Last week I found myself setting out on foot across the Valle Grande, the largest caldera in the new Valles Caldera National Preserve. Located in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, the Valle Grande is an open, bowl-shaped mountain grassland, some twelve miles in circumference. As I stood on the road above the valley floor, looking out toward the area I had already designated as a potential monitoring site, I saw in the distance a pair of coyotes zig-zagging through the grass — now stopping, now in a trot, sometimes near to each other, sometimes moving apart, seemingly hunting — and I thought to myself, “OK, they have it right, that is just where I need to be.” So I followed the coyotes into the valley, until I came to what I hope will be the perfect location, representing just the right eco-variation in the landscape. This will be one of approximately 35 permanent rangeland monitoring sites across the Valles Caldera. As I finished confirming the soil type and mapping the site on my GPS unit, something made me look up — there I was sitting shoulder-deep in Arizona fescue, mountain muhly, and the yellowing, inscrutable sedges, alone, in the middle of this wide valley, the road barely visible — my coyotes had gone and the sky was enormous. I lay back in the grass and laughed, how in the world did I get here?
Perhaps I have been following coyotes far longer than I have realized — the route has been circuitous, to say the least, and it’s a story about monitoring, though it starts in a law office. In the spring of 1989, fresh out of law school, I had just begun my practice as an attorney. Thinking that water law meant walking ditches, and that environmental law meant that I could be out on the ground learning about erosion and wild animals and open spaces, I set up shop in Santa Fe, intending to advocate for the environment. One of the first calls to my new office was from my uncle who had recently bought a ranch in Arizona. As it happened, the property was about an hour’s drive north of Wickenberg — 70,000 acres of mixed State/BLM land along the Santa Maria — pristine, desert river country. In addition, half the BLM portion of the allotment was in a Wilderness Study Area. The grazing preference was for 240 CYLs (Cows Year-Long).
As soon as the transfer to my uncle went through, it was appealed by the Environmental Law Clinic at Arizona State University. The challenge was based on the argument that 240 CYLs would indeed have a significant impact on the environment, and that under NEPA, an environmental impact statement was required prior to authorization of the grazing rights. This was not exactly what I had in mind when I had decided to practice environmental law, but my uncle was desperate, and it was my first real case.
So I made my way to Phoenix to meet with the BLM and to see the ranch. When I sat down with the supervisor, my first question was “What evidence do you have? How do you know what the impact of 240 CYLs will be?” Immediately, though I did not know it at the time, we were talking about monitoring.
What I found was that, overall, they had very little hard data to support their decision. On the BLM land, there was a series of less than ten photo points which had not been re-taken for at least ten years. There was rumor of a Parker Three-Step monitoring site, but no one was quite sure where it was, or when it had last been collected. The State lands had a series of species richness quadrats, but they also had not been collected in recent years. Finally, they had utilization analyses, but these had not been collected for the three years previous, as the ranch had not been grazed during the sale period.
The monitoring in place on the Santa Maria ranch was not comprehensive in any way — either in terms of landscape coverage, or in terms of the kinds of data collected. In addition, the data they did have was mostly qualitative rather than quantitative; it was based on informal rancher and range-con assessment, knowledge of historic practices, and agency experience with other similarly situated ranches.
Nor was monitoring coordinated between state and federal lands, or with ranching activities, or with any of the various environmental groups. There was no over-arching monitoring policy. There was no coordinated design for the monitoring program. There were no goals. There was no one person who was in charge of monitoring. As a result, monitoring was not on anyone’s schedule — ten years might pass with no one noticing that no monitoring had been completed.
At first, as a good young attorney, I was thrilled. There were two reasons: One, there was no negative evidence against us — no proof from this particular piece of ground that grazing was harmful. And two, all the evidence they had was utterly assailable. We could challenge anything. It was subjective and there was hardly any of it. What this meant was that we could go out and find our own experts to prove whatever it was we wanted to prove. And we did that. For example, we were able to find a desert tortoise expert, who was able to say, in his years of experience and research that, in fact, grazing was the best thing since toast for desert tortoise habitat.
