 The southwest deserts can be rugged and impenetrable landscapes. The native plants and animals have evolved here to survive with little or no water. Often meager food and nutrient supplies and drastic temperature extremes. Sustaining any kind of productive agriculture in this landscape represents quite a challenge. These are the borderlands, the southwestern corner of New Mexico and the southeastern corner of Arizona. Mexico lies just to the south. Survival here depends on many intricate natural processes. When these interconnected components are out of balance, the lands ecological and socioeconomic functions are threatened. Over the past two centuries, many of these key ecological processes have been disrupted by natural catastrophic events, as well as by man's footprint. Livestock and humans have reduced surface and groundwater supplies across many of the areas watersheds. Historic grassland communities are being replaced by woody species, such as creosote, juniper and mesquite, depending on the site. This has been due to zealous fire suppression, long periods of heavy livestock grazing and gradual changes in seasonal weather patterns. Lastly, large expanses of contiguous open space and wildlife habitat are threatened as development pressures escalate. Where the land can no longer turn a profit in agricultural production, there is money to be made in land sales. Subdivided parcels of 10 to 40 acres are fragmenting important ecological connections across the borderlands, especially on the U.S. side. In response to these challenges, a group of landowners, land managers and environmentalists have put aside their philosophical differences. By joining together, they can work towards sustaining this Chihuahuan Desert landscape they call home. They have taken the name Malpai Borderlands Group. Their cooperative alliance sets an impressive standard for natural resource management at the landscape scale. The Malpai Borderlands Group started out as something of a discussion group. One of our principals here, a fellow by the name of Drummond Hadley, was active in the world of literature and had made friends with folks who were, in some ways, outspoken critics of the livestock industry in the Southwest. So he had this situation where he had friends in the environmental community extreme environmental community, as well as his ranching neighbors. And he had the perception that we all kind of wanted the same thing, and we shouldn't be at loggerheads with one another. So with this in mind, he invited some of us to get together and start talking to each other, and many of us went along simply because we didn't know how to say no to a friend, but after the first meeting, we realized that there really was something to this. Part of the mission of the Malpai Group is to bring fire back and turn around the brush encroachment trend, not to remove anything, but to look at the subtleties and manage the resources that are in front of us to improve ecological function and, in turn, have diversity in healthy wildlife populations while we have a sustainable livestock production on the resources. One common attitude that we're faced with in discussing the work we're doing out here, this collaboration of conservationists and ranchers, is kind of disbelief that we really share enough in common that we can successfully achieve our mutual goals. And in fact, when we look at maintaining the grassland quality of this landscape, that grassland and shrub and savannah mosaic, our goals are almost completely overlapping. We both share the goal of maintaining vigorous, healthy native grassland. You can dig in your heels and you can say, boy, I don't like it and I don't want to change, but that isn't going to make a difference. You have to adjust, you have to make it work, and you have to keep your eye on the ball at the same time and realize that you need to make a living and you need to keep this landscape open and productive and ecologically functioning so that those that come behind you have a chance to do the same thing and enjoy some of the same values. To understand the land management challenges facing the borderlands, it is helpful to understand historical events and conditions that have influenced the current landscape. At about the turn of the century, three things happened. We had an earthquake in the 1870s that changed the hydraulics of the area. It dried up springs. It caused down cutting of gullies. At the same time, there were some of the most severe droughts recorded around here. It happened in the late 1800s and livestock numbers were at an all-time high. And that combination of the earthquake, the overgrazing droughts caused some severe environmental impacts. Now, the Rio Yaki River Basin used to be home to eight different species of native fish. And basically all the species are state endangered now and two are on the federal list, the Yaki Topman on the Yaki Chubb. Because pretty much this water was drained out and this stream channel has incised almost eight meters. And basically it had dried out because of ranching and also mining and also farming practices. And so no longer does this stream channel flow. Some of it undoubtedly could be traced to the fact that