Riparian management, water quality, and livestock grazing used in the same sentence can warm up a room with heated discussion. John Buckhouse has spent a lifetime contending for the Radical Middle, where people recognize that land conditions that are good for fish are also good for cattle. He has effectively advocated for and led collaborative resource management, published reams of research on the most critical and controversial topics in natural resources policy and management, and has loved people well. In this two-part interview, John reflects on these developments and work that remains to be done.
Transcript
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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on range lands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.
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This interview with John Buckhouse will be the beginning of what I'll call an occasional series with sages of rangeland, men and women who've spent a full lifetime studying and working in rangelands. Their wisdom has immense value, and I hope to honor these sages over the next few years on the podcast. Dr. Buckhouse has had an outsized influence on the world of riparian grazing, one of the more common flash points in public land management in particular, as well as in collaborative or coordinated resource management, one of the main social mechanisms to reduce conflict over differences of opinion in how we manage natural resources. I had the pleasure to record this interview with Dr. John Buckhouse in person at his home in Corvallis. John, where did you grow up? I felt like I knew that, but if I did, I can't remember it.
>> Really? Okay. Well, there'll be a quiz afterwards. I was born in Montana, but I grew up in Nevada through my grade school years, and then in Modoc County, California through high school. Both are great basin places. My father was a range manager, graduate forester from the University of Montana in Missoula, and so I was steeped in range management from the very get-go. When he would do his range surveys, just back in the old days, horseback, I would go with and play cowboys and Indians while he did his survey. And I, from the time I was eight years old, knew that I wanted to be in natural resource management, and my eight-year-old vision of that was I wanted to prevent soil erosion. Interestingly enough, that's still it. It's matured a little, but that's the general story. The various things that I've done throughout my entire career, all have had a interest in how do we prevent erosion, how do we stop stream, bank cavitation, various kinds of issues that would be a problem?
>> Well, my next question was, what made you interested in range lines, and you've partly answered that, but what kept you having continued interest in range lands?
>> Yes, I remember one of the first scientific, social-political conversations my father and I had, other than how was the baseball team doing, was a question about a book that some woman had written, and it was called Silent Spring. That took the natural resource world by storm. They either loved it or hated it, and some of them felt they were doing all those things already and she just poured cold water on their parade, and others felt it was long time coming to hear such things, but anyway, we had this conversation. That's when I first recognized there were controversies associated with managing rangelands. Otherwise, I would have thought, well, who wouldn't want to do that? And as I grew older, got more education, went off to school myself, I discovered that some of these controversies were very heartfelt among the people who were espousing them, and I began to recognize that, surprisingly enough, even though they were heated and sometimes close to blows, come close to blows, these people were, at root, looking for the same thing. The persons that saw it as, you know, a great travesty that had to be stopped, and the people that saw it as we've got a mutual purpose here, but perhaps we need to tweak it to get it better, all, in the end, wanted what was best. And once I realized that, it was a green light.
>> Mm-hm. There had been some travesties around.
>> There have been.
>> I just finished reading Tim Egan's book, The Worst Hard Time About the Dust Bowl, and I had not read any descriptions of people's firsthand accounts of what that was like, and it was --
>> Devastating.
>> Devastating.
>> Yes, Tim Egan wrote a book that everybody should read that is a real eye-opener. So yes, there were, and when you sent me that list of questions, of people that had various comments, one of them came from a woman down in Texas who I know well, but --
>> Jenny Pluhar.
