homes on the range: COOPERATIVE CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE ON CALIFORNIA'S PRIVATELY OWNED HARDWOOD RANGELANDS

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Alagona, Peter S

ABSTRACT

This essay describes the conservation history of California's hardwood rangelands: a vast region of oak woodland, grassland, and chaparral vegetation that occurs almost entirely on private property. Conservation has played as important a role in the history of California's privately owned hardwood rangelands as it has on the neighboring public lands administered by the U.S. Forest Service. The story of the hardwood rangelands, which includes a long history of cooperative conservation, challenges the conflict narrative of western rangeland history. It also demonstrates that neither local private control nor centralized public administration offers a panacea for range management.

IN FEBRUARY OF 2005, Monty Bell, a recently retired University of California Livestock Range Farm adviser, told me that he had spent the first half of his forty-year career "advising ranchers to get rid of the oaks on their properties, and the second half persuading the same people to save them."1 Monty Bell always considered himself a dedicated conservationist. Yet his professional opinion had changed diametrically over time regarding the value of native oaks on California's hardwood rangelands-a vast expanse of savanna and woodland vegetation that covers some 11 million acres of the state's coastal mountains and interior foothills. Before World War II, ranchers and range managers had seen oak trees on the hardwood rangelands as important natural shelters for roaming livestock. By the time Bell began his work, around 1960, a new generation had come to view oaks, with their shady canopies and thirsty taproots, as threats to rangeland forage productivity. Only later, in the 19803, did he begin to think of oaks as essential to the ecological functioning and long-term economic prosperity of the region. Over the years, Bell and his colleagues helped create and recreate the image of California's native oaks: first as the friends, then as the enemies, and finally as the subjects of conservation.

Monty Bell's experience typifies that of other range managers in the American West who have vilified, vindicated, and repeatedly refashioned their messages about a host of trees and shrubs, including cottonwoods, eucalyptuses, tamarisks, and oaks.2 But his story also contains a twist. Bell's work did not take place on public lands administered by the federal government, which have served as the subject of almost all historical writing on American range management and conservation in general. Instead, Monty Bell collaborated with individual ranchers to design and implement new conservation programs on privately owned rangelands.

Historians who have studied range management in the American West have focused almost exclusively on the role of the federal government for several important reasons. Three federal agencies-the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)oversee grazing operations on public lands throughout much of the American West. These agencies have generated a rich documentary record, including ample evidence of the debates that have surrounded their work. The Forest Service, in particular, has drawn the attention of scholars because it trained and employed the country's first generation of range managers in the early twentieth century. Approaches developed within the Forest Service during those formative years have profoundly shaped the field of range management, and they continue to do so to the present day.3

This preoccupation with the federal government, however, has had two unfortunate consequences. First, it has encouraged the idea that conservation happens only on public land, whereas ranching on private land constitutes little more than "cowboy capitalism."4 second, it has helped to perpetuate the popular image of a political and ideological divide between ranchers who favor local private control, and environmentalists who advocate centralized public administration of lands and natural resources in the American West. Authors who write about western rangelands usually portray these two groups as mutually exclusive, and most of the literature on the subject conveys a sense of inescapable conflict. Reports of collaborative efforts are depicted (over and over again) as exceptional cases of strange bedfellows crossing ideological lines. We rarely read histories of cooperation, or tales of ranchers as conservationists.5

This essay shifts attention to the conservation history of California's privately owned hardwood rangelands-and private property in general-in the American West. Conservation ideas and practices have played as important a role on the privately owned hardwood rangelands as they have on the neighboring public lands. The application of these ideas and practices has, however, followed a different historical trajectory. In the absence of top-down bureaucratic management, conservation efforts on the hardwood rangelands have required extensive cooperation and open communication, resulting in the establishment of close personal and professional relationships among diverse parties. The management approaches that emerged from this system often have included specific techniques, such as prescribed burning, that differed from, and even conflicted with, policies in place nearby on the federal lands.