active fire suppression followed that period of heavy grazing when there was a big reduction in fuels and the combination had a profound change on the landscape in that it tended to work to the detriment of the grasses and to promote woody species growth. And this was a problem that we recognized from the standpoint of forage for cattle, certainly. And the environmental community recognized this from the standpoint of species diversity and habitat. And fire played a major role, I think, in controlling that in the past. We had enough grass and ground fuel to carry fires. We had virtually no suppression efforts. And when the large numbers of cattle came in, they altered the fuels, fires ceased to spread. And then by, I was saying, in the 50s we were starting to get on top of the problem. About then is also when the federal agencies became pretty skilled and got modern equipment and got good at putting the fires out. We must also understand the current fluctuations in weather conditions, especially rainfall distribution. Just in the last 15 to 20 years, we've seen, although we've had annual rainfall equivalent to the long-term average, we've seen the seasonal distribution of rain move from the summer into predominantly the winter. And what that does is that tends to benefit the shrubs at the expense of the native grasses. One big thing that we've got to remember, no matter where you are, whether it's Arizona or Montana, wherever there's, you've got to manage these lands not only for the area you're in, but for the different weather conditions and things. Now here in the lower valleys, we have about half as much moisture, rainfall as we do up here at these higher elevations. Usually our annual rainfall in the lower parts of these valleys right in here would be from 8 to 10 inches a year. And that would be good for us. If we could depend on that, that would be good. Up here at the higher elevations, they would probably get 14 to maybe possibly 18 inches a year. Now this elevation where I'm standing is about 6, probably around 6,000 feet in the valley floor in there. It ranges probably anywhere from 3,500 to 4,000 feet elevation. So it's not a whole lot of difference, but it makes a difference. We get almost, in these higher elevations, as I said before, almost twice the moisture, the annual winter and summer rain, the annual rainfall as we get in the valley. Geologic formations and soil qualities also vary across the landscape. These physical features influence the management decisions being made by the group. As we're standing here looking out across the landscape, we're looking at a lot of geology here, which is the genesis of where the soils came from and what we have to work with in our management today. You notice the mountains and valleys, as you look in the background, there's block uplifting that form the basis, the basic foundation for the growth of soils in this area. That was followed at a later time by volcanic activity that produced a lot of heavy basalt rocks weathered into a heavy smectitic or clay with a high shrink swell capacity, which forms the plant communities. It also has the valley floors. The soil has a pretty high osmotic potential, which forms the plant community there. The plants have to be adapted to very drought tolerant soils. This is an arid climate, but the soils are also, they hang onto the water very tightly. You can see in the distance here, the patch of yellow vegetation in the swale below us is actually cured grass. What we're seeing is dry grass, and on the hills just beyond it, we see a patchwork of sandpaper bush and creosote bush, and in the background, the brighter green mesquite. All are different dominant species on different substrates. The geology leads to the soils and the soils support plant communities, and the way we look at plant communities within the natural resources conservation services is through ecologic sites, and there are different potentials for each ecologic site based on the management objectives and the soils and the climate you're working within. For example, in the valley floors here, it's dominated by tubosa grass, and to a smaller extent, cytotes, grama, and cane beard grass or cane bluestem with a lot of annuals. When the soil takes place, we lose the little bit of diversity we had with the cytotes, grama, and the cane beard grass, and the annuals start to become more a functional part of the plant community, and then as we continue with retrogression, our tubosa grass will lead to large barrier areas. Working out the logistics of large-scale control burning was a major catalyst for the group's formation. As we look at the needs of this landscape, and one of the overwhelming needs is to burn periodically, to rejuvenate the grassland and maintain that balance of grass and woody species, we see that climate is driving this system toward a woody or shrubbier condition, and that it requires that periodic intervention with fire to maintain the balance, and it turns out that without someone on the land to manage that, it really wouldn't happen very often. We've pretty much come to the conclusion that there needs to be somebody, a landowner, a land manager, who's out there taking an active