Malpai Borderlands: The Searchers for Common Ground
The New National Gallery in Berlin is showing John Ford’s 1956 western, The Searchers, on a huge projection screen. Visible to street traffic day and night, the movie, shown at one frame every fifteen minutes, will take over five years to run from beginning to end. The Searchers is above all a quest film. It follows the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), an ex-Confederate soldier who returns three years after the war to the family ranch in Texas. Within days of his arrival, a Comanche massacre kills most of his relatives and turns the reunion into a funeral. His niece, nine-year-old “Little Debbie,” has been taken captive. For five years Ethan searches for her. When he finds her at last, she is a young woman (Natalie Wood!) and the wife of Ethan’s nemesis, the Comanche Chief Scar. The climax of the movie is about overcoming hatred and rediscovering humanity.
For those of you whose cinema history is rusty, or who have never been able to get past the film’s disturbing cultural politics, The Searchers is the apogee of the John Ford western, meaning that John Wayne and the landscape are equal stars of the show. Filmed in Colorado, Alberta, Canada, and Monument Valley, Arizona, the story derives much of its power from its setting.
As everyone knows, these Vista Vision settings are becoming rare and astronomically valuable. Ranchers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, are offered $100,000 an acre today for ranchland valued at $10,000 a decade ago. Once acquired, the Ted Turners and dot.com millionaires often put telephone and electricity wires underground to preserve the viewshed. This impulse also has a more populist streak, as millions stream into national parks to experience epic landscapes that seem unchanged by human hands.
The story I want to tell is of a handful of men and women—ranchers whose lives are played out against just such a place, and whose quest to remain there will require an odyssey as grueling as Ethan Edwards’s, but with a twist. Edwards became a symbol of individual frailty in the face of an isolating “wilderness.” But for the ranchers of the Malpai Borderlands, it is the wilderness that has become frail, and the survival of all they hold dear will depend not on rugged individualism, but on their newfound ability to forge and sustain literally thousands of relationships.
Ranchers concerned about the future of cattle ranching banded together in the early 1990s to form the Malpai Borderlands Group, a nonprofit organization. Through a series of front-porch meetings and serendipitous relationships, these ranchers have created one of the largest experiments in what scientists call “ecosystem management” in America today. The group’s mission statement reads: “Our goal is to restore and maintain the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant, and animal life in our Borderlands Region. Together we will accomplish this by working to encourage profitable ranching and other traditional livelihoods, which will sustain the open space nature of our land for generations to come.”
The group has begun to work mano a mano with a sea of cooperators, including state fish and game agencies, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, universities, and several nonprofits such as the Animas Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and Environmental Defense. Within a few years of its founding, the effort had received the endorsement from the highest scientific and environmental circles, including the Society for Conservation Biology’s Distinguished Achievement Award. Articles about the group appeared on the cover of Audubon magazine, The Nature Conservancy magazine, the New York Times science section, and Smithsonian magazine. Not bad for a place that got electricity just ten years ago.
After the Martians Landed
The group’s project area is shared by southwest New Mexico and southeast Arizona. It is roughly triangular in shape, the bottom bordering 60 miles of the international boundary with Mexico, the west ending at the borders of the Gray Ranch, the north peaking a little past Rodeo, New Mexico, and the east bounded by Highway 80 out of Douglas, Arizona. Tucson is only a two-hour drive away. One of the best ways to encounter the Malpai Borderlands is to drive through Douglas, perhaps stopping for a beer at the Saddle & Spur Bar in the Gadsden Hotel, and then heading east onto Geronimo Trail Road. Once you skip into the hills west of town, you are greeted with an Alaska-like encounter with vastness so complete that giddy euphoria seems the most appropriate response.
It is here, in this roughly one-million-acre Malpai Project Area, that the Sierra Madre ends its 1,200-mile journey that begins in southern Mexico. It collides with the southernmost point of the Rocky Mountain range, whose northernmost tip lies 1,400 miles to the north. The Malpai region includes flora and fauna from no fewer than seven biomes, including the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahan, and the Great Plains. One glance can take in ocotil-los, pine forests, and oak trees. A century ago there were healthy populations of Mexican wolves and grizzlies, with thick-billed parrots only a valley away. Today there are six federally endangered species and more than sixty considered threatened regionally. More species of rodents occur here than in several states combined, and there are more lizard species here than in any other location in the United States. In 1996, the Malpai Project Area was even visited by a Mexican jaguar. It is the kind of landscape that makes environmentalists swoon.
Which is exactly what The Nature Conservancy did in 1989 when the absentee owner of the Gray Ranch gave the Conservancy two weeks to buy the property, or watch it fall to the chopping block. The response from Conservancy supporters, from the pennies of schoolchildren to five-digit contributions, was incredible. The Conservancy was able to pay $18 million cash on the barrelhead, at the time the largest conservation purchase in history. The Gray Ranch was “saved.” The response from the environmental community was unmitigated jubilation.
