This Land Quotes

“I say it's extremism to decimate pine forests, denude the desert grasslands, seed the steppe with cyanide bombs, send Bull Hogs into pinyon-juniper stands and turn birds to red mist. Ecosaboteurs destroy inanimate objects. The real extremists among us destroy life for profit.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Unmolested and with grass to eat, a tortoise can live eighty years. Their populations have plummeted in the Mojave in recent years, victims of a perfect storm of drought, sprawl development, solar energy projects, off-road vehicle enthusiasts (who crush them under their wheels), poaching, vandals with pistols (who use them for target practice), and, not least, livestock grazing.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Everything I thought about cows as an Easterner-come-west is wrong. They are not symbols of a noble culture of mounted herdsmen. They are not cute. They are an invasive species, Bos Taurus, a water-loving European animal not fit for arid climates, and their cancer-like effects on the land have not ceased.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Overall, the cost to the Forest Service to prepare and administer the timer sales, to oversee the construction of the roads, to mitigate (in usually small ineffective ways) the damage to the landscape far outweighs any fiscal return.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Among all the factors that contribute to habitat fragmentation--which is the leading threat to biodiversity in the West--roads are at the top of the list.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The top 10 percent of grazing-permit holders on federal lands own 50 percent of all livestock on those lands; the bottom 50 percent own just 5 percent.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“DeVoto observed in the 1940s that no rancher in his right mind wanted ownership per se of the public lands. That would entail responsibility, stewardship, and worse, the payment of property taxes. What the rancher who is farsighted has always wanted, and what extractive industry wants in general, is private exploitation with costs paid by the public.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The annual volume of forest felled during the Obama administration was higher than all the years during the George W. Bush administration but one. In the year Obama took office, 2009, the cut was 1,954,092,000 board feet; at the end of the Obama administration in 2016 it was up to 2,536,601,000 board feet, an increase of almost 30 percent. Much of this was done under the pretext of preventing wildfire.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“As with grazing on the BLM rangelands, the destruction of our forests is heavily subsidized. The most common estimate is the Forest Service loses between $1,400 and $1,900 per acre logged.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“In eastern Oregon and Washington, where grazing reigns supreme, an estimated 90 percent of the sage biome is gone.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The socially validated natural beauty, deriving charisma from moisture, is the forest, the waterfall, the alpine meadow, the mountaintop crisp with snow. But the grace of the arid steppe, the subtlety of the life there, the muted shades of color, the delicate perfumes, these are unsung, unloved. The sage steppe is the orphan child of the environmental movement. There is almost no literature celebrating it.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The fate of our national mammal is decided by ranchers who act as self-appointed representatives of the American people.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The Mexican gray wolf, the lesser prairie chicken, the dunes sagebrush lizard, the bison--all sacrificed to economic interests in violation of the spirit, and often the letter, of the Endangered Species Act.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Public lands seizure, conceived as a fell swoop of the sword, will likely never come to pass. The law bars it, precedent bars it, and the Supreme Court has spoken to this effect repeatedly. FLPMA, unless amended by Congress, establishes that the land shall remain in the hands of all citizens in perpetuity. I think the seizure will require more delicate schemes, slowly moving and imperceptibly violent. In Congress it starts with an amendment to an appropriations bill here and there. A rider or two or three to bills that otherwise must pass to maintain the budget. It’s easy to curtail the protection of seeming irrelevancies like grass, soil, water, air, and wildlife when the public is distracted with the question of whether the government will go on functioning.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Attack the value of public lands as a national birthright, reduce their worth in the public eye, diminish the institutions that protect the land, cut down their authority, bring them into disrepute, undermine public confidence, neuter enforcement, create a climate of uncertainty and disorder, demoralize the land managers--this is the long game now being played.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West