interest in managing that landscape in order to take the actions that need to be done to sustain that grassland habitat. The Malpai Borderlands Group and all of the cooperating agencies are doing some pretty extensive fire planning for the Malpai area. This map depicts the area, from the Mexican border up to about Animus and back down the other side. In addition, we have some cooperating ranchers in Mexico to the south of us that are interested, also interested in fire management. So we have over a million acres where we're trying to plan for improved fire management. The thing actually came together. It actually got started. We actually had a large group of landowners who met on a regular basis without doing things like prescribed burning across ranch boundaries, across state boundaries, across nation boundaries. And we are continuing with that process and we have a track record behind us. We have accomplished some very significant things. We have good records, both from tree rings in the top end of the watersheds and from sediment cores in ponds in the bottom end of the watershed where this country has burned on a fairly predictable return interval of between 5 and 10 years for millennia. And so one of the aspects of this that we can manage, the weather is out of our control and the soils are pretty much out of our control, but we can manage fire. By burning periodically, it knocks back the vigor of the shrubs, kills some of the shrubs. It actually invigorates the growth of the grass and we see it from three to five years following a fire. And it also causes a decline in the woody vegetation. The overall long-term objective is to restore some of these landscapes the way they were in the earlier years or in the 1800s so that we can get fire back, we can get the watershed back and healthy and functioning for the whole landscape. A healthy native perennial grassland is the most effective as a watershed buffer for managing rainfall runoff and maintaining perennial stream flows. Watershed conditions of the borderlands are influenced by sound management of both upland and lowland areas. This benefits livestock, fish and wildlife, as well as people. A healthy functioning watershed becomes an effective barometer for evaluating the effects of deliberate management practices on the land. We're standing at Blackdraw, which is part of the Yaqui River Basin, the real Yaqui River Basin. And at one time, this used to be a perennial stream bed. Eight different species of native fish used to live here in this stream channel. It used to look like a marshy grassland. So in places like downstream on the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge where we have endangered fish and amphibians, having a more dependable year-round flow of water would be a great benefit to them. We knew we had some trees that were endangered. We knew we had some special birds. But a few years ago, we learned that in some of our stockponds, we had some very rare native frogs and that they were disappearing on, for instance, a wildlife refuge in some of the pristine areas in Arizona. So we decided we would try to work to preserve the frogs in order for the other areas to see what was maybe wrong or maybe right. A lot of the draws that run through the country curve and bend like a flowing water. And there are Indian sites found on the side of these, but now they're just dry grasslands with no form of water. And very possibly, the water table at one time flowed through and the frogs had just wonderful habitat. And then the long-range grazing trends and different things changed it. We put in man-made dirt tanks and the frogs were able to survive in those water catchments year-round, whereas they used to have just a year-round permanent water. And so it seems like a stretch, but in fact, through the connectivity of these, of landscape function and vegetation conditions, burning these valley bottoms and hillsides is probably one of the most effective things we can do to manage the aquatic habitat for the fish down on the bottom of the valley. Historically, relatively shallow, meandering streams flow perennially in this watershed. During the monsoon season, flash floodwaters would crest over the grassy low banks, spilling the flow out onto the floodplain and riparian areas. This slowing of the floodwater allowed it to steep into the aquifer, rather than be channeled away downstream. Seasonally, this would recharge the aquifer. The water would provide year-round habitat for native desert fishes and sustain stream-side vegetation. Now, deeply in-sized channels quickly flushed the sediment-rich water downstream, leaving aquifers and surface streams dry. Our long-term goal is to try and get this stream channel to actually function again the way it used to in the early or the late 1800s. Beaver work was the first thing that actually was taken from this land and almost made extinct. And they're a huge part of the wetland system. They're what forms the landscapes. And so what we're trying to do is to bring the beaver back to actually help us rebuild our wetlands, basically. We'll be reintroducing the beaver, and what we're hoping they do is dam the actual stream channels and build it up so that