A Yale University podcast devoted to exploring the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human.
Ep. 24 – Christopher Ketcham on the abuse of the American West
“If I were to have my way on public lands, if I could do anything I wanted in a program of action to save them from destruction, top of the list would be a cow exorcism,” Ketcham writes. “[If cows were removed,] we would have an ecological recovery the likes of which has never occurred in modern history.” Photo courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
For the past ten years, investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham has documented the battles being waged over the fate of the federal public lands in the American West. Ketcham has extensively roamed this landscape of deep canyons, 10000-foot plateaus, sagebrush seas, mountains, deserts, and forests — “places of beauty and wildness,” he writes, “where no one person, or institution or corporation, is supposed to be privileged above the other.” This land, as Woody Guthrie once sang, belongs to you and me. It belongs to every citizen of the United States.
But today, Ketcham writes in his new book, “the government agencies entrusted to oversee it are failing us. The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government. The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only. I went west to see what we were losing as a people.”
Map of federal public lands in the western United States. “It is still possible in this country to find wild, clean, open spaces, where the rhythms of the natural world go on as they should, relatively undisturbed by industrial man,” Ketcham writes. “I fear the opportunity, though, could disappear in our lifetime.” Courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
The national commons that Ketcham focuses on are managed on the public’s behalf, and with our tax dollars, by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service: some 450-million acres stretching across 12 Western states. Both agencies operate with a “multiple use mandate.” This means they are required to strike a balance between using the land for purposes that generate economic profit (such as mineral extraction, energy development, and livestock grazing), while also protecting the health of the ecosystem. But today our public lands — and the wild animals and plants that depend on them — are being pillaged, poisoned, and assaulted by industries and government agencies that are captured by them, according to Ketcham. Multiple use, he says, is now multiple abuse. The result, he writes, “is ecological impoverishment, biotic simplification and a widespread collapse of biodiversity.”
Outside Magazine called Ketcham’s fierce new book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, “the Desert Solitaire of our time.” The New Yorker deemed it an “encyclopedic exposé.” In This Land, Ketcham documents the confluence of commercial exploitation and government misconduct on public lands across the West, the role of the livestock and energy industries in their despoliation, and the impact of rampant malfeasance by federal land management agencies on wildlife. Ketcham has been a freelance journalist for more than 20 years, publishing in Harper’s, National Geographic, Mother Jones, and other publications. This Land is his first book.
In 1971, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, outlawing mustanging and protecting wild horses as “living symbols of [the] pioneer spirit.” But the law did not work as wild horse advocates hoped. In response, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) determined “appropriate managements levels” (AMLs), the number of horses that the BLM claims the land can sustain with food and water. “Once they exceed the AML in their selected her management areas, the horses are periodically rounded up, forced into tractor trailers, and trucked across the desert to miserably overcrowded holding facilities from which they will never leave,” Ketcham reports. In 2013, the National Academy of Sciences found that the AML system has “never been based in scientific understanding of the actual needs of the animal,” he writes. Photo courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
Taxpayer-funded BLM wild horse round-ups target animals within the herd at random, disturbing the animals’ complex web of family ties that regulate breeding, according to Ketcham. As a result, the round-ups cause herd populations to jump. “More roundups thus produce more horses, which necessitate more round-ups, and also more horses in holding, for a continual cash flow to contractors,” Ketcham writes. “It could be said that horses are managed now as a renewable crop of captives. Currently there are sixty thousand animals in holding.” Photo courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
“What’s needed is a campaign for the public lands that is vital, fierce, impassioned, sometimes dangerous, without hypocrisy, that stands against the tyranny of money, coupled with a campaign of public education that explains in the simplest terms what the lands are, the glorious extent of them, the ecosystems they encompass, the wild things that live in them,” Ketcham writes. “… This land is our land. We as a society can determine its fate. What that fate is to be, of course, depends on much larger questions: whether we begin collectively to challenge the imperatives of the industrial growth system in which we are trapped; whether we reject affluence as the meaning of life; whether we think of the other-than-human as something beyond a resource for our aggrandizement.” Photo courtesy of Chris Ketcham.
In This Land, Ketcham exposes a little-known government agency called “Wildlife Services,” a program of the USDA that employs “an arsenal of poisons, traps, and aerial gunships at a cost of tens of millions of dollars annually” to kill coyotes, mountain lions, river otters, bobcats, foxes, prairie dogs, beavers, and other wild animals thought to be threats to ranchers. Ketcham estimates that the agency killed tens of millions of wild animals during the twentieth century. The agency killed nearly 1.5 million wild native animals in 2018 alone. Ketcham has previously reported on Wildlife Services in Harper’sand other publications.