What we learned quickly was that the lack of evidence cuts both ways. Of course, our worthy adversaries found their own desert tortoise expert, who said just the opposite — that, in fact, cattle grazing is really quite harmful to the desert tortoise. We were in a war of conjecture: we were making-up what we thought must be happening on the ground to support what we hoped to achieve — that is, a viable cattle ranch. Yet, we had no idea what was actually happening in this particular place. As a result, we found all the evidence we could about ranches that were similar to our ranch that said, “Grazing is great. Grazing works, it improves the habitat, it’s good for this piece of ground.” Our opponents did just the opposite. They went out and found all the ranches they could, all the research they could find, that said, “Grazing is the worst thing that you could possibly do here.” So they stacked up their papers. We stacked up our papers, and we hoped that in the end our stack would be bigger than theirs.
Realizing that it was going to take a long time for the BLM to sort this out, we thought in the interim that we should try to negotiate a solution. We had one of the most creative, energetic ranchers around. He was willing to try anything: herding, rotation grazing, riparian fencing. He just wanted to get out on the ground and start working. Unfortunately, however, the Environmental Law Clinic would not even come to the table so long as grazing was part of the equation. While we believed that good management could both mitigate and perhaps even eliminate environmental damage, they believed that cattle grazing, per se, was environmentally unsound. Our differences as to the root of the problem were so fundamental, that we couldn’t even begin to discuss solutions.
In the end, the whole process strongly polarized both sides. The briefs became more and more acrimonious. The parties refused to meet with each other. After about a year, the BLM split the baby, authorizing 120 CYLs. All of us were angry, the environmentalists because they believed grazing in any form would be harmful to the fragile ecosystem, and my uncle because 120 CYLs was not financially feasible. Everyone appealed. After another year, we transferred the case to local Arizona counsel, and my uncle got a stay so that he could ranch pending the final outcome. The case is still in litigation, now eleven years later.
So what does this have to do with monitoring? For me at least, my uncle’s ranch was another coyote. I followed for awhile then found myself in a strange new country, my coyote having dissolved over some far ridge. Eventually, I ended up with a degree in biology and a job monitoring grasslands for the Conservation Fund, and now for the Valles Caldera National Preserve. What I keep thinking is that, if we had had the kind of quantified data that I’m collecting now, in my new career, the dialogue between my uncle, the Environmental Law Clinic, and the BLM would have been completely different. We would have circumvented the conjecture and blame game. Right from the start we would have had real data to talk about. We would have been able to say, “OK, look, in this riparian area we know we’re going to lose willow and cottonwood and we’re going to have more erosion. It’s not going to work. You can’t graze here.” Or we might have been able to say, “If you look at these uplands, we can see that when we graze we get better grass, actually, and there’s more diversity.”
Monitoring data would have given us a language, a shared, concrete set of findings to come together around and from which to begin a discussion. Rather than basing our conclusions on some guessed-at reality, our interpretations would have been based on actual measurements taken from that particular piece of ground. We would have been one whole step further down the road arguing about interpretations of data, rather than whether or not data even exists.
This is not to say that monitoring is just about litigation avoidance — it is useful for that — but there’s more to it. Monitoring is the only way to know whether or not management decisions and land treatments have actually worked. It also provides a mechanism for testing new ideas and it provides protection against bad decisions. It allows a land manager to say, “We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen here. But we’re confident in our monitoring system so we can try it. We’re going to put cows out, and we’re going to watch what happens. If we see that there’s too much erosion going on, we can change what we’re doing. We can stop. We can change our management.” Monitoring gives the manager a way to see what’s going on, a way to spot trends, often before changes can be detected through more casual observation. It’s a mechanism for making better informed decisions and for managing before the crisis.
So what exactly does it mean to “monitor” something? I think of it as a “systematized watching” of the landscape. The two key components of any monitoring system are that it needs to be regular, and it needs to be recorded: the same measures or observations, using the same protocols, are taken from the same locations at the same times of year, and those measurements or observations are written down so that they can be remembered and compared.
There are a wide variety of monitoring methods and techniques ranging from the highly quantitative to the highly qualitative. In recent years, efforts to systematize monitoring have focused on developing better quantitative methods. Data that is reduced to a set of precise numerical values or measurements is much easier to repeat, and to compare over time and between sample sets. It is also, therefore, much easier to use to pin-point differences, trends, and changes. Qualitative data is generally less expensive and less elaborate, but also less predictive and more subject to claims of bias.
