that

pretty much everything that we talked about in this series is

hotly contested. In five seasons of doing Future Ecologies with

you, I do not think we have covered a single topic that has

been more polarized. Like I cannot tell you how many times

I've been confronted with expert perspectives and with research

that appears to completely contradict other perspectives

and research. It's been very hard to find common ground. And

claims of pro or anti cow bias are pretty constantly being

thrown around.

Well, maybe you've already blown it. You've

already copped to your anti cow bias. How are we going to

proceed with this controversy?

Yeah, so I'm actually going to lean into

this.

Okay?

Mendel, I pledge right now that for the rest of

this episode, I will say nothing bad about cows.

I kind of don't believe you.

Well, I'm gonna try real hard, anyway. And

listeners, do not worry. We are going to get to the other side

of the conversation. But today, it's 100% cowabunga.

Okay, well, I guess I'll do what I do and just

ask questions then.

Great. Okay, I'm going to begin by actually

immediately breaking my pledge. But only because one thing

virtually everybody does agree about is that A) cows are not

native to North America.

Sure

And B) bringing them to California has, in

conjunction with other land use changes, resulted in

extraordinary and potentially irreparable damage to

California's native ecosystems. So long story short, pre

colonial California was by all accounts, a land of tremendous

ecological diversity, abundant wildlife and significant

populations of Indigenous peoples.

Not unlike everywhere else in North

America.

Sure. The difference here is that there's

probably nowhere else in North America where so many of the

lowland ecosystems have been so thoroughly transformed. The

mountainous regions of California are international

conservation success stories, but the combined legacies of

state-sponsored genocide against Indigenous people, damming and

water diversion for agriculture, urbanization, and ranching have

rendered large portions of the state almost unrecognizable from

a historical standpoint. So much so that we actually don't really

know what some of our rangelands ecosystems even looked like.

Like, at all?

Not in any detail. We know we had these enormous

prairies and woodlands and wetlands, all around the foot

hills and valleys that were some combination of native perennial

bunch grasses and wildflowers, with herds of antelope and elk

wolves and grizzly bears.

Grizzly bears.

Yeah, there is one on our state flag,

Right, but they're not in your state.

No, they are gone, and so are the ecosystems I just

described. Only scattered remnants are left.

Replaced by what?

Well in some places, towns or cities, or

farms. But throughout much of the state. These perennial

bunchgrass lands have been replaced by a small suite of

highly aggressive annual grasses from the Mediterranean — oats,

bromes, rye, and bentgrass.

California's grasslands have been basically

taken over by grasses, most of which emerged in the Fertile

Crescent, and they're much larger in stature. They're

heavily competitive with our little native species, they grow

faster, and the seed persists in the soil for many years. Even if

you clear them, they are going to be back one way or another.

And cows are to blame.

I mean, not solely. But certainly they

played and may still play a pretty major role. These

introduced grasses evolved with livestock in Eurasia, and are

adapted to that kind of disturbance, whereas the native

perennial bunchgrass communities just aren't. So the famous

golden hills of California... scientific consensus is that is

a consequence of annual grass invasion and dominance of those

ecosystems. And it represents a pretty major historical

departure from what were probably much greener and longer

lived biomes. We're going to talk more about these past

ecosystems in a future episode, but I think this is the

background that you need right now. Because all of the

rangelands people told me essentially the same thing —

Those ecosystems, they are gone, probably forever. So we have to

move forward with what's left. I heard this from Clayton.

I think it's a different ecosystem now. And I

think you're gonna have to manage it that way. The annual

grasses we have like the rye grass or the wild oats, they're

very competitive. And they tend to just really take over and

shade out the bunch grasses. So I think you'd have a hard time

converting back to a purely perennial bunchgrass landscape.

And Lynn told me the same thing. That in essence,

California's grasslands are now, in large part, novel ecosystems.

Yes, we do have to manage for what's there. And

not imagine that we're going to convert most of these grasslands

back unless some new technology is developed or something

amazing happens. The annual grasses are there and they don't

go away.

I'm getting the feeling this is going to be a

pretty information-heavy episode. Maybe I should try to

summarize the arguments coming from these rangelands, people?

By all means.

So argument number one, these are novel

ecosystems. You can't restore them. You just have to manage

them. I'd guess not everyone feels that way. Adam, do you

agree with that assessment?