But in local communities, the response was quite different. “You might as well have told us the Martians had landed,” neighboring rancher and charter Malpai founder Bill McDonald later said. For the Conservancy, “Plan A” was to sell the Gray Ranch at cost to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, for designation as a national wildlife refuge. After listening to local objections to this idea, then Secretary of Interior Manual Lujan made it clear that a “Plan B” was needed. Enter John Cook—a “bookish Easterner,” in the words of McDonald—who was sent by the Conservancy in 1992 to “fix” the Gray Ranch. Equal parts entrepreneur, rainmaker, poet, and fifteen-year Conservancy veteran, Cook entertained a few serious inquiries from private buyers, including Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. But in the end it was a call from a local rancher, albeit an extremely unusual local rancher, that determined the future of the Gray Ranch.
Drum Hadley is a rancher and poet who has lived in the Malpai Borderlands for thirty years. His children, including his son Seth, were born there. Among literary and conservation circles he is known as a kind of vaquero Gary Snyder. While the Conservancy was looking for a conservation buyer for the ranch, one of Hadley’s neighbors—acting as an emissary for local ranchers who knew the Hadleys had means beyond their ranching operations—asked if Hadley could buy the Gray Ranch. It seemed an impossible proposition, but then Seth Hadley proposed that they could use their inheritance to create a foundation (to be called The Animas Foundation) to “encourage the practice of land ethics to preserve, heal, restore and sustain wildlands and waters, their inhabitants and cultures.” The final decision fell to Drum Hadley’s mother. When Drum explained what he and Seth wanted to do, his mother replied, “Do you have a pen that writes?”
Kitchens That Changed My Life
Years later, John Cook would comment in his Working Notes: A Hybrid Approach to Conservation: “In the two years of work in structuring the sale of the Gray from TNC to the Animas Foundation, the Hadley Family and the TNC team worked hard enough and long enough together to establish common ground values together. This is another way of saying we built trust. That gave Drum Hadley the confidence to open the door and invite TNC through to meet the neighbors. On the other side of that door were individuals with whom he had twenty years of neighboring. They took him seriously when he suggested we might have something we could bring to their table.”
John Cook’s father had been an Episcopal priest at Harvard in the 1960s, and John himself has a gentle yet astute way of holding a group of people together. It was John’s ability to supply the know-how to put a nonprofit group together that helped transform the group’s front-porch discussions into strategy, capital, and action.
Trawling for a helping hand, John invited me out to tour the project when I was four months’ pregnant. This was in the summer of 1994, back when the Sagebrush Rebellion was red-hot, and my dealings with ranchers back at the communications department of the Conservancy’s national office was termed “Opposition Management.” Since the Conservancy had sold the Gray Ranch, and didn’t own an acre of land in that part of the world, I didn’t understand what we were doing there. I had worked for the Conservancy for fifteen years. Where was the future preserve? Where was the green oak leaf? John looked at me. “Your job,” he said, “is to shut up and sit in the corner.” Over the next three days, sitting in the corner turned out to be sitting in four kitchens that changed my life: the McDonalds’, the Magoffins’, the Glenns’, and the Millers’.
For ninety years the McDonalds have lived on Sycamore Canyon Ranch. Bill McDonald is a fifth-generation rancher whose father was an English professor. A large, handsome man of Mormon descent, he learned his ranching skills from his grandfather. Like many ranchers, he has an uncanny ability to express his thoughts plainly and sensibly, but then he will throw in a word like “psyche.” In 1998, he became the first rancher to receive a MacArthur genius award for his statesman-like ability in creating what he calls “the radical center.” At lunch, he and his wife, Mary, equally talented and a microbiologist by training who now oversees the group’s complicated finances, talked about why the community decided to form an official organization. Bill said, “We’d gotten awfully good at knowing what we were against, and decided it was time to figure out what we were for.”
In reaching out to its critics, the group discovered that one primary thing that everyone was “for,” was fire. To understand this, remember that this region is influenced by the Great Plains biome, where prairie fires are commonplace. In fact, the movie Oklahoma was filmed just two valleys to the west of the project area.
