The Land Doesn't Care Who Signed the Paperwork

Public land is a bill that comes due whether you pay attention or not.

When the government talks about reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens, what they mean is leaving the store without settling your tab. Might feel liberating on the way out. Feels a good deal less liberating when they lock the doors behind you. I'm not against ranching. We all need to eat, and somebody's got to raise the cattle. But don't tell me this is about keeping the supply steady. This is about letting the people who already have money and influence make considerably more of both, while the rest of us stand in the parking lot holding the consequences.

In Harrow Corners, we know a thing or two about consequences. Take the Thompson farm expanding into one of the old dolmen circles. They swore up and down it was just a rock wall. We all know better. Those stones have been standing since before any of us were born, and now they're standing beside five hundred new acres of pasture. You might call that progress. I call it a decision you'll be explaining to something older and less patient than a county zoning board. The cows are already skittish. The tourists who come to see the circles are going to notice. Some things don't appreciate being crowded.

The BLM's plan to roll back public input and expand grazing is the same kind of thinking. You cannot carve up land like it's a Sunday pie and expect it to keep serving you. The land has its own rhythms and its own rules, and it does not issue warnings in plain English. We are talking about over 155 million acres, twice the size of New Mexico. That is not a resource. That is a responsibility, and right now the people in charge are treating it like a clearance sale.

The government has had a century to get this right. What they've managed, mostly, is to let ranchers graze the land into the ground and then hand them more ground to work on. It's like watching someone drown and deciding the lake probably needs the company. The people who've spent their lives actually caring for these lands, studying them, fighting for them, are being shown the door. The new rules are hostile to public participation the way the old Johnson place is hostile to trespassers. That house has a habit of leading uninvited folks somewhere they didn't intend to go, and these rules are no different. You think you're walking in, and then you look up and the exit isn't where you left it.

The BLM is supposed to balance ranchers, the environment, and the public. That's the job. These new rules don't balance anything. They tip the scales so far toward the ranchers that the rest of us are left holding their coats while the punches fly. And for what? So a handful of people can line their pockets a little deeper? That's a damn fool's errand, and the land is the one who pays the bill.

I have lived long enough to know when enough is enough, and I have lived in Harrow Corners long enough to know that the land remembers. It kept those dolmen stones standing before the Thompsons' grandparents were a notion. It gave the Hendersons' boy back from the lake on its own schedule, not ours. It will outlast the BLM, the ranchers, the environmentalists, and every memo written in triplicate about what to do with it. The question is what shape it will be in when it does.

The BLM should be listening to the experts, the public, and the land itself, not just the voices with the deepest pockets and the best lawyers. Respect is not a line item you can cut from the budget. It is the whole budget. And when you spend it down to nothing, what you've got left isn't land. It's a lesson.

Greed dressed up in a hard hat is still greed. The land knows the difference, even if the paperwork doesn't.

Tend your ground before someone else decides to. , Aunt Dot