November 11, 2002

By Jim Carlton, The Wall Street Journal

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WEED, NM -- Jimmy Goss has survived wildfires, flash floods and being struck by lightning while herding cows in the Sacramento Mountains. He's not sure he'll survive the Forest Guardians.

Hardline environmentalists, the Guardians are leaders of the zero-grazing movement, which aims to clear every head of cattle off the 265 million acres of wildlands the U.S. government owns in 11 Western states.

The Guardians use an unusual legal approach. First, they track down ranchers who have permits to feed their livestock on federal land for just pennies a head. The next step is to sue under the U.S. Endangered Species Act or other laws, accusing the government of mismanaging the land where the ranchers' cows graze.

If the Guardians win in court, or if the government settles, the number of cows a rancher is allowed to graze with his permit is cut. That hands the Guardians a double victory: Not only does the land get a breather, but the rancher has to pay much more to feed his displaced cows on private land.

Indeed, the Guardians' most controversial tactic is to single out the financially vulnerable -- ranchers who have used their permits as collateral for bank loans, a common form of financing for small ranching operations. "We want to put the squeeze on ranchers to get off the land," says John Horning, the coordinator of the Guardians' antigrazing campaign. "If some ranchers go out of business along the way, so be it."

A Guardians suit forced Mr. Goss and his wife, Frances, to put 200 of their 553 beef cows out to pasture with a neighbor who charges them 10 times as much as the Forest Service did. They have had to dig into retirement savings to make payments on their grazing-permit loan. "It makes you want to cry, what they've done to us," Mrs. Goss says.

About 25,000 ranchers have grazing permits in the West, where upwards of three million cows, or about 10 percent of America's beef cattle, feed on land owned by the U.S. government. By their own estimate, the Guardians have managed to clear 5,000 cows off two million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, winning or settling some 18 lawsuits, and they have dozens more suits pending. In one of the potentially most significant, a federal judge in Tucson ruled last month that the Forest Service failed to properly monitor and restrict grazing on hundreds of allotments across about 15 million acres in New Mexico and Arizona. The judge is considering remedies, including severely restricting the livestock that can graze there.

Mr. Horning says the Guardians sympathize with the ranchers they go after and don't hold them entirely accountable for the damage done by their cattle. According to the Guardians, their main enemy is the U.S. government, and its grazing-permit program, which zero-grazers say subsidizes an industry that threatens hundreds of varieties of plants and dozens of species of animals.

The only way to protect the land, they say, is to put it off-limits to livestock that crush delicate fauna around mountain streams, causing erosion and harm to fish, and destroy meadows that are home to a multitude of wild creatures, including threatened and endangered species.

The Forest Service says the Guardians exaggerate the injury caused by cattle. For one thing, agency officials say, wild animals, including fast-growing herds of elk that roam many Western states, probably do as much harm to pastureland as livestock. The government's main argument is that public land can and should continue to be available for multiple uses, including grazing. "I believe that properly managed grazing has an excellent future in the Forest Service," says David Stewart, director of rangeland management for the Forest Service's Southwestern region.

Formed in 1989, the Forest Guardians have 2,000 members and an annual budget of $400,000, mostly from small contributors, the group says. The group describes itself in its literature as "relentless" and "uncompromising." In fact, it has drawn criticism from mainstream environmental groups uncomfortable with the Guardians' zeal for putting ranchers, especially small-time family operations, into financial binds.

"They're a little too extreme," says George Grossman, a longtime official in the Sierra Club's office in Santa Fe, NM, where the Guardians are based. "I think zero anything is not the way to go. I mean, we're talking about people losing their livelihoods."

So far, few ranchers targeted by the Guardians have gone out of business, according to lawyers for ranchers, though many say they have been pushed to the brink.

After the Guardians sued last spring, the Forest Service ordered 77-year-old Lena Shellhorn to remove her 80 cows from the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico. Now the cows feed on the 258 acres she and her two sons own in Glenwood, NM. But it isn't pastureland, so the Shellhorns have to haul feed in, significantly raising operating costs.

"If we can't get these cattle back in the forest, I'll just go broke," says Mrs. Shellhorn, whose ancestors started ranching nearby in 1878.

Like Mrs. Shellhorn and many of the ranchers the Guardians single out, the Gosses aren't well off. They live in a three-bedroom log house that Mr. Goss built in this tiny community of some 20 residents high in the Sacramento Mountains, an Old West refuge for gunslingers and renegade Apaches.