>> Thank you very much, and thank you for helping me on that. The chemotherapy sometimes makes my brain sluggish. But Jenny was mentioning some devastation that she was seeing and was heartbroken about, that here we are in the 21st century, and we're still having some of these kind of problems. I acknowledge that. That's a continual effort that we have to deal with. At the same time, I can tell you more or less success story. As a youngster and growing up being aware of natural resources, things, because of my association with my dad, I saw gullies, erosion and arroyo-cutting that were phenomenal. We have some in the Great Basin but -- well, many in the Great Basin, some galleys that are 40 feet deep and vertical walls. I mean, they are devastating and were tremendous, and happened quickly. A lot of people lay the blame on livestock grazing, but that's part of it. I think a significant part also was dating clear back to the beaver-trapping era, when we trapped out all the beaver in the country. The Hudson Bay Company made a fur desert out of the Great Basin in order to stop the influx of Americans coming in, and by doing so, they pulled the hydrologic plug, and when the hydrologic plug was pulled, the whole thing came apart. Now, you come in with cattle and sheep and horses in unmitigated numbers, and you just coup de gras. It was devastated. By the 1920s we had done a remarkable job on a remarkable resource. Well, I wasn't around in the 1920s but not too long thereafter, and I can remember seeing the results of these gullies, and you can see them today, dramatic. I remember one of my first jobs I had was working with one of the local ranchers to haul rocks from the hillside to put down in the gully to try to slow the [inaudible] water when it came as runoff. Now 50 years, 60 years, have gone by, and I drive through the same places. The gully is still there, but they're healing. No natural resource manager likes a gully, but they hate active gullies. And there are keys that you can look at to see whether this is active or healing, and for the most part, they're healing, and isn't that an exciting thing that I can see in the course of my lifetime? Now, granted, I've got a little longer lifetime in that I got started as a youngster looking at things like this, but still, that is phenomenal. In the other room, there's a photograph of Bill Cougar, Lee Edelman and Tom Bedell and myself standing on a flat. Big deal. That flat was a gully, and with a change in livestock season of use, so that you graze the plants at a time that they could tolerate it, as opposed to a time when they were devastated by being consumed, they grew and prospered and trapped sediment. Now, we're standing on a flat plain, and I just smile when I see that, because I got a picture of those over a 20-year period from when it was one way to another, so good news there. So yes, there are some devastations we still have to work with. I guess I'm kind of at the end of my lead, but you've got lots of work to do still, and that's a good thing. Well, get some progress, I'm sure.
>> It is. I had a question from Pat Shaver. He said that there might have been some lessons learned on a field trip in (he wasn't sure) eastern Tennessee or maybe Kentucky, and he thought at some point the trip involved gunshots. Do you have any recollection of that?
>> No, but that sounds like a -- gunshots. I bet there was some beer involved too. Somehow it sounds like it.
>> That may very well be.
>> No, I know nothing about gunshots on a field trip.
>> Okay, I will be sure to ask Pat. Why did you become a researcher? There could have been a number of --
>> There could have been a number of [inaudible] yeah, that's a good question, Tip, an interesting, personal question. I was going to be a natural resources guy from the get-go. I realized that, and in the sense, follow my father's footsteps. When I got out of college and I had a master's degree, and hydrologists were in great demand, I was offered a job, a starting job at more than my father, after an active career, was making. That was disappointing to him and to me, in a kind of a, "Jeez, where is this agency going, that they are doing things like this?" And so I said, you know, I'm going to be working with the same people Dad worked with, but I want to work with them in a way that I'm my own man, as opposed to Jack's kid, and either I never quite stand up to the image, or I do better than him, and then he's having to look up to his kid. And who wants to do that, you know? Well, I guess we all do, but both at the same time. So what I said was how can I do this and still do what I want to do? And that was get a PhD, become a teacher, a research and an extension person, and it was the best choice I could have made, because my father was standing -- not withstanding, I had the best of all worlds. I researched stuff that we had questions about, why this, why that, what-ifs, and I got to teach it, and I also got to work with practitioners in the extension world, and if I could only have had one of those three jobs, I'd have taken the extension. It was fascinating to be out among people that were actually doing a job. So that's how that all evolved, and I feel wonderfully gratified that I was able to do so and do so successfully. I got a whole wall full of plaques and things saying, oh, yeah, I did it well. And we will assume they're true, and that feels good.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I've often said that I think extension, as you just described, is one of the best places to be, and as I've put it, you've got one foot in academia where you're trying to understand things and tease out causality, and then one foot in the real world with people whose livelihoods depend on making good decisions in the things that you know something about, and you can help them with that, and we learn as we do that as well.