Well, Mendel, I am with the cow people today,

remember? But honestly, my personal experience has been

that these novel grassland ecosystems are really stubborn.

And trying to imagine restoring them at any kind of scale is

challenging. Plus, restore them to what, right?

Right. Okay then, so, game over.

No, actually, the rangelands, people say we might

have lost those ecosystems and some of those species forever.

But there's still tons of biodiversity in California's

rangelands and we can manage for it... using cows!

So the problem becomes the solution.

Exactly. And this is kind of a recent development,

because for the longest time in California as elsewhere, the

consensus view was that cattle were bad for wildlife and native

biodiversity. And then slowly, a new school of thought has

emerged. And that view has started to change.

You know, during the 90s and early 2000s,

there was a ton of research done that showed the benefits of

cattle grazing — the ecological benefits. And as that

information was released, and the scholarly articles were

released, I think you started to see a transition in the thought

process of land managers and the public. And as we continue to

graze, you know, and demonstrate these positive benefits, you

tend to see more and more people become believers.

Lynn was one of the researchers driving this

paradigm shift. And she told me that it's sometimes pretty

challenging to overcome people's ingrained assumptions about

livestock.

Livestock is guilty until proven innocent, in

every way, right. So somebody has to have done the research to

prove that wildlife benefited from grazing before they're ever

going to put it in their documents, right?

Specifically, any documents associated with listed

species under the US Endangered Species Act. This includes the

original listing documents, as well as recovery strategies and

periodic reviews. These resources often portray cattle

as a threat to endangered species. But when Lynn and her

colleagues Sheila Barry did an analysis of over 280 endangered

species in California, they found that...

About half of them have been proven to benefit

from livestock grazing in some circumstances.

How so?

Well, I'd say there are two primary ways that

cattle benefit endangered species in California. First,

all of those introduced grasses? Cows eat them.

Right.

Yeah, cows are like vacuum cleaners for grass.

And if you don't remove those annual grasses, then they take

up all of the available sunlight, all the water and

nutrients. And eventually, when they dry out, their dead bodies

pile up at the end of the season, and create this thick

thatch layer that just covers the ground.

So by grazing, that also provides a benefit for

a number of wildlife species. California red legged frog,

California tiger salamander, kitfox, burrowing owl.

Particularly like the kitfox and the burrowing owl, they prefer

really short grass. It allows them an opportunity to see prey

and to hunt. It also allows them to see predators coming and

avoid them.

Not to mention all of the native wildflowers, which

just can't compete with these introduce grasses. But can at

least persist if something removes the thatch periodically.

The cattle really don't like flowers. It's

not just that they remove that thatch, it's also that they

don't particularly like forbs.

Uh... forbs are?

Herbaceous plants, like wildflowers. They are less

preferred by cows. Clayton even says that cattle can be used to

give native bunch grasses an edge against these introduced

species. Which is really interesting because

historically, of course, cows ate native bunch grasses into

oblivion.

If you go out in these landscapes, and you

look, there's isolated pockets and larger areas where you'll

see a high concentration of perennial bunch grasses, native

bunch grasses, particularly like purple needle grass. But I think

what we can do with grazing is manage the bunch grasses that we

have, the native grasses that we have, to get them to germinate

and to reproduce and spread.

And helping native grasses means helping insects,

ground nesting birds, wildflowers, and even

amphibians. You name it, if it lives in grasslands in

California, it probably doesn't want to be choked out by

introduced grasses.

Right, who would? And cows preferentially

eat the grass. So that seems fair enough. But there's another

way that they'r supposed to benefit wildlife?

Yes. And this is a bit more indirect. But

essentially, in California, as in many other places, we've

destroyed most of the lowland wetland habitat, and we've

basically extirpated beavers.

Right.

So the Central Valley, which is the

agricultural engine of the Western United States, used to

be an extraordinary complex of wetland and grassland

ecosystems. It's been likened to a North American Serengeti.

And now, mostly farms and cities.

And rangelands! So across the state, amphibians

have lost most of their best habitat. But they have adapted

themselves, somehow, to live in water features that have been

created in upland ecosystems... to support cattle.

Research has shown that the salamanders need

the stockpond water. If a rancher or a park person gets

rid of the introduced fish and bullfrogs, they become excellent

habitat for these migratory salamanders.

