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Non-Traditional Uses of Grasslands Panel
Nathan Sayre1 , Moderator
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INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL
Wendy Laird, the Executive Director of the Tucson Audubon Society initially conceived the idea
for this panel. She originally was going to call it Alternative Use of Grasslands. We talked a little bit. She
didn't like that title. We were left wondering what is the traditional use that we are trying not to talk
about right now. I thought I'd say a few things about that to start with before introducing our panelists.
Clearly the first and primary use that we are suggesting is the traditional use in cattle ranching and I
think it's been said enough already in the conference that late 19th century overgrazing and drought
caused a whole lot of damage to the grasslands of this area. It also caused a lot of damage obviously
to individual ranchers, but we don't mean to imply that ranching is incompatible with grassland
preservation and they al=8 a lot of other panels going~ "fa Iking about issues of sustainable grazing. At
least two of our panelists here, and perhaps more, Tom Orum and Tom Hildebrand, are talking about
uses of grassland that can complement rather than replace ranching. I don't think anybody here is
going to speak for a radical alternative to grazing.
Without going into detail then, I would suggest that the critical issue we're talking about is
economics not cattle. 19th century destruction of grasslands can be traced to boom and bust cycles
in the economy that prompted a massive overstocking of the range and then when times got bad,
attempts not to sell cattle because the price was very low even if grasslands were being destroyed. I
think these boom and bust cycles still persist today even if they are moderated relative to the late 19th
century. From this perspective, the topic of our panel is how grassland owners and managers can
organize their enterprises in such a way that economic pressures do not translate into ecological
stresses; to what extent can revenues from films or from ecotourism complement ranching; how can
alternative land ownership strategies such as land trusts or non-profit organizations insulate grasslands
from market conditions.
I think there's also a second conventional or traditional use of grasslands that is implicit in our
title and it cuts across issues of economics. For simplicity I'm going to call it state conservation. At its
extreme, this is the polar opposite of cattle ranching as I've just described it since it involves the
withdrawal of land not only from private ownership but from market forces as a whole-the attempt to
set aside the land and say this will be the way it is regardless of what the price of cattle or the price
of land may be. Publicly owned grazing land falls in between. The more strictly they are regulated by
government agencies or the higher the lease rates rise, the more exposed the lease-holder becomes
to market pressures. For various reasons we can't expect all grasslands to be withdrawn from private
use and insulated from the market. Nontraditional uses therefore include uses other than or
complimentary to state conservation. The Nature Conservancy and the Mal pais Group are perhaps the
best known big examples of this. Here we're hoping to find mechanisms that are available to more
people more broadly who don't have the resources of the Nature Conservancy or the Mal pais Group
and they're looking for ways to participate in the management and acquisition of grasslands without
being sucked into the pressure to subdivide and develop these lands.
One topic which I hope we touch on at least somewhat here is the issue of taxation. What is a
nonprofit group able to do by virtue of being nonprofit and exempt from taxation? How do tax policies
1
2
University of Chicago, retired, now residing in Tucson AZ.
The entire panel was transcribed by Boleyn Baylor, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ.
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affect other ways of organizing enterprises? I'm hoping that Tom Orum will talk at least a little bit about
the Saguaro-Juniper Project, which is not nonprofit even though it appears to pursue goals that would
make it such.
Finally, the third use, which I think is not what we're talking about, is subdivision and
development. This is no alternative but I think it lends the urgency to our discussion in this conference
and reminds us that we can't simply declare that grasslands are valuable in the abstract. The value that
we see in grasslands must be transformed in practice into livelihoods for people that do not undermine
grassland ecosystems.
Our four panelists: Tom Hildebrand works for the City of Tucson coordinating large-production
filming in the Tucson area and is going to speak about the way that is organized and the impact it has
on the local economy and the way it has utilized grasslands in this area historically and more recently.
Roseanne Hanson represents the Buenos Aires Natural History Association which is a nonprofit
education association set up in partnership with the Buenos Aires Natural Wildlife Refuge. Chris Benish
is from Field Guides Incorporated. He's a birding tour guide and is going to speak about grassland
birding and the limits of ecotourism. And finally, Tom Orum from the Saguaro-Juniper Project, "a
network of friends that have formed a for-profit corporation to combine cattle grazing and land
stewardship." He'll be speaking about the history of that group and the obstacles they have overcome
in their work.
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