This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West

This LandHow cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American WestThis Land, is largely a very well written book with some portions very well researched and others, perhaps not quite so. It’s been a couple weeks since finishing Ketcham’s book, and I’ve been ruminating over portions of his work. If you are a conservative/rancher/an extractive industry, this book is about you, but really not meant for you, other than exposing the breaks ranchers receive from the Federal Government they love to hate, with the use of public lands for grazing at a fraction of a cost of grazing on private land. Ketcham spends many pages on the Cliven Bundy’s illegal grazing on public lands, then Ammon Bundy’s occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) could not stand up to the militia supporting Cliven Bundy’s illegal grazing activities, during the Bunkerville Standoff, nor the illegal occupation (January 2016) of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge by Ammon Bundy, who did so in response to support the law breaking Hammonds (Steven and Dwight), ranchers who were prosecuted in 2015 for arsons of public lands in 2001 and 2006 to cover the deer they had poached on public lands. The courts botched The case against Ammon, and the Feds had little stomach to chance another Ruby Ridge, or Waco which ultimately led to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murray Federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, of whom 19 were children. So what we find is that the Feds are being held hostage by the tyranny of the minority, ultra conservative agendas, and their actions on Public Lands. Ironically, One found little backing down from the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.Most of This Land deals with the controversy of Public Lands in the American west, land that was ceded to the Federal government as one of the cornerstones to being granted statehood. Scofflaw ranchers, the exploitation by the extractive industries (logging and mining), and the suffering of native wildlife in all forms in the western states at the hands of Wildlife Services at the beck and call of ranchers, are covered by Ketcham.Ketcham fails to follow through on the rationale of western persecution of wolves, all the while supporting their positive effect on healthy ecosystems. The wolves aren’t killing all the elk, nor are they driving ranchers out of business. Local wolf predation may have impact on certain elk hunting zones in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, yet , Ketcham fails to provide statistics that show a decades long trend, since wolf reintroduction that elk harvest rates are holding steady, or steadily increasing. He also failed to use supporting data to defend the wolf from predation upon livestock on Public Lands. Cattle losses during 2015 in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming respectively were 88,961, 80,731, and 35,671. The majority of which were caused by health problems (digestive and respiratory),birthing, weather, poisoning to name a few. The percent of cattle deaths, caused by wolves in those states, again respectively, were 0.04%, 0.02%, and 0.03%. Modern day cattle rustling affects the stockman more than wolves, but it’s Wildlife Services that are called to the rescue to kill wolves.Ketcham covers all the talking points about the exploitation of public lands by the extractive industries. It’s more than obvious that as the human population continues to grow, there will be a place for extractive industries, but at the same time, their activities require regulation. This is one of the strongpoints of Ketcham’s book, as he goes to great lengths about the agency’s responsible for this regulation, the Forest Service, the BLM, and the different manifestations of Fish and Game departments that are in bed with the industries they are supposed to regulate.Ketcham, scathing of the Reagan and Bush administrations, holds no punches in regard to the Obama administration, turning a deaf ear towards western state exploitation and persecution of wildlife, not considered good, ie elk, deer, etc. From This Land: “Over this last half century alone, the losses have been extraordinary. Millions of acres of forest logged, much of it old growth; tens of millions of animals slaughtered by Wildlife Services; every year more than 155 million acres of BLM land and 100 million acres of national forests destructively grazed; hundreds of thousands of miles of new roads blazed, some 2.8 million roadless acres in our forests gone; tens of thousands of acres drilled for oil and gas or mined for precious metal and mores; the Sage grouse headed for extinction, the last of the wild bison trapped in a tiny national park, the grizzly bear and the wolf clinging to the vestiges of the wild.The tyranny of the minority rules in the West. Ketcham postulates most Americans don’t know or understand the issues, “they don’t even know they own the land.” Yet, one wonders even if they did know/understand the issues, what would they do? In that respect, Christopher Ketcham’s This Land, How Cowboys,Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West is as good a place as any for the general public to understand, and hopefully take issue with public land transgressions in the American West.

For any truth-seeker, read this book! Our public lands particularly in the west are being denuded of wildlife, including wild horses, by the BLM in order to appease cattle and sheep ranchers, especially cattle ranchers who receive subsidy money payments from your tax dollars. The federal government pays the ranchers to put cows on horse management areas, BLM federal forest land, and desert lands of Arizona and Nevada too! These big, stupid, clumsy cows destroy almost all of the native vegetation, floral and fauna are eliminated, and cows are the main cause of the decline of grouse populations because the sage grouse habitat lands are, guess what, leased to cattle ranchers and the cows destroy the sage brush and trample any nests. In Oregon, the BLM "asked" the ranchers if they "could set aside" a few acres of grouse habitat for the endangered sage grouse! "Well, maybe we could," replied one large rancher. Our forest lands are 'grazed' by cows. Cows pollute streams and watering holes by dropping manure directly into the water and tromping on the banks causing destruction. That's why ranchers build large, (or does BLM build them with our tax dollars) round raised watering troughs for the cows with their own wells. But that doesn't stop the cows from destroying watering holes. Antelope and what few remaining horses are left with manure-ridden, green slimy water courtesy of the cows. I have photos proving this. These range cows are not used for food production, they are a "Cash Cow" for the ranchers. What the book doesn't mention is that BLM 'rounds up' wild horses with helicopters, separating stallions, mares, and foals from one another. Some of the horses are properly adopted and the rest are sold to be slaughtered in Mexico by stabbing or hanging by the neck until dead. All for COWS, the ranchers, and the almighty dollar subsidy payments, not to mention the $1,000.00 per horse paid to the helicopter owner from Nevada. Wildlife on our public lands is being poisoned, trapped, and slaughtered in order to 'protect' grazing stock from possible threat on our land, the public land. People and domestic dogs have been poisoned and killed by accidentally setting off a poison blast device. Poison pellets are thrown to the ground from airplanes for wildlife to eat and die, and this includes the symbol of our country, the BALD EAGLE. BLM is ruining the earth. DOES ANYBODY CARE?

Like another reviewer, I found myself having to put 'This Land' down here and there simply to digest and process its distressing statistics and disillusioning human truths. Ketcham narrates a story that, whilst diverging from the US case in its particulars, resonates as a timely parable for the Australian situation: two hundred plus years of colonial/post-colonial/neoliberal plunder of Australia's indigenous heritage and natural resources which, with its current correlatives of climate change and wildlife extinction, appears at this precise moment to be at a devastating tipping point.Smoke from scores of bushfires across the state has now filled the Sydney Basin and seeps into all our houses. I'm finding scorched feathers in my mountain garden. Our wildfires are phenomenal, unprecedented, heartbreaking, and fatally destructive - yet months of uncontrollable conflagrations continue to be fielded by heartless spin from our religious right-dominated land-grabbing leaders who - as stooges of the mining sector and thus bereft of strategic policies to deal proactively with irrefutable evidence of galloping climate change (aside from slashing funding to environmental protection agencies) - ruthlessly betray those they were elected to serve and the national parks and wildlife they have been charged with conserving and protecting.For these craven politicians, providing funding to services and financial compensation to exhausted 'firies' and emergency services would imply a retreat from the ideologically repudiated fact of climate change - so thousands of exhausted, anxious and demoralised volunteers battle wildfires to protect their homes and communities whilst underwriting cynical reactionary politics at great - sometimes traumatic - personal cost.What Ketcham has so plaintively called out for the American West has yet to be called out for Australia in similarly comprehensive and unswerving fashion. I especially recommend this important book to Australian readers in the hope that this gauntlet is picked up.