Taming The West

he federal government's new land preserve is a breathtaking beauty in northern New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, an hour's drive from Santa Fe. Dubbed "the Yellowstone of the Southwest" by outdoors enthusiasts, Valles Caldera, which translates roughly to "cauldron valleys," is a mammoth crater, the collapsed dome of a volcano that erupted more than a million years ago. Fifteen miles across at its widest point, the caldera's rim encircles hot springs, gas vents and lava domes, including the 11,250-foot Redondo Peak. Its high-elevation forests and mountainside meadows provide homes for one of the country's largest elk herds and 17 threatened and endangered species, including peregrine falcons, Mexican spotted owls and Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

But the visual splendor of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is deceptive. The caldera is not a pristine wilderness, but, until recently, part of the sprawling Baca Ranch, a private, working ranch for generations. Sheep have been grazing the caldera in large numbers since the early 1900s, and ranchers added several thousand cattle in the 1970s. Logging that continued into the late 1970s nearly choked trout streams with silt. And the 4,000 or so elk roaming the caldera today are descendants of animals transplanted from Yellowstone. Hunters had wiped out the caldera's native elk herd by the end of the 19th century.

A Texas oil family saved the Baca Ranch from environmental ruin in recent years, but later decided to sell the 95,000-acre property to the federal government. The family, heirs of the late Texas oilman James Dunigan, wanted to honor his wishes by putting the land in the public's hands. In 2000, Congress agreed to buy the ranch for $101 million and create a new 89,000-acre wildlife preserve. But the deal was aimed at more than protecting an ecological treasure. Congress wanted to use Valles Caldera to blaze a fresh trail through the tangled politics of managing federal land in the West.

Agencies in Washington manage 535 million acres, 54 percent of the land, in the eight westernmost states and Alaska. That's almost double the percentage of land owned by Uncle Sam nationwide. Federal control of the western landscape irks many Westerners and has sparked furious exchanges in Congress and angry confrontations between landowners and federal officials. But of late, the tensions have begun spurring grassroots efforts to find creative new ways to give communities a larger role in managing the federal resources in their backyards.

The Valles Caldera Preservation Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in July 2000, is the first major bottom-up management effort approved by the federal government. The law puts the caldera in the hands of a nine-member board of trustees-five of whom must be from New Mexico-charged with managing the preserve as a government-owned corporation overseen by the Forest Service. The law requires the trustees to allow the preserve to be used many ways, for livestock grazing, timber harvesting and elk hunting as well as hiking, camping, cross-country skiing, photography and fishing. The idea is to protect natural resources while making enough money to make the preserve financially self-sufficient within 15 years.

Western Republicans and Democrats alike have praised the Valles Caldera law. Illustrating the breadth of its appeal, a congressional odd couple-Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M.-wrote a letter in November 2001 to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth urging the agency to use Valles Caldera as a model for a series of pilot, community-based management projects in federal forests. Under other circumstances, the two might be foes: McGinnis is one of the loudest critics of federal restrictions on the mining and timber industries, while Udall, an ardent environmentalist, is the son of Stewart Udall, Interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

"While reasonable people continue to disagree about national forest policies," McInnis and Udall wrote, "people on the ground in Western communities and watersheds are gaining experience at working toward solving public lands problems by bridging ideological divides and concentrating on what is best for their communities and surrounding ecosystems." The goal, they explained, would be to solicit proposals from local groups or communities for projects with nearby national forests or ranger districts and let them proceed under close monitoring by Congress and the Forest Service.

The Bush administration hopped aboard the Valles Caldera bandwagon in February by proposing a "charter forest" program in its budget request for the Agriculture Department. The program would draw on proposals for federal forest management pilot programs offered by the Idaho legislature and some private think tanks, in addition to the Valles Caldera project. Mark Rey, the Agriculture undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, said the charter forest plan might offer a way out of the gridlock caused by the agency's "archaic and conflicting and burdensome" management procedures.

But charter forest legislation hasn't materialized because environmentalists and Democrats have opposed the plan. Its prospects improved with the Republican Party's success in the November elections. Opponents say a charter plan would be no more than a Trojan horse opening national forests to increased timber harvesting and road construction. "I see the real motivation of the charter forest proposal to be little more than circumventing federal laws," says Mike Dombeck, the Forest Service chief in the Clinton administration and now a professor of environmental management at the University of Wisconsin.

"What concerns me most is that there is a focus in charter forests on turning national forests into moneymakers," Dombeck adds. "National forests were never established to make money. Many of the values they generate are not commodity values that we turn into hard cash, they're ecological values. While we know the value of a ton of timber or a barrel of gold, we don't place a monetary value on water. But 66 million people get drinking water from national forests."