California tiger salamander, you know,

their legs are only an inch tall, so they've got a lot of

country to cover, you know, to get to their breeding habitat.

They used to call it estivation sites. And those salamanders,

they'll stay underground most of the year. And throughout the

drought, they may stay underground for two or three

years and not breed. But when they do, when we get these heavy

rains, and they want to come out and get to the pond to breed,

you know, it's pretty tough if you had one inch tall legs to

get through grass that's three feet tall. So by grazing the

grasses down short, you know, around the stock ponds, it

allows them an opportunity to travel a little bit easier, and

get to those locations.

So that turns out to be a plus. Who knew,

right?

Huh. So stock ponds have basically become

substitute wetlands?

Yes. Okay, argument number one, these are novel ecosystems. And

then argument number two, cows can manage these novel

ecosystems to make them better for the native wildlife that

remains.

Yeah, I would say it's actually more like cows are

the essential tool for managing these ecosystems to benefit

native wildlife.

If you look around the state of California,

the vast majority of special status, wildlife species are

found on privately owned grazed range lands. And I think that's

just a testament to the benefits of grazing and to the management

practices of cattle producers and ranchers in the state. And I

think throughout the Western United States, that that

habitats there, that it's been there for several 100 years, and

it's there because of their practices and the way they

graze.

Uh... what are your thoughts on that?

Well, I have read a lot of literature now. And

there's a strong and growing body of evidence to support this

point of view, especially in California. There are of course

critiques, and we will get to those later. But I'd say that

this is now the dominant view in the state of California among

land managers.

So what's next?

Well, next, of course, is fire. After the

break.

Okay, it is Adam.

And Mendel.

And this is Future Ecologies. Actually, this is part one of

our series on rangelands. And today, cows can do no wrong.

They manage California's novel grasslands for native

biodiversity. And they also manage fuels in a state that

occasionally catches fire.

Generally, if you look at properties that

aren't grazed, you'll have a dense buildup of thatch and

grassy vegetation that produces an extremely high fire risk. And

when you're in an area such as the Bay Area here, these

wildland interfaces are right up against neighborhoods. We've

seen what happens. I mean, there's just devastating

wildfire potential.

And, as we've discussed on this show many

times before, climate change is exacerbating that potential.

How do we take care of these lands with climate

change? That's a really important consideration today

for both foresters, and range managers. They understand, many

of them, the value of removing that grass and finding ways to

suppress it. Grazing is one of our most valuable tools for that

The annual introduce grasses that we've

been talking about are the fine fuels that carry a spark from a

power line, or an absent minded human, or a gender reveal party,

and then generate massive wildfires in woody vegetation

that would otherwise be more fire resistant.

I think the best thing we can do landscape

wide is to continue to graze these fine fuels and grasses and

keep them short. And that allows our firefighters an opportunity

to suppress these fires before they can get out of hand.

But what about prescribed burns?

Interestingly, both Lynn and Clayton are real

proponents of prescribed fire. But it's just really hard to do

in much of California for all sorts of reasons.

Prescribed burning does too. But it's

hard... harder to do, and grazing is you can do it right

up to a house. They're not going to eat your house.

Unless of course you are one of three little

piggies, and you went and built your house out of straw.

That would be an unfortunate choice in

California. But I mean, even in a grass house like would you

rather have a cow or a prescribed burn for a neighbor?

I see your point.

So Lynn and Clayton are saying that grazing

can manage the fuel problem wherever prescribed burning

simply isn't possible, for whatever reason.

Yeah, we have mechanical things we have

prescribed burning. Both of these are useful, both of them

should be used. But we're really missing the boat if we don't

also use grazing, where it's appropriate — where it works.

I'm a proponent of controlled burns,

and I would like to see more of them on the landscape.

Combination of controlled burns and grazing, I think you'd see

even even greater benefits than we see now.

I'm actually kind of surprised to hear that

they're in favor of prescribed burning. Wouldn't fire

effectively be like a competitor to cows in terms of consuming

grass?

You would think so. But on the contrary, Lynn

says that traditionally, ranchers and herders have always

used fire to help clear land and keep it clear for livestock. Oh,

and by preventing wildfires, Lynn says cattle can more than

offset the emissions that we generally associate with them.