>> There was one other aspect to it that I really enjoyed, and that is there's no blowing smoke. You can tell a group of wide-eyed students that the sky is green, and they will all diligently write in their notebooks that the sky is green. You tell a bunch of hard-nosed ranchers that --
>> That won't be the reaction.
>> -- and they will call you on it.
>> Yeah.
>> So.
>> Yeah, they may write something. They'll be writing you off.
>> I really loved working with ranchers because there was no B.S.
>> Well, I'm going to jump to what I think are maybe some of the more important questions, and then if we get through them, then I'll ask some more, but Jenny Pluhar did ask, "Has the range scientific community had a meaningful impact on actual land stewardship?" She says, "Sometimes as I drive across Texas and the western US, I am discouraged by the sheer number of acres that are still poorly managed."
>> I read that comment from Jenny, and I can't disagree that there probably are and western Texas may be -- well, this sounds like I'm picking on Texans, but that's hard country. I've driven through it myself, and I don't -- I honestly don't see how anybody, including a jackrabbit, can make it a living out there. It's rough, and so it wouldn't take much to, whatever balance there is, to tip it. But at the same time, yes, we have made a tremendous difference, and I will -- can go into some of those differences if you'd like, but that difference has manifested itself not only in stories like the gullies that are healing that I quoted a moment ago, but on quite a number of other things, and maybe one of the main ones, and maybe this is a good time to jump into it. It has to do with dealing with people. I have had two really, really positive professional mentors in my life. The first was my father, and he was professionally trained and logical and a good man, and I learned much from him. The other was a fellow by the name of E. William Anderson, Bill Anderson. Bill became my second father and a mentor once I arrived in Oregon, and that gentleman taught me a huge amount. One of the things that I learned from him was something called Cooperative Resource Management Planning. Now, what CRMP amounts to is bringing everybody together to look at the problem. And we had, for so long, solved our problems or didn't solve our problems as the case may be, by each individual agency or entity declaring what their handbook said or what they believed and touting that as chapter and verse, and that was a standalone from the message the neighboring agency had, or the county agent might have had, or the NRCS agent might have had, and even though they had similarities, they were just a little bit out of sync with each other. What Bill figured out was that, if we could bring all of these people together, people could have the power to make a decision and determine things like, well, Tip, we're grazing your cattle on Forest Service land in the summertime and, Amy, were grazing those same cattle on your BLM land in the early spring, but we got a two-week gap there between those, and so the cows go on in spring on the BLM, and then they had to come home for two weeks, and that's awkward. And then they had to go back out in the forest, and then they go somewhere else and do -- it just was uncoordinated. By coming together and saying, "Well, I can shift a little bit, and you can shift a little bit, and we can make this thing come together," and through this Cooperative Resource Management Planning concept, wonderful, biologically sound projects could be put in place, and the livestock could thrive. The wildlife could thrive. The watershed could be healthy and functioning properly. It worked. It worked really well. I understood, on my own. I got that from Bill and land. I understood this really works pretty much anytime you're dealing with people, that Joe Blow has ideas and Sally Smith has ideas, and they're both good ideas, although they might not be exactly the same, but if we can take the best of all worlds, we do better. I have a really good friend. He's an architect, lo and behold. But at any rate, this architect sees the world as an architect might, and yet he has figured some of this out, too. His favorite phrase is, "Together, we're better." And different ideas from different people work to help solve problems, and so the engineer's approach and the architect's approach, and somebody with perhaps a bit of dyslexia that