We’ve all heard it said that the West is a checkerboard of public and private ownership, providing the image of neat, interchangeable squares. The reality often looks much more like some kind of optical puzzle: a large square of Forest Service land here, a thin rectangle of state land there, a zipper of private riparian zone cutting back to Forest Service or BLM land at the higher elevations, the valleys mainly private. In the Malpai, the different squares add up roughly to 53 percent of the land in private ownership, 23 percent in Arizona and New Mexico state ownership, 17 percent owned by the Coronado National Forest, and 7 percent by the Bureau of Land Management. The gridlock produced by this ownership pattern had resulted in eighty years of fire suppression. This, combined with historic overgrazing and a documented climate shift, fed an invasion of woody shrubs into an area where wild hay operations had flourished at the turn of the century. It wasn’t until the Malpai Borderlands Group was able to get everyone in the same room together that a nearly 850,000-acre “fire map” for the region could be developed, so that wildfires can burn on private property with the landowners’ consent. Larry Allen of the Coronado National Forest estimates that the plan easily saves taxpayers more than $1 million per year.
Next, the Malpai Group and their new cooperators tackled what had previously been unthinkable: a prescribed burn, requiring the blessings of four private landowners, five government agencies in Arizona and New Mexico, international coordination with Mexico and adherence with the Wilderness Study Area, National Environmental Policy Act, National Antiquities Act regulations. Planning and execution of the “Maverick Burn” were accomplished in eight months.
Saving All the Parts
If the success of a collaborative approach to fire was the first head-turner of the Malpai Project, water as well as the power of the single ranching family was the second. This is a landscape where 8 inches of rain is a good year, where one million acres of mountains, some over 8,000 feet high, do not produce a single perennial creek. Down the road from the McDonalds live the Magoffins, a family of ranchers who have worked for years with biologists and herpetologists to preserve one of the world’s last populations of the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog, which occur in stock ponds on their land. In the early 1990s, when successive droughts threatened these ponds, the Magoffins hauled more than a thousand gallons a week to keep them from drying up. From the Magoffin kitchen, you can see a taxidermy mount of a snarling javelina head with a vintage hat perched saucily on its head. “Pig with PMS,” says Anna. But when I ask why they went to so much trouble for a frog, she replies, “The frogs had become our friends. We couldn’t watch them die.”
Working with the Malpai Group, the Magoffins secured funding from Arizona Game & Fish and Malpai supporters to drill a well for permanent water that would support both the frogs and the Magoffins’ cattle. I remember a particular “Malpai Moment” when I watched Matt Magoffin talking to herpetologist Phil Rosen about fencing the cows out of half of a pond to make sure that the cows didn’t affect the frogs. Matt then went on to describe watching the frogs disperse during a monsoon, hopping a quarter of a mile in thirty minutes. Phil said, “that’s the kind of thing I would never see because I don’t live here.”
Historian Patricia Limerick has written, “It is difficult for most people to realize that a particular moment in 1869 was once the cutting edge of the present—-the edge beyond which the future could only be glimpsed by guessing.” Rancher Warner Glenn seems to defy this. John Cook remembers talking with Warner one day “about what a time of upheaval the Sixties were, how tough it was on so many families, and Warner agreed. Later on, we realized that I was talking about the 1960s, and he was talking about the 1860s.” Warner’s partner, Wendy, has a sense of the past and future that equals his. One day while checking water at a pump, Wendy talked excitedly about the native grasslands restoration that she and Warner had begun with the Malpai Group’s help. She spoke about the high concentrations of hawks and grasshoppers she had been watching. Then she became uncharacteristically wistful for a moment, and seemed to be talking about more than just the restoration on the Malpai Ranch. “Sometimes I think about how much time I have left and it makes me sad. Not because I have to die, but because I won’t get to see everything that’s going to happen.”
It was at the Glenn’s Malpai Ranch that the Malpai Borderlands Group came into being, and the first office was housed in one of their bedrooms. Much of the dialogue that drives the group still takes place there. Their kitchen is a meeting ground of exquisite food, long conversations, small dogs, children, ranchers, hunters, environmentalists, public agency staff, and the occasional rattlesnake. Kitchens, porches, dogs—family ranches integrate life and business in a way that is foreign to most of us. This also helps explain ranchers’ distrust of “officialdom,” which seems far removed from their world. At the same time, this is one of the reasons why collaborative conservation is so effective, creating a forum for ranchers and outside mediators such as The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense, to help negotiate the labyrinth of environmental laws and agency “officialdom.” This is especially important in areas like the Malpai Borderlands, where much of the land is managed by the Coronado National Forest, which has more endangered species than any other national forest and, not surprisingly, is also one of the most heavily sued national forests in the United States.
Individual endangered species have the power of the law behind them; ecosystems don’t. The core grasslands restoration effort that helped catalyze the group was the reintroduction of fire, but the group quickly collided with the Endangered Species Act, which can unwittingly deter the conservation of species it has set out to save. Before my interaction with the Malpai, my faith in the Endangered Species Act was complete. Now I watch lawsuits launched by well-intentioned environmentalists that, if won, would jeopardize the populations of the very species they are trying to save. For example, many green groups list the Chiricahua leopard frog as a victim of cattle ranching. Yet most herpetologists recognize that isolated, bullfrog- and bass-free stock ponds are this leopard frogs’ best hope of survival. Michael Bean of Environmental Defense, a longtime expert on the Endangered Species Act, captures the tragic folly of these lawsuits: “If you measure your victories by the lawsuits you’ve won, you may be making the same mistake that the U.S. Army made using Vietcong body counts as proof that we were winning the Vietnam War.”