Fires are incredibly damaging. Do you know

that I think in 2020, if I remember this correctly, 400

million metric tons of carbon were released from California,

which was considered a huge achievement. It was a reduction.

But what they don't report is 100 million metric tons that

came from those wildfires in 2020. They don't report them.

California's 2020 wildfires actually released

close to 127 million metric tons of CO2. And by some estimates,

that is double all of California's emission reductions

since the year 2003.

They don't report wildfire emissions

because they're part of a natural cycle where the plants

grow back. And when they grow back, they absorb the methane

and carbon that's released by these fires, right? Well,

consumption by livestock on rangelands is part of a natural

cycle. And it grows back in one year, instead of 100. Right. The

grass grows back in sequesters carbon in one year. That's the

goal.

That's an interesting argument. I mean,

we've talked before about how governments don't tend to factor

in wildfire emissions into their own carbon budget, which leads

to kind of funky calculations about the effect of prescribed

burning. But in the end, you're talking about hypothetical

prevented emissions versus actual realized emissions. It

just seems really hard to prove.

Yeah, the counterfactual is challenging to

quantify in this case. But I think the key point here is that

something needs to manage all of those fine fuels preventatively.

And more often than not, livestock are the most practical

tool.

Okay, so then, argument number three is

livestock... or else!

Yes, or else wildfire. Moving on, argument

number four, we will spend a little less time on but suffice

it to say that ranchers and rangeland managers see

themselves as holding the line against more destructive forms

of development and land use.

We've destroyed a lot of our native ecosystems

for development and farming, which really, farming converts a

complex ecosystem to a very simple one, right? That's

growing non native plants, that often requires water, that's

completely lost most of its natural characteristics. So

whereas ranching ecosystems are semi natural. And as semi

natural ecosystems, they're pretty compatible with wildlife.

So that's why I like ranching.

Right... I'm familiar with this line of

thought. Environmentalists might prefer tofu to beef. But putting

aside climate change, a well-managed rangeland is

ecologically a lot more healthy and biodiverse than a soybean

monoculture

Or a housing development.

Right. So like you said, argument number four,

ranchers hold the line against more destructive development,

which I can imagine is challenging in California.

Yeah, I think any rancher in California will tell

you that development pressure can be pretty intense. And, you

know, sometimes they can't hold out. But it's not just farms and

housing developments and solar installations that want to move

into these range lands. It's also... shrubs.

Shrubs! Shrubs?

Yeah. When grasslands in the Bay Area are

left without grazing or fire, woody shrubs, and eventually

trees tend to move in. And if that happens, you lose all of

the open habitat for endangered species. And you also create

more fuel and more risk of burning down the grasslands in

the woodlands.

And the suburbs.

Those too. As far as I can tell, this is what

keeps Lynn up at night.

I can't tell you how urgent it is that we do

something if we want to conserve our oak woodlands and our

grasslands. We're losing them all over the world. But between

those two kinds of forces, either intensive agriculture or

abandonment and neglect, you've got a real fire problem

building.

What Lynn is alluding to here is something

that anyone who has ever built a campfire before will understand

intuitively. Woody things don't burn as easily as grasses do.

But once they do get going, they are a much more potent fuel. So

shrubs and trees moving into grasslands can actually be a

serious cause for concern.

I'm not so worried about our private

landowners. They've been doing things, many of them have been

doing things for a long time. I'm worried about their economic

fate, a little worried about land tenure and the future of

ranching, given the costs of real estate in California. But

in terms of their stewardship, I think it's pretty good. And

they're interested, many of them are interested in doing really

great stuff.

Instead, she's worried about the public lands

where grazing is not always happening. And there is a lot of

public land in California. Some of it quite remote, but much of

it pressed right up against cities. And of course, in recent

years, a lot of it has burned.

So what's happening in places like those?

Well, to answer that question, let's talk a

little bit more about Clayton and his operation.

Yeah, so my family originally homesteaded in

the Dublin area in 1870s. And they moved down to Sunol, the

little town where we live now. In 1918, they bought the ranch

here. So we've been on this ranch for just over 100 years. I

grew up here born and raised here and there's a little school

down in the town of Sunol, there. And my grandfather went

there, my dad went there and I went there. And I've got two

little boys, they're four and two. And they're going to start

going there.

I happen to be pretty familiar with that area.