approaches issues entirely different, they all come together to add a piece, a cog to that wheel. There's a absolutely fascinating woman that is nationally known named Temple Grandin. I'm acquainted with Temple through a number of avenues, but Temple is world-renowned as a livestock behaviorist. Yeah, and we, in the -- associated with the livestock industry at some level, have used much of her stuff for years on how do you build corrals so they don't frighten the cattle or this or that or the other thing, and marvelous logical, practical stuff. And but you have to think like a cow in order to see how that might be. Temple also is dyslexic, autistic, yeah, and has created a national reputation as somebody that is useful in that world. I've attended a number of her lectures that she's given to international audiences, and she tells the story about how you can blend these kinds of things, and it's not just autism and livestock behavior, but all sorts of things, in that each of these people see the world slightly differently. Each of these people bring something to it, and if we accommodate those ideas and at least acknowledge them and see how they might fit here, and if not here, maybe over there, then we end up with a far better product. I would say, for my own self, my personal self, I've been able to have a number of natural resource questions that have to do with erosion and issues with livestock grazing and time of year, or amounts or one reason or another, and my work with people, which is all self-educated kind of stuff, on how do you get everybody to be a part of the team has been what has made me as successful as I have been. I had something to say, but I also knew how to say it so that each of these people had a piece to contribute. And it's a marvelous combination, because I guess you could be a marvelous people-person, but didn't have anything to say, then you'd be kind of tough position to lead, but if you've got that combination of knowing something but also understanding that others do too and they can bring something to the table, then you've got a going situation, something that's going to come together, going to work really well.
>> She gave a keynote address at I think the SRM meeting in Sacramento [inaudible] she did.
>> Yeah, she's interesting woman.
>> And at that talk, she described -- this was not long after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, where the tsunami took it out --
>> Yes, it did.
>> -- and she described how if anybody, besides a nuclear engineer who thinks very linearly, had been on the planning team for this, for the construction of the nuclear power plant, they would have realized -- they would have seen in their mind's eye the ocean waters rushing into the room that held the backup power systems and controls for the reactor, which were all below sea level, and --
>> And what a good idea that was to build it below sea level.
>> Right, right. But she said anybody who was -- you know, had a different way of thinking, even maybe not even so far as somebody who was autistic and saw the whole world in pictures, might have been able to foresee that and then plan against it.
>> Conceivable, and that's the concept, isn't it, that if we had had that person on the team, and if we routinely had those kinds of individuals on the team, think how much better our planning and projects would have turned out.
>> To your point about Coordinated Resource Management as well, it seems like one of the keys is dealing with the natural world in concrete details instead of talking about methodology. You know, for example, if you have a team of people who all think they have different ideas about how land should be managed, they likely all agree that what you want is not the gully but the wet meadow that can absorb water. They may disagree on how to get there, but usually, those groups with seemingly widely disparate interests and beliefs can agree on what they want for what Dave Duncan, a rancher in Ellensburg, has called a landscape goal. And then we just have to work through how to get there.
>> That's been a key to many of the successes I've had when I've put together workshops for groups of people is doing just that. What would you like? And surprisingly similar, what they would like. They want the meadow. They don't want the gully.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Then it's just a detail, how do we get there?
>> Right, how do we create that?
