CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Overshoot: Implications for Western Public Lands Ranching

Cow on grazing allotment in Central Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

We now have the Administration giving 1.4 million acres of our National Forest in Alaska to facilitate the destruction of the Arctic environment for oil.  We have the Iran war and blockade.  Public land and National Forest protections are being eliminated with laws enabling fake wildfire projects to further expand clearcuts and eliminate old growth in our National Forests. Public input is being done away with, and now we propose a giveaway of our public lands to the livestock industry.

Then, I read that Golden Eagles are being targeted in Wyoming because they take out lambs.  Nothing is said about the destruction of hundreds of millions of acres of Western public land by livestock and the loss of native wildlife.  Our Wyoming wolf populations have been decimated by disease, yet the hunt will still go on while traps abound.  Our illogical elk feed grounds continue concentrating thousands of elk to benefit the guiding and outfitting businesses and ranchers.  This concentration leads to increasing mortality from hoof rot and chronic wasting disease, and environmental contamination with prions. Predators and carnivores are killed for recreation when they are nature’s way of countering the spread of disease.

This is the mere tip of the iceberg of bad news for our public lands and the West.  It got the population ecologist in me thinking about the bigger picture, the picture I have had in my head for decades.  That is our worship of growth and its consequences.  Growth in numbers and consumption accompanied by the total inadequacy of regulatory protection for our public lands.    I always felt we would sacrifice the last of our pristine environments for growth, while our captured agencies would continue the rape until it is all gone.   We have social media and Xbox, so who cares?   I care and here is where I see us going, and why, and soon.   Whether we transform our system is the question.

Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, describes societal failure due to environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and decreased support from friendly neighbors.  Societies succeed or fail depending on how leaders and institutions react.   In a study spanning 5,000 years of human civilization, Luke Kemp’s book, Goliath’s  Curse, describes how societies collapse when elites consolidate power and wealth, leading to weakened societies.  Kemp warns that modern society functions as one large, interconnected, global “Goliath” (capitalism), which makes it highly vulnerable to a “worst-ever” collapse, driven by climate change and extreme inequality.

In a lecture by archaeologist Eric Cline on the Bronze Age Collapse, he described the interconnected nature of societies of the time and their dependence on each other for essential goods and trade in general.  A combination of severe drought, crop failure and famine, coupled with invasions, earthquakes, and disease, led to the collapse of the system, death and destruction, and a 400-year Dark Age.   Societies failed to adapt by transforming........

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