It's a little rural outposts with a lot of rapid urbanization

all around it.

Yeah, we're kind of getting boxed in here.

The home ranch where we live is bordered by highway 680 on the

western boundary, and by highway 84 on the southern boundary.

There's housing development, there's a golf

course.

And in the early 1960s, highway 680

actually split the ranch.

Clayton didn't realize that he wanted to

continue the family business until university. And by then he

was running some of his own cattle.

Just out of college, I went to work for

MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District, and they own about

60,000 acres between Santa Clara and San Mateo County,

They manage tons of land on the San Francisco

peninsula.

You know, they started buying land in the 60s

and 70s.

Back in the day, the general consensus was the

cows are bad.

And they kept grazing off all the properties

they acquired, and tore out all the infrastructure. And you

know, fast forward 20, 30 years and you start looking at the

science and the benefits that well-managed cattle grazing

provide to the habitat and to the landscape.

After a couple of decades of seeing what happened

to the land that they removed cows from, they decided that

maybe they want to bring those cows back.

So they hired me as a rangeland manager. And

over the course of about seven or eight years, we were able to

develop grazing management plans and reintroduce cattle grazing

to about 12,000 acres.

So Clayton works on public lands. And he's

actually bringing grazing back to places where it had been

previously removed.

Yeah and he says that once you compare grazed to

ungrazed grasslands in the Bay Area, that's when you really

start to see the positive impacts from grazing.

You know, I've seen that firsthand. One good

example is we're on a piece of property that was privately

owned, it was grazed, the grasses were on the shorter

side. And on the other side of the fence, there was an area

that was owned by an agency and I won't name them. You know,

there's about three feet of dead standing grass and just dense

thatch there. You looked on the side of the fence we were on

that was grazed, and there's red tail hawks, there was golden

eagles, there's raptors, there's a bunch of wildlife. And you

look on the other side of the fence, and there was none of

that.

And so after helping to return grazing to

public lands all over the peninsula, he now works back

across the bay, where he started.

So that's save me the commute. I work for the

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and I manage their

Alameda watershed. So there's about 40,000 acres of land here.

There's two drinking water reservoirs, Calaveras reservoir

and San Antonio reservoir. Of those 40,000 acresm I oversee or

manage the cattle grazing on about 32,000 acres. Those

properties are leased out. We have about 12 Different grazing

tenents. So I oversee and manage the grazing program there. We

primarily use the grazing to reduce fine fuels for wildfire

protection and to enhance habitat for a number of special

status wildlife species in the watershed.

That... that's a lot of land and a lot of values

to be managing for. So ranchers are already grazing on lots of

public land in California.

In California and throughout the West. I mean,

it's super common, but it's definitely not happening

everywhere yet. And some folks are only just coming around to

it. So Clayton has a bit of advice for any land managers who

are looking to work with livestock operators.

The biggest thing for me is that your

grazing operator needs to have similar objectives and ideals in

mind when it comes to managing the land. They need to

understand what the goals and objectives are, and it needs to

be a partnership.

And a partnership means reciprocal understanding,

You need to work together you need to

understand, you know, the agency or the landowner needs to

realize that you're running a business and it needs to be

economically viable. But on the other hand, you need to realize

that the cattle are there to provide an ecological benefit to

the landscape.

Clayton told me that it's pretty important to

set up the terms of the lease so that they incentivize the kind

of behaviors and management approaches that you would want

to see on the land. But once the land manager's interests are

aligned with the rancher's interests, there can be

significant benefits. Because argument number five — that all

the rangelands folks make — is that ranchers are keen and

knowledgeable observers of landscapes. And that as business

people, and people-people, they have incentives to manage those

landscapes sustainably. I heard this from Ashley, actually, in

that very first conversation. She was telling me about a

rancher that she interviewed for her series.

You know, we're riding along and he's literally

from horseback, noticing how many bites have been taken out

of each bunch grass plant that we're writing by. And that

wasn't something I'd associated with a cowboy, right? Like,

that's something I associate with a scientist. And I was so

impressed with how attuned he was to the health of his

landscape and how his cows were affecting the health of that

landscape. It wasn't a denial, it wasn't making lofty claims

that his cows are good for the ecosystem. It was "wow, I

probably need to move the herd out of this area, because

there's one too many bites taken out of this bunchgrass". And I

think that for me was the moment where I kind of started to see

ranchers differently. And then sure enough, I come home in my

own community, and I'm riding with an old cowboy, and he's

doing the exact same thing. And he's noticing the exact same

thing, whether it's like erosion in a riparian area, he's like,

"gosh, we really got to get away from this creek, or they're

gonna muddy it up, and then we're not even gonna have water

here anymore".