>> You had a question, and maybe I'm jumping ahead in your scenario, that actually I pondered quite a bit since I received it a couple days ago. One of your rancher friends had apparently asked, so why should anyone care about rangeland management? And at first, that was a gobstruck moment. Well, of course, they care. Everybody cares. Well, actually, many of them don't. In fact, many of them are unaware, and they find it therefore a very esoteric kind of question. But why should we care? Well, I thought about that for a while and pondered. In the U.S. -- and it depends on how you calculate, but 40% of our land surface is -- and probably it's greater than that, but at least that, is could be classified as rangelands. Globally, it's probably closer to 70. And now, that's a huge proportion of our land mass. Now, so what does that 70% give us besides area? Well, it's all multiple resources. There are five major categories, and then they break into a bazillion subcategories of values that we get from them, and everybody should care about those. For me, personally, number one would be the watershed habitat things. If that 40% of the land surface is functioning properly, and the hydrology is working the way we would like it to work, then you will have streams that are supporting meadows and fish habitat and all sorts of things. You will have some great safety in terms of wildfire and other kinds of devastations that could be coming through, because the land had become desertified -- help me with word desertification. And any rate, so that's a big one to me. Another large one is the question of herbivory, and lots of people say grazing, and then go directly from grazing to cattle. But it's herbivory, with all kinds of creatures from grasshoppers to giraffes, I guess, and these creatures are important to us for one reason or another in that they fit in the web of life, and are part of the whole functioning ecosystem. And again, it's an important economic but also important from a resource point of view, to have all of these resources going for us and working. The next one would be fiber. It's in my mind. Now, again, people probably would simplify that timber and say, well, rangelands don't produce much timber. Well, not in the same sense that western Oregon does, but on the other hand, there is a fiber resource involved with that. Some of it is harvestable timber, like ponderosa pine or Douglas fir. Others of it might be some kind of not so well understood fiber, like juniper, and whether it's used for firewood or fenceposts or exotic wood creations, but it's a resource. We can work from there into recreation. Gosh, when I was a kid --
>> I'm going to pause you for a second. This is fascinating, because when I hear food and fiber, my brain immediately thinks of leather and wool and not wood.
>> Interesting. Yeah, that's how we're schooled, isn't it?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Interesting point, thank you, yeah. Well, let's throw the wood in there, too. Recreation, when I was a kid, was kind of pooh-poohed, and in fact, almost laughed off as something silly, and if you ever saw a guy in Bermuda shorts out in the middle of Nevada, that was a subject of great entertainment. In reality over the decades, it's become a big issue. Now, whether it's recreation in the Sears Roebuck catalog point of view with the happy family camping alongside a stream bank, or it's more of a wildland experience, where you could have wide open spaces and many acres of it to experience the world in a much different light, I can speak only for myself, but when I have the opportunity, which I do relatively often, to get out, either alone or with a group of cherished individuals and explore some of these wildland areas and look around and see things like rattlesnakes or Indian pictographs or how the various sequences of grasses are growing, to me, that is a day that was a gift from heaven. I think many people see it in some level do that. This is just an aside, but since I've retired, one of the things I've been doing is leading people on what I call eco tours, I guess, for lack of a better word, but take a group of church people, for example, out, that their whole idea of hiking in the rangelands would be hiking, go from point A to point B as quick as we can. When they go with me, you go 100 feet before we have to stop and dig a soil pit and do something else. And at first these people would beat their heads against the wall, "Can we ever get going? Will we ever get there?" Well, we might not, you know? But after a trip or two where they suddenly said, "You know, what we saw was something magnificent. Now, I'm looking at how the bugs work, or how something else does, or fire patterns that I can see on the far horizon, something of that nature, that's good stuff."
>> Mm-hm.
>> Yeah.
>> And it has an effect on the human psyche as well.
>> Oh, man.
>> There's reams of research on that now.
>> If you read some of the early literature that came out in the '60s when this whole idea of wildland and preservation of wilderness and that sort of thing was really gaining foothold, that's one of the things that they spoke of very commonly, was the commonality of how my psyche somehow improved, and you even see it today in a little different genre, but Cheryl Strayed who wrote Wild, I think is the name of her book, she's a woman that hiked the Pacific Crest Trail as a healing exercise (almost think of it as when a Native American vision quest kind of thing), came out of it a very different person than she went into it. It's a wonderful thing.
>> There was a woman from a Rocky Mountain bird conservation group that gave a talk, one of the keynote talks at the SRM two years ago. I don't recall whether you were there or not.