Mrs. Goss's ancestors settled here around 1880. Mr. Goss's grandfather arrived a few years later. The families ran cattle over a roughly 100,000-acre expanse of ponderosa and fir forest now known as the Sacramento Allotment, part of the Lincoln National Forest. Mr. Goss, 65, worked for years as a logger. In his mid-1950s, he went back to the ranching he had grown up with. "My grandaddy worked to give us this," Mr. Goss says, "and I'm busting my behind so my grandkids can have it too."

To find ranchers with grazing-permit loans, the Guardians use the federal Freedom of Information Act to get the names of participants in what's known as the escrow-waiver loan program.

Under the program, the U.S. government provides banks with verification of ranchers' grazing permits, so banks can accept the numbers of livestock allowed to feed under the permits as collateral for business loans. In the past 20 years, banks have issued more than $450 million in grazing-permit loans to about 300 ranching operations, according to records obtained by the Guardians.

The Guardians say another New Mexico-based environmental group, called Gila Watch, gave them the inspiration for the grazing-permits tactic. Gila Watch in 1995 successfully sued the Forest Service to remove all cattle from 125,000 acres of the Gila National Forest, home to the endangered Mexican spotted owl. One rancher with a grazing permit there went out of business after he couldn't keep paying his grazing-permit loan, and the Guardians decided to put that kind of financial squeeze on ranchers throughout the West.

The group's lawsuits are filed under the 1973 Endangered Species Act or other federal environmental laws, including the National Forest Management Act and the Clean Water Act. The laws require federal managers of the nation's public land to protect creatures and plants that the government has determined are threatened or endangered. The suits typically argue that the government needs to take action in order to carry out that legally required protection. For example, an endangered spotted owl may be threatened by cattle grazing, in part, because cows trample the land where field mice, a preferred source of food for the spotted owl, live in burrows.

The Guardians don't sue only in cases where ranchers are in debt. The group says it goes to court whenever it thinks it can force the Forest Service or another federal agency to change its grazing policies. But critics say the Guardians go after loan-holders more often than not and acknowledge the tactic can be effective. "It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out how many head of cattle it takes for the rancher to make his bank note," says G. B. Oliver III, an executive at the Western Bank of Alamogordo, in Alamogordo, N.M., which gave the Gosses a $170,000 loan in 1989, with the 553 cows then on their grazing permit as collateral.

The U.S. government doesn't dispute that a lot of the public land in the West has been excessively grazed. When fires were raging across the Southwest last summer, several Forest Service officials said publicly that one reason was a build-up over the past century of dense ponderosa pine forests. The forests grew up in part after cattle mowed down the native grasses that used to catch fire and keep the timber in check. In recent years, the Forest Service has been keeping cows out of burned areas to help forests recover.

The Forest Service and the ranching industry say smarter land management -- not zero-grazing -- is the best answer for all concerned. "There is no question our performance on the public lands has vastly improved," says Ted Hoffman, president-elect of the Idaho Cattle Association.

Many ranchers take protective steps themselves, fencing off streams and declaring some hard-hit meadows off limits until they can recover. In the Lincoln National Forest, Mr. Goss moves his cows regularly so they won't feed too long in one spot. On a sunny afternoon, he showed how he does it. Driving down a dusty road in his pickup truck, Mr. Goss stopped a few yards from where several brown heifers were munching grass in the shade of pine trees. They perked up when they saw him fetch a bucket full of grain cubes from the back of the truck and hurried forward when he started handing them out. "This gives them more incentive to wait for me to come back," said Mr. Goss, surrounded by cows.

The Goss case started in April 2000, when the Guardians sued the Forest Service in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque. The Guardians argued the Gosses' cows had nibbled the threatened Sacramento Mountains thistle and other vegetation, including native grasses and streamside willows, to the nub, putting the threatened Mexican spotted owl at risk and upsetting the ecosystem.

In June 2000, the Forest Service ordered the Gosses to cut their herd from 553 head to 400. In August of that year, the agency ordered them to cut it again, to 335. Forest Service officials say they did so because it was clear they had allowed too many cattle on the land, not because the Guardians had sued. The judge in the case ultimately ruled that 335 was the right number.

Now, the Gosses pay $2,700 more every month to put their cows out to pasture than they did before the Guardians sued. With their grazing-permit loan eating up $30,000 of the $120,000 their operation grosses every year, and other expenses now consuming the rest, the Gosses live on monthly Social Security checks of $900, and what they had saved for retirement.

The strain weighs on the whole Goss family. "It's like we're watching them slowly kill our folks," the couple's 34-year-old daughter, Kendra Mydock, says on her parents' front porch as thunder rumbles. "Hey," her father says, "we're not dead yet."

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