Jon Marvel

The Government Accountability Office has just released its study of the costs to American taxpayers of maintaining ranching on public lands. The study concludes that the annual costs to taxpayers exceed $120 million just to keep about 20,000 ranchers subsidized.

The GAO study fails to address all but direct costs to the U.S. Treasury and those additional costs have been independently determined to be an additional annual hit of $400 million on the pockets of American taxpayers.

Every taxpaying American could use a break from this uncontrolled cost not to speak of the destruction of wildlife habitat and water quality caused by cattle and domestic sheep on our public lands every year.

This relief is made even more compelling when between 55 percent and 60 percent of all public lands ranchers are hobby ranchers who gain most of their annual income from some other job or source of income.

Over 70 percent of public land grazing permits are held by fewer than 10 percent of Western ranchers, and those individuals and families are often multi-millionaires who enjoy the status that comes with land based empires without having to pay the costs.

Confirmation of that fact can be found in any real estate advertisement for ranching properties in Wyoming where, with the possible exception of the eastern part of the state near Nebraska, ranch real estate sale values always exceed the capability of livestock ranching alone to amortize the cost of the land.

While ranching in the West continues to enjoy an iconic presence in our minds, it provides little or no economic benefits to Western counties with large areas of public lands. Across Wyoming, where the cowboy and bucking horse is the designated trademark of the state, ranching on public lands provides little economic benefit, and yet demands, among other give-aways, continual government subsidy in terms of reduced property taxes and below market returns from the state's public school trust lands.

In these times of explosive growth in oil and gas extraction, there is certainly a powerful irony that ranchers in many areas of Wyoming are facing the power of the oil, gas and coal interests who care not a whit for ranchers' sensibilities about coal-bed methane production or other mineral impacts on public and private land. It is fine for the cowboy icon to be on Wyoming's license plate, but no cowboy messes with coal, oil and gas, the real source of power in the state.

So how can all Americans recover our public lands for wildlife habitat, clean water and recreational opportunities? That effort is a difficult one considering how entrenched the cowboy myth is in our minds, and how ranching exploits that mythology to maintain political control over county, state and national governments with little regard for other values.

Notwithstanding this 150-year history of political control, there is a crack in the monolithic myth of the ranching West that offers a glimmer of light in the darkness of a system unwilling to change. It is a remarkably all-American solution to the problem of competing values about how public lands should be managed. It is the introduction of a free market in public land grazing permits, and it will solve this conflict and the ongoing hemorrhage of public tax dollars to prop up ranching on public lands.

I know this because it is already happening across the West where both government agencies and private individuals and groups are buying grazing permits from willing ranchers and not using them for grazing livestock.

Livestock are gone from Great Basin National Park in Nevada because those permits were bought-out by a private conservation group. All around Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, sheep-ranching permits on National Forest lands have been acquired and retired from willing ranchers by other conservation groups to stop conflicts between domestic sheep and wolves and grizzly bears.

In central Idaho, the Bonneville Power Administration, working with the Forest Service, retired cattle allotments on more than 250,000 acres by paying ranchers generously for their permits that were creating problems for salmon habitat. Near Bend, Ore., one rancher donated his BLM grazing permit to be retired to benefit wildlife habitat and fisheries.

These voluntary and generous free-market efforts are the future because they break through the contention and mythology of Western ranching by offering a financial solution. Open markets not only empower change but also overcome cultural resistance with cash.

On the national level Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona's 7th District is sponsoring the Multiple-Use Conflict Resolution Act (H.R. 3166) that would offer all public land ranchers $175 per Animal Unit Month to voluntarily waive their grazing permits.

Wildlife, fish, recreation, American taxpayers and ranchers win with this generous proposal. It is a fair and welcome way to resolve the fight over ranching on public lands.

Jon Marvel is executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project (www.westernwatersheds.org), with field offices in Utah, Wyoming and California.