camp: Escalante, Utah
context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an
ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we
met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an
environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s
grazed. Today, we went out on an actual grazing allotment to count cows and see
what the land looked like.
I
think today, I get it. I’ve seen Suzanne cry and Mary rant about riparian
habitat and grazing. I’ve seen cows and incised channels. But today, wandering
across a few miles of moonscape covered in hoof marks and cowpies, I saw a bit
of what they see. The fence, built perhaps to keep cows away from part of the
stream and the juniper bushes, was in decent shape, but the cows had access to
the stream on both sides because they’d managed to erode a path down into the
gully. The water was muddy and trampled to death.
I’m
still having trouble being angry about it. Maybe because it’s hard to pinpoint
a source. I don’t fault the individual rancher trying to make a living, though
I have no sympathy for absentee billionaires or giant corporations who run
cattle. Cows are far too docile and placid to be the objects of anger. And the
political and bureaucratic clusterfuck seems difficult to pin on any particular
person, law or agency. It’s a beast of its own, independent of individual human
desires, although a product of them.
But
I know it needs to change. I’m not as strident as Mary, though I feel the truth
in her statement that some jobs or lifestyles cannot be justified because the
cost to the earth is too high. I know absolutely that a rancher should be able
to graze fewer cattle than an allotment allows for and should be able to sell
it for conservations purposes if both parties are willing. But beyond that,
it’s so hard to untangle. I worry about imperialism and outsourcing of negative
consequences. If we eliminate the 2-3% of beef grazed on public lands here (and
2-3% of American beef is still a ton of cows), demand won’t follow the drop in
supply. So we’ll import from Argentina or Brazil and eat cows with a huge
carbon footprint grazed on pasture that used to be Amazonian rainforest before
it was clearcut. We’ll have our land back and some smug satisfaction or feeling
of grand victory, but I worry we’ll just be outsourcing the problem. So what,
ethically, should I be eating? If I add a no-public-grazing clause to my
vegetarian meat-eating ethics, I might as well just go back to no meat at all.
I want to be healthy, which means no more tofu if I can help it, and I’m not
the kind of girl who can live off of lentils. I love dairy, but that’s a
curtain I’ve barely started to pull back, and I know I won’t like what I find.
Someday, I want a house in Seattle with a backyard big enough for chickens and
a goat. But until then, I still think I’m doing better eating cheese, raw milk
and Thundering Hooves beef.
No comments:
Post a Comment