And with Clayton, I mean, it's clear that he's a

really astute observer and manager of landscapes. His own

ranch has won awards for its management of conservation

values. And he's a sought after manager for public lands. But he

was also really clear about his personal values,

You know, I've got two little boys. And my goal

is when I'm grazing a piece of property, I want to enhance that

ecological value, I want to improve the infrastructure, I

want to leave that property in much better condition than when

I got there. And I want that for for my kids for the next

generation. And for the generation after that, I want

them to have that experience. I want them to see the wildlife.

You know, we're not doing this to get rich, it's a lifestyle.

It's because we love being outdoors. We love the cattle, we

love the horses, and we love the wildlife. You know, you're

horseback and you're riding out in the dark in the morning and

watch the sun come up, and see a coyote or see a mountain lion,

or take your kids out and watch a golden eagle or bald eagle fly

out of the tree. It's just something that most people in

this world don't get to experience, and it's something I

like to share and and I don't take for granted.

So, just to summarize, range lands are

anything that isn't paved, or forested, or wet.

Yes, according to the rangelands people. I will

say some wetlands people consider to be rangelands, but

let's just go right past that.

And rangelands proponents will argue that they

are, in California at least, novel ecosystems that can't

otherwise be restored, but can be managed for native

biodiversity using cows. Those cows can also be used to control

fuels and prevent wildfires. And that ranching as a practice

defends those ecosystems against other harmful forms of

development, and promotes a kind of long term stewardship by

people who really know and care for the land.

You nailed it. Oh, and one more thing. Probably the

most obvious thing actually. Rangelands generate useful

products that most of us enjoy. Sometimes daily, sometimes with

a bit of wine.

How do you optimally produce goods for

human consumption like meat products, leather, mushrooms,

charcoal, wildlife, and now endangered species? How do you

do that sustainably for a couple of 1000 years?

The question Lynn is asking is one that ranchers

like Clayton have a ready answer for.

There's farmland that's easily

accessible with equipment, and people farm that. But there's

all these landscapes that you can't farm, and what we're doing

by grazing, aside from the ecological benefits, we provide

a protein source for the general public consumption on land

that's of no value for food production otherwise. So I think

there's a win win there.

Well, Adam, I am impressed. You kept your word.

You really managed to go the whole episode without saying

anything negative about cows. Other than... other than all

that stuff at the top.

Yeah. Speaking personally, I will say that, you

know, working on these episodes, talking to these folks, and

reading a mountain of literature on the subject, it's really

complicated the issue for me. I think Lynn is doing some really

important science, and I really respect the work that Clayton is

doing out on the land. I still might not like cows, but I'm

starting to appreciate their value.

You are capable of growth.

Hurray!

Would you say that all of these conversations

have... cattle-ized a shift in your thinking?

Yes, and no. Because I have to say that there

are lots of folks who have a serious beef with this approach

to managing public lands.

People say "oh, it's a changed California

annual grassland. Now it's permanent. You know, all you can

do is use cattle to graze it". I think that's wrong.

And we're going to dig into all of that in this

series. But not before we answer the one question you've probably

been asking yourself this entire episode. You know, "Hey, Adam,

what about the butterflies?"

Wait, what?

That's next time, on Part Two of Home on the

Rangelands.

This episode of Future Ecologies features the

voices of Ashley Ahearn, Dr. Lynn Huntsinger, and Clayton

Koopman, music by Thumbug, Aerialists, Saltwater Hank, C.

Diab, and Sunfish Moon Light, Cover art by Ale Silva, and was

produced by Adam Huggins, and me, Mendel Skulski.

Special thanks to Tristan Brenner, Dr. James Bartolom,

Camilo Andrés Garzón Castaño, Brennen King, and Robert Alder.

And thanks most of all to all of our patrons, without whom this

show would not be possible. To keep it going, and get access to

bonus episodes, early releases, our discord server, and more,

head to futureecologies.net/join

Until next time, adios.