Monitoring takes a long-term commitment. It takes patience. Results do not happen overnight. It also requires a variety of skills, from botany to soil science to ornithology, or to whatever it is being monitored. It also requires data management skills. Where will the data go? How will it be analyzed? How will it be reported? Who will it be reported to? These are complicated issues that need to be addressed as part of the monitoring process — it is not just about collecting data.
Depending on the situation, monitoring can be quite time and labor intensive. The type of monitoring selected should be based on management and monitoring goals, as well as desired statistical resolution, desired repeatability, and financial and time constraints. In the long run, however, monitoring should be considered as an investment in the landscape. The costs of monitoring should be compared directly with the costs of not monitoring. For example, if the money spent on eleven years of litigation by all the parties in my uncle’s case had been funneled instead into a monitoring program, we would have had the most highly monitored ranch in all the West. We would have been able to say now a great deal about the true impacts of grazing in that country.
There would have been another benefit as well. In the time actually spent making enemies, we would have been working together on the ground to set monitoring goals and to collect and to report on our data. We would have been building a new community around the health of the land.
Personally, I believe that monitoring is here to stay. In my opinion, it needs to be as much a part of land management as the treatments are. There should be a monitoring department in each forest and BLM district. Monitoring should be afforded the same status as burning, or grazing, or cutting timber. The fact is that we cannot assess the success or failure of the burning and grazing and timber cutting of the past, because we have not adequately monitored. Today, we throw good money after bad, repeating projects, repeating efforts to remove encroaching pinon-juniper stands, for instance, that were begun in the thirties and again in the fifties and again in the seventies and again today because we did not adequately monitor the projects. We don’t know what happened. We don’t know why those past projects failed. Monitoring has been treated as the ugly stepsister. It has not been funded or even put into the budget. We say, “Okay, we’re going to do this great burning project. We’ve got all these people that are experienced and ready to go for it. But we haven’t set aside any extra money to do the monitoring.” That has got to change. Monitoring needs the same infrastructure as any other management project. There have to be people that know how to collect the data, people to manage the data, people to run the monitoring program, and to be held accountable.
One of the problems is that monitoring is not glamorous. It is not as exciting as burning down a forest. It is not as exciting as cutting down trees. It is a much more daily kind of work. But I think, for that very reason, that monitoring can have a much greater impact on the way we live here in the West, and on the way that we look at our future.
There is this idea first espoused by Aldo Leopold called “an ethic of place.” How do we as Westerners, acknowledge where we live, change our communities and our economies so that we become self-sufficient and self-sustaining? How do we put back what we’ve taken out of the ground, and rehabilitate these places that we live in? Maybe part of the answer is bringing the people who love pristine wilderness, and the people who make a living off the ground, and the people who drink the water that comes from the ground, and the people who eat the meat that comes off the ground, maybe we bring all these people together to watch in a systematic way, to monitor the effects of their living on that ground — so that they might make decisions as a community about how to live better and how to become self-sustaining.
Monitoring, for me, is this wonderful activity. I get paid to watch the landscape change. One of the things that I notice is that there is a relationship between the observer and the observed. I have spent months looking daily at a particular grass, uncertain as to its true identity, until one day I notice the hairs at the ligule curving just so, in a way I had never noticed before, and it is like a name-tag, repeating itself over and over, literally shouting out its name to me. It is a profoundly intimate experience. And I realize that monitoring is about relationships: my relationship with this particular place and with these particular inhabitants. And I realize further that I have begun to care deeply about each of the places in which I have begun to monitor.
If we take a leap of faith, like trusting the coyote to lead where we need to go, we might build monitoring associations, something akin to acequia associations, in which all the people with a stake in a particular landscape, come out together once a year to man the transects, to watch the birds and count the grasses. And then all that information would be funneled back to that year’s mayor-domo, the Mayor-domo of Monitoring who would be responsible for writing a report and calling a meeting and saying to the people, “This is what we’ve learned this year. What are we going to do about it?”
I see monitoring as a kind of keystone for creating a new egalitarian community in the West, a community that is much more aware of its relationships in and of the landscape. It would be a community much more capable of regulating itself and its impacts, because it would know first-hand and it would know intimately just what those impacts might be.
This essay first appeared in Forging a West that Works: An Invitation to the Radical Center, Essays on Ranching, Conservation and Science: 143-150, Santa Fe, New Mexico: The Quivira Coalition, 2003.
William S. Barnes 