The Fox and the Henhouse

The Fox and the Henhouse (And a Cow)

A closet full of my shoes doesn’t always smell that great, but this was ridiculous.   It smelled like a stockyard in August in there.  I knew it was my hiking boots – I’d been out for a recent wander in the National Forests of southern Utah and had unsuccessfully hop-scotched through a closely cropped and cow pie covered mountain meadow.  I grabbed the boots and threw them out on the back porch and thought about all the clout ranchers and farmers have over the management of the vast amount of public land we enjoy in the West.  In Utah nearly 80 percent of the land is managed by state and federal agencies for public use.  That is to say, ostensibly, for you and me and everyone else in the country.  Agriculture makes up a tiny two percent of the state’s economy and livestock only makes a small slice of that two percent, yet some 90% of all BLM lands, 69% of all Forest Service lands, and even many national wildlife refuges and national parks are grazed by livestock.  Grazing hammers the land, contributing as much to the list of federal threatened and endangered species as mining and logging combined.  Eighty-five percent of all the water used in Utah goes to agriculture and most of that is for growing hay and alfalfa to feed livestock, yet the use of all that water produces less than one percent of the state’s economy.  In the West, livestock grazing occurs on more federal public lands than any other commercial activity, covering 260 million acres, an area the size of Texas and California combined.  Even with all that land being exploited, those cows make up less than three percent of national beef production.  Who makes the decision to use the land this way?  It’s not you and me.

Somewhere once upon a time in the land of metaphor a fox charmed a farmer into believing the fox should guard the henhouse.  The moral of the story seems self-evident and one might think we would have the lesson down pat by now.   Unfortunately, when it comes to the public welfare, foxes are put in charge all too often.  It’s too bad; the henhouse could almost guard itself.   Free and open markets have a way of taking care of themselves.  Back in the 18^th century Adam Smith pointed out that it was, “not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner . . .” With delightful alliteration Smith is pointing out that your friendly neighborhood merchants know it is in their own best interest not to water your beer or put sawdust in your bread because they know you will quit coming back.  Smith called that self-interest the market’s “invisible hand.”  I adore open markets and the almost magical way that hand works.  But can we depend on the invisible hand always working?  Can the various players in the market always be counted on to operate in an enlightened way?  Will the farmer be able to take care of his own henhouse?  Who will protect us hapless hens?

Over time in this country a growing line of economists, philosophers, social critics, and politicians have said no, we can’t rely on the market, the government needs to protect the chickens.  The need for some regulation and enforcement is undeniable, but regulation always comes with unintended consequences, most of them negative.  One of those consequences is what Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglar calls “regulatory capture,” which happens when a regulatory agency that is supposed to act in the public interest ends up advancing the very commercial or special interests that dominate the industry the agency is charged with regulating.     Let me point out just two glaring recent examples with horrific consequences.  Say you work at a financial regulating agency like Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, and you want a million dollar job on Wall Street.  Just give the Wall Street companies a good rating, and the favor will be returned.  In fact, at S&P and Moody’s it is the Wall Street companies who pays these agencies to rate them.  That is how AIG Insurance gets a AAA rating right before it goes bankrupt and had to be bailed out at taxpayers’ expense for $180 billion dollars.  Who let the fox guard the henhouse?  Now that BP has spilled 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico at Deep Water Horizon, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, proposes to dismantle the Minerals Management Services Agency, separating safety oversight from the division that collects royalties from oil and gas companies.  The proposal would end a decades-old relationship between industry and government that has proved highly profitable. The minerals agency, which was created in 1982, brings in an average of $13 billion a year from the oil companies.  Numerous Congressional and internal investigations have called the oversight agency badly mismanaged and at times corrupt. It has been rocked by regular scandals, including disclosures in 2008 that agency officials took bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials.  Fox guarding the henhouse, regulatory capture, you get the picture.

In Utah today, oftentimes the rancher that a Forest Service agent is regulating is that same agent’s Mormon bishop, his ecclesiastical boss, the guy at the gateway of the agent’s stairway to heaven.   If it’s not his bishop then the rancher is a county commissioner.  I’m still trying to figure where a county commissioner’s clout with elected officials comes from but suffice it to say a few words from the commissioner to a congressman and the agent can soon be looking at a job transfer.  Kirsten and I spent five days with Mary O’Brien, a scientist serving as the Utah Forests Project Manager for the Grand Canyon Trust, doing grazing impact studies on the Fish Lake Plateau.  Mary works tirelessly documenting the effects of livestock on the southern Utah National Forests, trying to get the current grazing regulations enforced.  But the local ranchers have the county commissioners and local bishops behind them, and the county commissioners have the ear of the local, Utah, and U.S. politicians, and if regulators want to keep their jobs, have their agency funded, or better yet, advance their careers, they ought not upset any ranchers.  Mary, to her great frustration, is often ignored, and the public, which doesn’t know better, doesn’t notice.  I focus on ranching because a dramatic first step solution to overgrazing is so easy:  let the ranchers have the choice to sell their grazing rights into conservancy.   Many ranchers would rather have the money than pursue what for them is a demanding, money losing endeavor, and the public, the public purse, and the public lands would be better off.   Even though the Cattlemen’s Association claims to stand for the rights of individual ranchers, they stubbornly and hypocritically stand against allowing ranchers to sell their rights this way.  I think the Cattlemen are seeing ghosts and are haunted by the idea that if ranchers can sell their rights into conservation the whole livestock industry will collapse.  Not likely, but in the meanwhile both the land and the ranchers suffer.  Regulatory capture is at work on the Plateau.

As I see it, the public land is not managed in the way the modern public would like it to be.

There are strict rules for the public on use of the land and I’m all for them, but let’s be consistent with how we implement our values.  When we were with Mary O’Brien this past October, we camped near a stream.  Mary wanted me to get my tent the Forest Service’s required 200 feet from the stream.  “But Mary,” I said, “there are cows doing their thing right in the stream.”  She just smiled grimly and shook her head.  The rules and regulations for people make good sense today, but for livestock they are from days gone by and no longer work–except for the benefit of a few vestigial but still powerful special interest groups.  When a practice or subsidy matters a lot to a few but not much to the many, special interests form, and lobby, and tend to get their way.  How to change that?  Ask Upton Sinclair about The Jungle, or ask Rachel Carson what happened after she wrote Silent Spring or Ralph Nader about the impact of  Unsafe at Any Speed or Aldo Leopold about Sand County Almanac or Wallace Stegner his “Wilderness Letter.”  This power of pen is what we have in mind at Torrey House Press.  Treat yours accordingly, get outside in the West and on the Colorado Plateau, write about it, and let us see what you’ve got.  Maybe if we work together I can put my boots back in my closet.

-Mark Bailey