it would also help to drop sediment and to slow down water and to help recover some of these stream channels. The rich mosaic of landscape here provides many challenges and opportunities for land managers. As a conservationist, we're kind of stuck with a dilemma of reading the landscape and the resources we're working on and fitting that mosaic puzzle together and looking at the ranch we're working on or the farm and thinking in a larger context in how it fits in the total system and the way it was formed geomorphologically and the way the soils function and the plant communities help support. And if we can break it down into looking at soils and putting the plant communities that are on those soils hooked to the potential plant community or the managed plant community that's desired, we can get our ecologic building pieces and attain functioning ecosystems which should be our ultimate goal in any planning efforts we do. And a functioning ecosystem is usually not bounded by a single landowner. It's bounded more by a landscape as we're looking out across the horizon here. What we're looking at here is this little cactus. This is actually a large example of this species. This is the Robbins Pincushion cactus. And this little cactus probably represents one extreme of the scale of diversity that we're trying to manage in this landscape. The scale of diversity we're trying to protect here. And this little cactus, is an endangered species by virtue of its rarity. And it's actually known from only three limestone hills in this immediate area, the one we're standing on, the one just south of us across the border in Mexico and the next hill just to the east of us here. So these three hills represent the entire global distribution of the species. And so from the point of view of managing this species, which is known from only this location, we have to really focus on what's happening on the hill tops. And anyway, this represents kind of one extreme of the scale of biological diversity that we try to manage here. This being kind of the most local, most restricted scale. And at the other end of the spectrum, a good example of that is in the valley here, just behind us, moving down from the limestone hills that we're standing on here, you rapidly move into a different plant community in the foothills there. And then as you go across the valley, you go through a whole series of patches of different vegetation. And so we see that the landscape here is really made up of a patchwork of different vegetation types. It's a mosaic of biological diversity on a very broad scale. So we've gone from looking at the tiniest scale, an individual rare plant population to a broad scale of how to maintain diversity in the broad landscape. Livestock and wildlife have often been considered at odds with each other and unable to share a habitat. There have certainly been conflicts such as those between livestock and wolves. However, many species are impacted here in entirely unmanageable ways that have nothing to do with livestock. This is Black Bear sign here. They eat this shoot that comes out of the agave once in a lifetime after the agave shoots that stalk in the air and flowers out. That's it. The plant dies. But the bears break these off and eat them. These are bear teeth marks and claw marks, of course, on the stalk. He didn't finish this one. You didn't see that plant right there where he's crawled up in there. He bent the spines or the spears down. The concerns with the bears eating on the agaves is their critical habitat for nectar-feeding bats, which is a listed species. It's something we have to manage for in the system here. We have a hard time getting people to recognize that there are other resources that are affecting these plants and just livestock grazing. The bears probably have a much bigger impact on them than a cow would ever have just because of the form of the plant grows in. With the spines and the sawtooth leaf margins, it's somewhat protected from predation by cattle. They do eat it, but the bear, as Warner stated, just tear the whole thing apart and they're pretty fragile. It's a bolting plant. Just some of the dynamics we have to deal with. The fragility of the ecosystem is important, but the subtleties are where the flavor of it is and what we need to be sensitive to. Reading the signs on the land and putting the resources together to affect our management. How these lands are managed can affect biological communities across the hemisphere. The large ranches of the borderlands comprise a portion of critical wildlife migration and sea dispersal corridors that extend into South America. Diverse, often rare plants and animals need this relatively unfragmented landscape to complete their life cycles to fully reproduce. So we're looking at patterns of diversity on a large scale here, from just a matter of a few square meters for this cactus on the hillside to a few square miles for the movement of some of the wildlife in and out of the mountains to literally thousands of miles looking on a hemispheric scale for maintaining the migration of some of these birds and bats. Long distance migratory species that fly, both birds and bats, depend on food resources at