The national attention focused on Valles Caldera worries Ernie Atencio, an anthropologist who coordinates the Valles Caldera Coalition, which consists of 15 environmental groups and a few ranching organizations. The coalition was formed in 1997 to push for federal acquisition of the Baca Ranch. But political pressure could rush the delicate and complicated process of forging a consensus about how to create an "ecologically sustainable working landscape," Atencio says. "There's nothing wrong with going slow, since this is completely new territory and it holds such great potential," he says. "This could really turn into a model of public lands management if it's done right. If it's done wrong, it could be a nightmare."

Gary Ziehe, the executive director of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the preserve, chuckles at the idea of Valles Caldera being held up as a national example for resource management. Ziehe, who has doctorate in livestock breeding as well as extensive Capitol Hill experience, has struggled since his appointment in September 2001 to get Valles Caldera up and running. He's had to overcome a tight budget, bureaucratic snafus and a shortage of clerical help under the intense scrutiny of environmentalists and ranchers alike. "At this stage," he says, "I don't think anybody's looking [to] us for any answers."

But everybody's eager to find a better way to manage the nation's forests. Fierce political fights pitting environmentalists against Western timber interests flare each summer during the fire season. As devastating wildfires sweep across the West, arguments rage over road building, timber harvesting and fire suppression policies. The issues have grown more intense in recent years as Western demographics and economies have changed. The West is no longer a monoculture of communities dominated by timber or mining interests, Dombeck says. "There's now a wide variety of people with different values living in rural areas," he says. "They value forests for more than just their timber."

As clashes between old resource extraction industries and environmentalists have grown and intensified, the federal government has struggled to craft new land management policies. "Forest management used to be an engineering problem for technocrats," says Jim Burchfield, director of the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests. "The technocrats managed forests as tree farms. That was quite straightforward, but there were needs and demands that forests be managed for other values-protecting species, biodiversity, fire protection, beauty. The 'technocracy' couldn't negotiate these values. There was tremendous frustration. There wasn't a system to solve multi-dimensional problems."

The nation watched the old system grind to a halt in the early 1990s in the Pacific Northwest, when loggers and environmentalists clashed over the spotted owl-and the federal government was not quite up to the task of sorting it all out. The Bolle Center, a part of the University of Montana's School of Forestry, opened in 1994 to help reconcile new environmental needs with commercial timber harvesting-"to promote a harmonious relationship between people and the land," says Burchfield, the center's director. A trained forester and former Peace Corps volunteer, Burchfield is now a self-described cheerleader for new forms of forest management slowly evolving out of crisis and conflict. "What we try to do is take it one step at a time and learn from what's going on," he says.

Strange-bedfellow coalitions, such as Atencio's, are the driving force that brings groups with conflicting interests together to deal with Washington's perceived inability to manage resources. "The appeal and power of these coalitions comes from the fact that they involve former adversaries and that they are local," Burchfield says. "Local people are able to deal in specifics, rather than abstract concepts like resource protection or jobs and reinvestment. When you deal in specifics, you can see where there is space for some kind of compromise." Most grassroots coalitions shun the limelight. "Most have consciously decided to stay beneath the radar screen and to work behind the scenes to find solutions to problems," Burchfield says. "They just want to be able to accommodate these multiple interests and have their communities come back together again."

The Bolle Center is studying a range of so-called collaborative resource management efforts between government agencies and citizen groups in the interior West-from the effort to reintroduce the Bitterroot grizzly bear in Montana and Idaho to conservation planning on state and federal lands in Arizona's Sonita Valley. The results have been uneven. Some are successful-"citizenship at its very finest," Burchfield says-while others never get beyond what he calls "a wild cacophony" of competing views.

One of the most successful projects is the Quincy Library Group in Northern California. Frustrated by battles over logging in the early 1990s, the local coalition of environmentalists, loggers and other community groups came together in 1993 to craft a wildfire prevention strategy for thinning brush and prescribed burning in the Plumas and Lassan national forests northwest of Lake Tahoe, near the Nevada line. The Forest Service provided $18 million in 2002 to fund the group's project as part of its National Fire Plan.

