Chip Taylor

Self-governance and natural resources

I've recently read Ostrom's Governing the Commons for one of my classes. The book deals with how some groups manage common pool resources without resorting to either central governmental control or complete privatization, but rather by developing institutions that are somewhere in between.

Then this morning, this article catches my eye:

DOUGLAS, Ariz. -- William McDonald urged his quarter horse through a boulder-strewn canyon, in the heart of his 20,000-acre cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. A thorny mesquite bush scraped his leather chaps, interrupting the steady rhythm of hooves striking lava rock and cinnamon-colored clay.

McDonald, 52, a fifth-generation rancher, stopped and smiled from beneath his broad cowboy hat. A golden sea of grass was spread before him, and he could see his land healing, the vegetation restoring itself.

A year earlier, this section of McDonald's ranch land, known as "Cowboy Flat," had been intentionally set ablaze as part of a controversial 46,000-acre prescribed burn intended to restore an ecosystem damaged by a century of fire suppression and grazing.

Studying the restorative effects of fire is one of several ecological projects designed by the nonprofit Malpai Borderlands Group, which was founded in 1994 by McDonald and other local ranchers who felt threatened by government regulation and widespread subdivision of Arizona rangeland. The group is in the vanguard of a growing movement in the West -- the formation of rancher-based land trusts that buy and hold conservation easements to protect ranch land from development.

The loosely structured group now consists of ranchers, government regulators, conservationists, scientists and environmentalists working to find out how best to restore, protect and maintain a delicate habitat while supporting profitable ranching. The group strives for consensus and has been successful enough that this unlikely convergence of divergent interests has fostered cooperative ecological studies of fire, grassland restoration, erosion control and innovative compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

The success of the group -- measured in the restored ranch land itself, in the pages of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and in the fact that ranchers work the land and have not been forced to sell it -- comes at a time when the West is beset by drought, immigration problems and rampant development fueled by population growth. The Malpai group and its backers say that seeking the "radical center," as they try to do, offers more workable solutions for the West's future than the extremes -- environmentalists who want cattle removed from all public lands west of the Mississippi and property-rights activists who oppose all government regulation.

There's more.