intervals along the way throughout a migration of thousands of miles. And if that habitat gets broken up so that they don't have that high energy food source to sustain their migration, their populations could easily be seriously impacted or even extirpated. But these wildlife corridors, as you can see, in this area coming out of Mexico right up into the USA right here, we've got a tremendous amount of valleys and mountain ranges that come in right in and hopefully those will remain open. I was fortunate enough to take a photograph of Jaguar right here in these mountains about five miles from this spot and it was the first photograph of a Jaguar alive in the United States. So these corridors are working. They're working and a big thing we have to keep them open. In the late 70s and the early 80s when the biologists came in here to look at the opportunity for the introduction of the sheep into this country, they all pretty much reached consensus that there was an opportunity to create a herd of Desert Bighorn sheep in a continuous landscape. The herd would cover all some 60 to 80 miles and it would be a continuous herd that was totally uninterrupted. In 1998 when they brought the sheep into us they had rethought that process. The large landscape that those sheep require to be a viable population had been divided into four smaller portions so now they're looking at metapopulations that can survive with less than 100 sheep in each of those populations in four different areas. That's happened due to subdivision and cutting those corridors where those animals actually used to intermingle within the herds. Development, leapfrogging past urban boundaries threatens to fragment this once unbroken land. When subdivided into 40 acre parcels human impact can greatly degrade the land. Wildlife corridors are blocked and wildlife populations sharply decline. Sustaining ranching operations on a large scale becomes crucial for sustaining healthy ecosystems. We ranchers were concerned about what the future of this landscape would be not just for the sake of ranching but for the sake of the wildlife and the open space values that are here. There's a lot of pressure to the west and to the north, what they call ex-urban development that is subdivisions that aren't connected to the metropolitan area. We thought it would be a tragic thing for everyone who values what's out here whether they be ranchers or not if this area was to start to get cut up and developed. Fortunately through the efforts of the Malpai Borderlands Group we're working to try to sustain not only the landscape but the lifestyle that has been so fortunately presented to some of us to maintain a lifestyle with the cattle ranching formula that we use to actually just pay the bills on the ranch. In the course of meeting with these folks we begin to talk about ways that we might be able to take the bull by the horns and begin to preserve and maintain this open space that's out here and at the same time give the ranching livelihoods a chance of carrying on into the century that we're in now. It's changed a tremendous amount even in my lifetime and I think we'll continue to see changes in it and the requirements that people have for really wanting open spaces and scenic open spaces is something that we really need to contend with due to our air and water quality that those enhance for us. The landowners and agency managers of the Malpai Borderlands Group have learned to work together to find solutions to large-scale natural resource conflicts. This collaborative approach is crucial to the long-term viability of this landscape. The group has worked hard to understand their landscape and adjust their management accordingly. By managing for sustainable ranching operations here the people and the ecological communities they depend on will gracefully remain co-inhabitants and stewards of the Borderlands far into the future. All this is trial and error here. All we can do is try our best to see what works and what doesn't work. We don't know if bringing back to Beaver is actually gone to restore the stream channel but that's all we have right now to go by. I think we're all working this piece of the puzzle because none of us know exactly what's going to make it work. The most significant thing we've done is get folks to think differently about how they wake up every day and proceed. I rarely think in terms of just the ranch anymore. In the back of my mind it's how does my ranch fit in with this larger landscape and what do I do today? What is that going to affect a great number of things? It's not really as complicated as it sounds. It just simply is an attitude that will then pervade the way that you go about doing your business every day. When we started the organization we really looked at the process for not the next six months when we hope we get a rain but for the next 30 to 60 years. And if we can do that I think all of our ancestors will think we did the greatest thing in the world and we know that our children and their offspring will really appreciate wise planning and forward thinking of a little organization that's spawned in the southeastern corner of Arizona and the southwestern corner of New Mexico.