National environmental groups only recently have begun paying close attention to this trend toward collaborative management. "This trend has been occurring with little evaluation of [its] impact on natural resources," says Collaboration: A Guide for Environmental Advocates, a booklet published in 2001 by the Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society and the University of Virginia's Institute for Environmental Negotiation. "The experience of environmentalists in these [collaborative] groups has been decidedly mixed," according to the booklet. "Some report positive environmental gains as well as improved community relations and environmental awareness. Others report that the groups are a significant drain of time and resources and serve as a forum for inappropriate compromises, exclusion of some environmental interests, and weakening or avoidance of environmental protections."

The Bush administration is trying to champion the collaborative resource management movement as a way of fulfilling a conservative goal of turning responsibility for environmental protection to state and local governments and private landowners. "We believe in conservation through cooperation, communication and consultation," says Lynn Scarlet, the assistant secretary for policy, management and budget at the Interior Department. The Bush administration, she says, is trying to encourage such efforts with grants and by scaling back federal regulations that might hinder entrepreneurial conservation programs.

One of the best Interior cooperative programs, Scarlett says, is the $40 million Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which involves about 27,000 private landowners who are enhancing natural habitats on their lands. Interior provides technical advice and grants to carry out the projects. "There are so many of these efforts now, our challenge is to decide how we can make them centerpieces rather than an afterthought," Scarlett says. "We are working with a nation of self-motivated stewards."

Atencio is concerned that the administration's eagerness to trust the private sector could affect the Valles Caldera project when Bush appoints three new trustees to replace Clinton appointees whose terms expire in January. "The board of trustees that is now balanced could be easily stacked with a lot of industry interests or large-scale commercial ranch, timber or recreational interests," Atencio says. "That would upset the science-based approach the current bunch of trustees are following."

The law says the nine-member board will have two federal resource managers-the supervisors of the federal properties that surround Valles Caldera on three sides, the Santa Fe National Forest and the Bandelier National Monument-and seven presidential appointees with expertise in preserve management. The board must include one trustee each with expertise in livestock, fish and wildlife, forests, financial and cultural management, and the natural history of Northern New Mexico. One trustee must be a member of a conservation organization and another must be active in state or local government. Three appointees serve two-year terms, and four serve four-year terms.

The Valles Caldera corporation is structured along the lines of the one that runs San Francisco's Presidio, says Ziehe, the Valles Caldera Trust's executive director. "But other than that, we're kind of blazing a trail here," he says. "We're in uncharted territory." Ziehe was chosen to help chart a course for the preserve because of his extensive political, scientific and practical experience. With a Ph.D. and a master's degree in animal breeding, Ziehe came to the trust from a wildlife resources post in the New Mexico Agriculture Department. But Ziehe also has extensive experience with political animals. He worked on Capitol Hill from 1993 to 2000 as a congressional science fellow, a legislative aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and senior analyst for the Senate Budget Committee. At the budget committee, Ziehe worked with the New Mexico delegation in Congress to craft the Valles Caldera law.

"There's been some frustration in getting started," Ziehe says. The trust did its contracting and procurement through the Forest Service, even though the trustees were unfamiliar with the process. The transition from Forest Service to the trustees, expected to take 90 days, took more than a year. Money's also an issue. The preserve had a $2.8 million budget in fiscal 2002 with only a little more than $1 million proposed for 2003. "Just like any small business, if you're under-appropriated you're doomed to fail," Ziehe says. There is pressure on the preserve to start raising money for programs and facilities by stepping up grazing and hunting. Because the caldera was heavily logged into the late 1970s, timber harvests hold less promise for generating revenue.

The trustees raised more than $400,000 by selling permits in a worldwide raffle for fall elk hunts. More than 4,700 hunters paid $25 a ticket for a chance to bag a bull elk; only 85 winners were picked during the raffle while another four hunters paid $12,000 to $15,000 each for permits during an e-Bay auction. A trial grazing season for about 1,000 head of cattle ran from mid-August to Sept. 30, over protests by environmentalists who said the preserve's trout streams and grasslands have not had enough time to recover from decades of overgrazing and a devastating summer drought. Ranchers, on the other hand, argued that more cattle should have been allowed, given that 6,000 or so steers grazed the preserve each summer when it was part of the Baca Ranch. The preserve allowed ranchers, who were chosen in a lottery, to bring up to 25 head of cattle each. The preserve charged ranchers 35 cents a head per day for grazing rights, or $270 for 25 head for 30 days.

The preserve does not yet have adequate roads, drinkable water or facilities to accommodate visitors. The only public recreation allowed in the last two years has been organized, guided group hikes that began in August. Thus, "it's been controversial that we planned to open for elk hunting and grazing before we open to people," Ziehe says. "But you have to remember the preserve is basically an old ranch. People are a bit more difficult to manage than animals."