August 18, 2003
Country and western legend Hank Snow must have had Arizona rancher Wally Klump in mind when he sang the sad lyrics, "Straw hats and dirty old hankies". Working the land and driving cattle have always made for backbreaking work. Now, it’s proving to be tragic too.
Far away from the open skies and fields of his profession, Wally Klump languishes in prison.
His crime?
"Trespassing" cows on Bureau of Land Management property in Arizona’s Dos Cabezas Mountains.
Balladeers chronicling the hardscrabble life of cowboys and ranchers could rewrite Home on the Range to Hounded on the Range.
That’s what happens to ranchers, cowboys, and little people when radical environmental activists get in on the act.
According to J. Zane Walley in Powerhouse magazine, it’s a problem of location.
"The Klump lands and grazing allotments in the Dos Cabezas Mountains have been the subject of concentrated scrutiny in past years. The family has been subjected to ever-increasing pressure from the Bureau of Land Management.
"New Mexico rancher Levi Klump has studied the mounting problems and sadly reckons, `It’s simple. "They want to force us from our land. Run us off.’"
This is a story right out of John Steinbeck.
While rancher Klump’s reckonings are scribbled on the backs of road maps, and while he takes his bearings from the setting sun, and from other patterns provided by Mother Nature, nothing less than the world’s largest bureaucracy, the United Nations, has been keeping Big Brother-like tabs on him.
Says Powerhouse magazine: "Levi’s brief summation is deeply rooted in documented fact, much of it springing from international forces. Few places in the west are as coveted, as sought over, and "protected" as the remote highlands where the Klump’s cattle graze."
Unfortunately for little guy Klump, his widely scattered islands of private land in Cochise and Graham Counties are situated in a long roundabout sequence of national forest, wildernesses, monuments, memorials, and parks. The Klump properties are strewn over a substantial area between, and bordering, the Coronado National Forest, Coronado National Memorial, Chiricahua National Monument, the Dos Cabezas, and Chiroicahua Wildernesses.
Problem is that all these areas were somehow identified as United Nations Protected Areas in 1997. If that wasn’t bureaucratic enough for most folk, along came the Sky Island Alliance (SIA), a hell-bent for leather gang of pro-wilderness, anti-ranching campaigners.
It shouldn’t surprise any to find gung-ho activists on the SIA board of directors, which includes former Earthfirsters Rod Mondt and Nancy Zierenberg.
While generations of ranchers have eked out a decent living from cattle, Mondt, a former employee of the U.S. Forest and Park Service, looks at it a different way. Mondt stated in a 1998 speech to the New Mexico Quivira Coalition "They (cattle) cause excessive damage to the land, they eat native flora that would otherwise be eaten by native fauna."
It’s untenable to try to teach table manners to cattle, and that’s not even to mention the flatulence environmental activists hold against their breed.
SIA members maintain a take-no-prisoners attitude. Director Lainie Levick (a former USDA Agriculture Research Service employee) is a member of what Powerhouse magazine calls the "rabidly anti-grazing Rangenet". Levick stated in Rangenet that, "I believe that livestock grazing is completely inappropriate on our public lands. The damage caused by ranching and associated activities is enormous and must not be allowed to continue."
Other ranchers and ordinary citizens may smell an agenda here, and there is one.
At the moment, SIA is active in attempting to "rewild" the entire Dos Cabezas.
"SIA has proposed a confounding conservation plan, the Sky Islands Wildlands Network, that would encompass about 17.3 million acres of the Southwest and Mexico," says Powerhouse. "The plan includes a provision that "Key private lands, in-holdings and grazing allotments need to be purchased by conservation groups or conservation-friendly individuals." At the centre of the region, covering about 9.9 million acres, are the Sky Islands, which include the Dos Cabezas Mountains and the Klumps’ private land.
"SIA’s plan is not original. It is a duplicate of, and directly supported by the Wildlands Project, a well-known, gargantuan plan that calls for the establishment of systems of core wilderness areas where human activity is prohibited. A syndicate of deep ecology, deep-pocket international environmental groups and foundations in turn supports the Wildlands Project."
And if that’s not enough to spook a herd of cattle to run off in the opposite direction, the jaguar (Panthera onca), which fueled additional anti-grazing, anti-rancher sentiment on litigation-bound greens, is.
This is what Klump has stacked up against him: The Jaguar Conservation Team, (JAGCT) a binational partnership of government agencies, private and non-governmental organizations identified Dos Cabezas as jaguar habitat with interconnecting travel corridors.
JAGCT was reinforced by the formation of Bordercats Working Group, a block of environmental organizations with lengthy records of ESA lawsuits against land agencies.
Joining the dots back to the United Nations would take us to the next step. Bordercrats (financed in part by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant) linked up with the IUCN (A.K.A. The World Conservation Union) based in Switzerland. IUCN is the primary source of most international environmental treaties and laws.
The IUCN placed Panther onca on their "Red List Program" of species facing global extinction. The big cat roams free on Rancher Klumps’ lands.
Meanwhile, the lonely cry of the coyote seems to strike a more heart-rending note coming from Arizona’s Dos Cabezas Mountains. Problem is, stuffed shirts at the UN are too far away to hear it.
While environmental groups line up for grants, Wally Klump still languishes in a prison cell.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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