The controversy, which has generated a deluge of
news stories, guest columns and letters to the editor of the Casper Star-Tribune
over the past several months, helped sell out the book’s first printing.
A new paperback edition of The Western Range Revisited should be available
in book stores in early May for $14.95; you can also order the book from
the University of Oklahoma Press, 4100 28th Avenue NW, Norman OK 73069,
(405) 325-2291 or 6531. On March 3, USA TODAY published one of the best
summaries we’ve seen about the dust-up over Donahue’s book and her free-speech
rights. We’ve reprinted it with their permission:
by Tom Kenworthy, USA Today
Not counting India, it’s hard to think of a place
where cows are more sacred than in Wyoming.
This is after all, a place that puts a bucking
horse on its license plates, calls itself the Cowboy State and roots for
the University of Wyoming Cowboys.
So when University of Wyoming law professor Debra
Donahue published a book this winter arguing that livestock ought to be
removed from vast stretches of arid federal land, she sparked a firestorm.
The president of the state Senate drafted legislation
to close the law school.
Livestock interests demanded that the university
board of trustees do a better job of screening faculty. They questioned
how Donahue could use state resources to attack a vital state industry.
Ranchers, including a former Republican gubernatorial
candidate, said they would no longer donate steers for the annual auction
run by the university’s booster group, the Cowboy Joe Club.
And livestock organizations have pressed the law
school dean to launch an investigation.
"I’m viewed as a traitor," says Donahue, who teaches
public-land and environmental law, has a master’s degree in wildlife biology
and has worked for several federal land-management agencies. "You’d think
this was the most radical publication since Lady Chatterley’s Lover."
Donahue is hardly the first person to suggest that
the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) terminate grazing on many of
the 164 million acres where it is authorized. Environmental groups, and
even some government studies, have long argued that in the most arid stretches
of the West, cattle harm native vegetation and wildlife, degrade water
quality and open up the landscape to invasions of exotic plant species.
In her book, The Western Range Revisited: Removing
Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity, Donahue
synthesizes previous research and her own study of federal law. She concludes
that livestock grazing has "significant adverse environmental consequences
on arid western rangelands."
Removing cattle from large BLM tracts receiving
12 inches or less rainfall a year, Donahue argues, "holds greater potential
for benefiting biodiversity than any other single land use measure."
The book, with a modest initial press run of fewer
than 1,000 copies, struck a nerve here quite out of proportion to the relatively
small number of Wyoming ranchers who hold grazing permits on BLM land.
Despite the state’s wide, open spaces, only about 2% of its overall economic
output comes from agriculture, Donahue and others argue, and fewer than
3,000 Wyoming ranchers hold federal grazing permits on BLM land.
The numbers alone don’t mean much, however, in
a state where the cowboy is so deeply ingrained in the culture and where
livestock producers are a dominant influence in state government.
"It’s part of the mystique, the notion that the
state wouldn’t be here without agriculture," says Donahue, trying to explain
the reaction to her book. Its publication triggered an avalanche of columns
and letters to the editor of the Casper Star-Tribune,Wyoming’s largest
newspaper.
The state’s livestock ranchers "are really up in
arms about it," Wyoming Stockgrowers Association President Rob Hendry says.
"They don’t want to cut the university any slack at all."
Ranchers here see Donahue’s book as part of a wholesale
assault on their way of life. That attack includes the Clinton administration’s
attempts to overhaul the rules for public land grazing and to remove dams
it views as environmentally destructive. "This is just kind of one little
drop in a big bucket," says Hendry, who runs 2,000 cattle on his Clear
Creek ranch at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains.
Hendry doesn’t dispute Donahue’s right of academic
freedom. However, he says the university, as a land-grant institution,
has an obligation to present both sides of the argument.
Noting an earlier controversy involving another
law school professor who did consulting work for environmental groups,
he says, "What the university can do is make sure that their professors
don’t use university money and university time to put out that kind of
material."
Published just as the Wyoming Legislature was preparing
for its budget session, the book has caused university officials some anxious
moments. The university receives about 39% of its overall $273 million
budget from state appropriations.
University President Philip Dubois’ initial response
to the controversy was to assure ranchers in a letter to a livestock newspaper
that "the official position of the University of Wyoming is, has been,
and will continue to be, support for those industries — including production
agriculture — that have brought this state from its status as a territory
in 1886 to its promise in the new millennium."
Though that concerned some faculty, Dubois has
since then strongly defended the principle of academic freedom before the
Legislature. "We defend the right of the faculty to publish their work,"
he said in an interview. "At the same time, as a land-grant institution
we feel an obligation to provide support for the agriculture industry.
I don’t see those as inconsistent positions."
For now, the threat of legislative reprisals has
diminished. Senate President Jim Twiford never introduced his legislation
to close the law school. Both houses of the Legislature have given initial
approval to a 12% budget increase for the university.
And one legislator even added $250,000 for grazing
research, "to counter my book," Donahue says.
________________
Copyright 2000, USA TODAY. Reprinted with permission.
Privacy Policy