The reality is that the huge areas needed for “cores, corridors, and carnivores” require working with multiple landowners, especially stabilizing land tenure when good or promising managers are already there. Information and energy on behalf of a species can move in informal yet powerful ways. For example, in the case of the Chiricahua leopard frog, Anna Magoffin’s brother, Hans, happened to teach biology at Douglas High School. Hans enlisted the help of his students to rear young frogs and then build a frog pond for them on the school’s campus. Anna’s and her brother Hans’s hope was that the frogs could then be transplanted to other stock ponds, but regulatory concerns about the species have preempted the effort. Similar problems have plagued the Malpai Group’s work with fire. How will fire impact the ridge-nosed rattlesnake? The agave that the long-nosed bat depends upon? Is there suitable Mexican spotted owl habitat in the area? There seems to be an endless array of agencies and lawyers that need clear answers to these questions, and it doesn’t matter that these species have evolved in habitats that have burned for millennia.
Out of the Kitchen, but into the Frying Pan?
Many of my environmental brethren have berated me for “mission drift,” for being seduced by the cowboy myth as the result of my work with the Malpai. You can enumerate all the reasons that working with ranchers is a sound environmental strategy to achieve conservation goals (and vice versa for ranchers), but there is a sly bigotry at work that prevents many people from believing that it’s possible. One colleague asked, “You can kick the dirt with the ranchers, but what do you have when it’s over?” For the growing number of environmentalists who believe the answer is “more than we could ever get on our own,” the results from the Malpai to date are impressive ammunition.
The Conservancy began by buying a 324,000-acre property to protect a “nature preserve.” But instead of entering into a hybrid relationship, and throwing our might into creating a “working wilderness,” five years later we now see one million acres in cooperative conservation ownership, including several additional ranches in Mexico. Conservation easements are now held on 30,000 acres of private land affecting 60,000 acres of adjoining and intermingled public lands. The Animas Foundation has reintroduced black-tailed prairie dogs on the Gray Ranch, twenty-four bighorn sheep have been released on Bill Miller Jr.’s ranch, and there are two hundred permanent monitoring sites established to gain information on how to promote general ecosystem health. The group’s Jaguar Fund is helping to support research and inventory of jaguar habitat in northern Mexico and in its own project area. In fact, using science as a “community-building tool” has proven so effective that researchers supported by the National Science Foundation and the African Wildlife Foundation are studying Malpai lessons for possible export to Kenya.
Seeing the conservation power that motivated private-sector ranchers can ante up helps me understand why Bill McDonald looked so puzzled the first time he saw a scorecard sheet from the New Mexico Heritage program, detailing species on “protected” versus “unprotected” land. He asked, “Why is everything on private land listed as ‘unprotected’?”
Science is usually thought of as the purview of the cap-and-gown or Teva sandals crowd. But the Malpai Ranch hat rack tells a different story: White Stetsons coexist with baseball hats advertising obscure scientific groups, such as the American Society of Mammalogists. The heads that these hats belong to have stepped into what John Cook has called “‘the hybrid’: a partnership of unexpected and surprising stakeholders determined to move a common agenda ahead no matter what it takes.”
And as the Malpai ranchers and supporters are finding out, it takes a lot. Even the most creative and useful ideas—such as Drum Hadley’s grassbank concept, in which grass on one ranch can be exchanged for conservation action of equal value on another ranch—take a lot of time, legal help, and capital. The process of protecting their “traditional lifestyles” has done much, ironically, to almost wreck them. The Malpai Group has had to adapt to an almost urban, incessant “busy-ness”—phones, faxes, emails, direct appeals, newsletters, meetings, memos, visitors—that their ancestors certainly never envisioned. And their enemies on both sides have become more voluble and vitriolic as their successes mount.
Yet despite these trials, the group continues its search. In fact, members often point to the group’s formation as giving them a new opportunity to engage in old-fashioned “neighboring.” It is their belief that the strength of this same neighboring, which secured a school bus route and electricity, will somehow see them through to their dream of staying on the land. For those of us at ringside, so cognizant of the market forces transforming so many other places in the West, their story often seems much more of a cliffhanger. But the ranchers of the Malpai Borderlands Group seem to have no doubt that they will succeed. They are, as Ethan Edwards might say, “as sure as the turning of the Earth.”