Will Great Basin GrazinG survive climate chanGe? by Dennis Myers
J
oe Guild is a member of one of Nevada’s older families. He manages a small ranch for another of the state’s pioneer families in Douglas County. Though he has a Reno law practice, ranching seems to be his preference. When he returned from military service and Vietnam in February 1971, he spent some time working on a Carson Valley ranch. Carson Valley is in Douglas County south of Carson City. The valley also contains Minden and Gardnerville. Guild is now 68 and back in Douglas County to ranch. And he’s worried about climate change. He’s not sure what it means for ranching. In the past, even droughts could be dealt with and waited out. But now there’s no certainty that this dry period will end. “This period of time is exactly what occurred in the 1930s,” Guild said. “I remember talking to an old rancher in Carson Valley when I was down there in the 1970s. So the worry is the uncertainty. Is this 1930s redux, is this the mid-1970s with two years considered a drought, is this 1880s redux or … are we in the beginning of a mega-drought? So it’s the uncertainty.” The ranch he now runs has a Forest Service grazing permit that allows its small herd of 170 to graze in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, all the way to the Pacific Crest Trail at one point, from June 16 to September 16 each year. Then the herd is brought back to a meadow maintained by the ranch. (Grazing takes place on both rangeland, composed mostly of native grasses and plants, and pastureland, composed of introduced or cultivated plants.) Surprisingly, the ranch has been able to keep its herd at normal size during these dry years. But that won’t last much longer. “Now, if we go into another winter like we’ve had … these past two winters, I’m going to have to recommend to the owners that they liquidate some of their cows,” Guild said. Someone once said that the West begins where the average rainfall drops below 20 inches a year, meaning that the region is already defined by its dryness. And it is in the West that so many cattle are grazed on public land—in an era of climate change. What happens when climate change hits the Western ground cover on which cattle feed?
THe
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Terrain
Grazing. It’s a word identified with the West, part of the script of innumerable movie Westerns, a target for reformers who say the federal government undercharges on public lands, a target for environmentalists who claim the practice despoils the land. Grazing was the putative issue in the fight Cliven Bundy picked with the feds. Grazing is a cultural and political as much as an agricultural issue. And as we will see, there is division among experts on the impact and consequences of grazing. The danger to grazing could be very real. A term like “could” is not very satisfying, but science doesn’t deal in the certainty that its critics do. And grazing in Nevada could be a different matter than grazing elsewhere in the West. That’s because Nevada is in the Great Basin. The geography is different from other states, and
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“The cows come home” continued on page 14
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