At the End of the Day, We’re Still Married
Hard conversations and high stakes with the collaborative group Results-Oriented Grazing for Ecological Resilience in Nevada
By Megan McGrath – Intermountain West Joint Venture
“One million acres” is a fairly meaningless statement.
So when I tell you that the plot of land I’m standing on managed by one ranching operation takes up one million acres of private land and public grazing allotments, I forgive you for struggling to comprehend what that means.
It was impossible for me to grasp, too, until I drove across a ranch in Nevada that encompasses over a million acres of land.
Here are some things that “one million acres” means:
- A huge swathe of excellent wildlife habitat—sagebrush lowlands, desert basins, juniper-covered mountainsides and hilltops hosting a diversity of native plants, birds, and game animals—overseen, stewarded, and protected by a few people who are trying their very best.
- As far as the eye can see, and then some.
- Most of the entire northeastern corner of the state of Nevada.
- Start driving at one property line and you won’t see the far line for a big chunk of your day.
Few know what an acre is, and nobody, really, can wrap their mind around what a million is either.
We are a few hours into the fall field tour of Results-Oriented Grazing for Ecological Resilience—ROGER: A rancher-led group dedicated to bringing rangeland management professionals from different backgrounds together to work out some of the thorniest problems in Nevada rangeland stewardship, one debate at a time.
As the scope of the ranch slowly unfolds itself before our truck wheels and our feet, from one gnarly problem in this vast and beautiful landscape to another, I feel a desperate question building in my head.
How does one person, one family, one team of people even think about managing this much land and keeping it all healthy?
The particular person tasked with the management of this particular land is Joe Glascock, head manager of the Winecup-Gamble Ranches in northeastern Nevada.
The main principle of rangeland management on a ranch is simple on paper: Keep the ecosystems and habitats within the property as healthy and high-functioning as possible, both for the good of the cattle that we produce here and for the wildlife we share it with. Because if this business fails, this land and the habitat it hosts will most likely be sold and converted to something else. It’s a responsibility not only to a business’s bottom line, but also to families, heritage, tradition, and a whole lot of living things that make their homes here.
“Ranching keeps open spaces intact,”
Kathryn Dyer, the Nevada Range Program Lead for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), explains between stops on the ROGER field tour.
“Ranching keeps habitat in a way that developments don’t—and working ranches also keep water on the landscape. We have super limited water in Nevada, and despite the fact that otherwise it might all be allocated to more urban use, a ranch that is operating on this landscape needs the water to stay here to keep the vegetation productive. The thing is, ultimately, that’s a healthy landscape then!”
Liz Munn, the director of The Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Public Lands Strategy in Nevada, concurs.
“Ranchers are the people that know this landscape the best. They are the eyes and mirrors of this place. They have a love for these landscapes, and knowledge about them that is hard to replace. In my work it’s been important to lean on that knowledge, and I would love for us all to lean on their stewardship capabilities more.”
In practice, keeping rangelands healthy and resilient is not a simple task at all. And given that a lot of entities including governmental agencies, universities, and local communities are as deeply invested in the land as ranch managers, it can lead to a whole lot of conflict.
But one thing the participants in ROGER can agree on is that getting together to see things from each other’s point of view is a huge first step towards finding solutions that are good for the land and everyone who cares about it. On this field tour alone there are representatives from several Nevada ranches, but also state- and national-level government agencies, universities, NGOs, environmental consultants, and many more.
We drive together to see first-hand the latest environmental stewardship projects and challenges facing the ranch:
A lush green stream corridor, an indispensable water resource for livestock and wildlife, that has become so overgrown it now poses a fire risk for the entire surrounding landscape.
A recently burned series of hillsides in urgent need of reseeding with perennial and native vegetation before invasive grass species swarm in and displace the entire habitat.
A low sage basin that stretches as far as the eye can see, that partners must consider how to manage for resilient vegetation before the site transitions to a different state via a trigger such as fire, drought, or invasive annual grass expansion.
At every stop, we gather in a circle and the group begins a shared dialogue.
Participants offer explanations for complex situations, and tentatively offer possible joint solutions.
The university representatives offer vegetation maps generated using the newly updated Grazing Management Tool via USGS.
The various ranch managers nod their heads in knowing sympathy for the difficulty of the problem and offer their lifetimes of gathered experience.
And the government agency representatives offer perhaps the most valuable information of all: Clarity on what rules and regulations must be followed—why, and how—and what, if any, assistance they are able to provide.
Katlyn Mendive is the coordinator for the ROGER group, with facilitation support from Laura Van Riper with Laura Van Riper Consulting. The sponsorship of Mendive’s position—which is shared by the BLM, the Intermountain West Joint Venture, and the consulting firm Resource Concepts, Inc.—reflects the importance of her position, and of ROGER itself, to this wide array of partners. And a lot of Mendive’s time is dedicated towards the logistics of these very meetings—getting a bunch of people out on the land to see and talk over problems.
“It’s an opportunity for whichever ROGER rancher is hosting the field tour to say, ‘I’m noticing this—I don’t know if you guys are noticing this too, but what can we do here?’” Mendive says.
“And then there’s enough people that are at the table that can say, ‘Well, we’ve done X, Y, and Z here before, or we can try this, or we actually just got this grant, let’s bring this in.’ All sorts of unexpected solutions come up. It’s a really good space for everybody’s voices to be heard and to realize, like, oh, we do have similar goals, we’re maybe not as different as we thought we were.”
This time on the ground seeing problems in person is incredibly valuable to the government agency representatives present, who spend their careers working with landowners and ranch managers dealing with these problems first hand.
“I can’t count the number of times in my career we’ve had the combination of drowning in data, but also not really knowing what we need to know about a specific project,” remarks Jeff Moore, a Rangeland Management Specialist with the BLM’s Wells, NV, field office. “We often work in silos because of how agencies are legally defined, and a lot of the data I need as a range specialist is different from what others need. But we’re all looking at the same land through our individual viewpoints, and the data we need is going to depend on that viewpoint. ROGER acknowledges and helps with this immensely.”
Birds of the Winecup-Gamble. Mountain bluebird; pinyon jays; horned lark.
At the end of the day everyone is exhausted and covered in dust, but just a little bit closer towards realizing a collective goal: Keeping the land we stand on functioning properly for everyone in northeastern Nevada. After many hours of looking his BLM colleagues in the eye and asking a whole lot of blunt questions, Joe Glascock has to laugh.
“We’re married, all of us!” he exclaims, eliciting immediate looks of consternation from forty people.
He explains, “It’s not me against you; it’s us against the problem. We’ll have some uncomfortable conversations, but that’s the nature of fixing hard problems. I look forward to all of these uncomfortable conversations, because they’re where we check whether we’re right about things. We’re here to have those conversations, to fight through it, and hey, I’ll kiss you in the hall later—at the end of the day, we’re still married!”
The gathered rangeland experts all grin and shake their heads in unison. Maybe not spouses, then—but neighbors for sure. And with every ROGER meeting a little closer to fighting better, and learning how to get along.
To learn more about the Intermountain West Joint Venture’s work to increase conservation capacity through support of positions like Katlyn’s, and to support vital conservation partnerships across the West, visit www.IWJV.org.
