Treasure Of La Sierra - management of Taylor Ranch near San Luis, Colorado

Reason, Oct, 1999 by Karl Hess, Tom Wolf

Under the new system, elk, cougars, bears, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep are no longer just pests that prey on cattle or eat the grass cows need. They are assets, earning landowners double or triple the dollar return on cattle. This has made wildlands, not subdivisions, the most attractive proposition in many parts of Colorado.

Indeed, Ranching for Wildlife has given ranchers incentives to reintroduce wild species to their lands. Before the program, there were no bighorn sheep in the Sangre de Cristos. Under the policy umbrella of Ranching for Wildlife, Forbes was able to reintroduce the bighorn, steward their health and numbers, and eventually receive the only authorized licenses for bighorn hunting in that area. (This meant that landowners who had not invested in the sheep's recovery could not ride free on Forbes' success.)

Since 1986, Ranching for Wildlife has spread throughout Colorado, in large part because both hunters and regulators realize its value in keeping wildlife habitat intact. It came to the Taylor Ranch in the early 1990s, bringing a financial boon for the Taylors, a conservation boost for wildlife, and a chance for local hunters to attain a world class hunt for the price of a dinner and a movie. Ranching for Wildlife not only improved environmental conditions on the Taylor Ranch, it helped stop poaching. Locals, whose poaching activities had, according to Colorado's Division of Wildlife, seriously reduced the elk herd in the 1980s, now had controlled but legal access to high-valued elk. For the first time, the ranch's wildlife was paying its own way, a key point for the estate tax - strapped Taylor family.

While Ranching for Wildlife was establishing itself on the Taylor Ranch, endangered species lawsuits virtually shut down logging on western public lands, driving timber prices from a low of $40 per thousand board-feet in 1990 to more than $200 in 1994. Overnight, the ranch tripled in value - a blessing that was tempered by tripled tax obligations and the ever-escalating litigation costs of Rael v. Taylor. Federal and state agencies made a series of buyout proposals, none of which took the change in the land's value into account and all of which were rejected by the Taylor family.

Faced with dead deals and mounting debt, Zack Taylor began in 1996 to cut timber he had sold a few years earlier at top market prices. Incensed by Taylor's brazen defiance of the community's claims to the timber of La Sierra, the Land Rights Council ratcheted up its legal assault. The more it sued, the more timber Taylor had to cut to pay his legal bills; the more he cut, the louder grew the screams that he was raping the land.

In an ill-fated move, the Land Rights Council sought support from the fringe of the Anglo environmentalist movement. Soon, members of the Boulder-based Ancient Forest Rescue were chaining themselves to the Taylor Ranch gates, claiming that "the clearcutting of pristine old-growth forests" was destroying a unique and valuable culture, damaging the Rio Culebra watershed, and threatening an endangered species. None of these claims turned out to be true, but anyone who challenged them was branded as anti-environment and racist to boot.