>> Two years ago, I was suffering from a different malady. It seems like the last couple of years I had something, and I missed that meeting.
>> At the very end of her talk, she played recorded birdsong across the loudspeakers in whatever the auditorium was, and it was fascinating to watch how you could see people visibly relax. You could see their pulse go down, and I've mentioned this numerous times on the podcast before, but it was really remarkable how just the artificially reproduced sound of a bird being played in a, you know, an urban setting dramatically changed. You could see their heartbeat go down. You could see people's bodies relax, and that's, you know, not even being immersed in the nature itself.
>> That's interesting, and it's interesting when you put that in perspective to what it was 75 years ago where recreation and rangelands was kind of a silly thing, to now, my gosh, it's going to save our souls. Finally, there's a wildlife issue, and almost everybody loves wildlife. What's not to love, you know? But rangelands are a habitat home for many, many species, and it's wonderful to have the opportunity to get out and be among various kinds of wildlife, and you see the interactions between these several interactions that I or groups that I've mentioned. Jack Southworth has done a marvelous job of rehabilitating a ranch that, in the 1920s, was used too heavily, and now is coming back, and he cherishes that he has reestablished an antelope herd. And Jack can tell you marvelous stories about that, and will, if you get him started. And that is not only a wonderful thing for him and on the land that he's managing, but for everybody, the tourists that drive through on the highway, to the people living the community. You know, it's to everyone. It's a -- it's wonderful to see wildlife. I love driving up that road to his ranch, which is miles long, because I'm sure to see something, probably elk, undoubtedly mule deer, very likely antelope (I haven't seen a bear yet, but I'm looking) and all kinds of birds and what they call watchable wildlife, the little guys. And it's, to my way of thinking, and anybody that I've ever been with that will give me enough time to notice, "Did you see that over there?" it becomes a fulfilling thing. It's a wonderful, wonderful experience. So that's how I decided to answer that. That's why it's important to you and to me, and to the person that makes a living delivering mail in the city. It's something that we all have a benefit from, directly maybe, and luckily, if you are in that position, but certainly indirectly.
>> That's a good answer. The context for the question is that Mark Pratt, who is an Idaho rancher, is on the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission, and we're working together some on a project to try to get rancher stories out to people besides the choir --
>> Yes.
>> -- and --
>> Yes, we've preached to the choir long enough.
>> Yes, and so he's looking for, you know, what are the angles that communicate well to people that don't even know they -- that don't know they don't know about rangelands and why they matter, and I think that's a good answer.
>> One of the things that seems to always work is if you can get those people with you for a little while. Now, maybe that's some windshield time in the car going somewhere, or maybe it's through a slideshow or a PowerPoint or some kind of thing like that, but to share some of these things, the wildlife and the water running free and clear (imagine that) and these kinds of things. It's things working well together.
>> Maybe related to that. I don't remember whether I sent the question from Tom if it came in on time, but Tom Bartlett asks what things have gone undone that you would like to see completed, say, in the next 100 years?
>> Wouldn't it be nice if I could be here and follow it?
>> Yeah.
>> There are a number of things that remain undone, and that's encouraging in itself, because that means there are things to do and appropriate important issues for us and our kids and our grandkids to carry the torch forward, and maybe in a slightly different format, slightly different desires, because I assume it'll change. I mean, my thoughts on all this have changed from time I was a child, and I suppose my father's have as well, raised on a ranch in Montana and gone through something, you know, during the Great Depression, would have seen Timothy Higgins in the worst hard times in first hand. But I would like us to get a handle on wildfire. And I would also like to see us get a handle on climate change, temperature change, however you want to express it. And I know that's a political hot button, but the truth of the matter is we got issues and we need to deal with them, and I would like to see us do it rationally, and I would like to see us do it in a way that has value so that something positive could get done and. And it could, if we could work together and think together. And I was pleased a few days ago when my son from San Francisco, who's involved with all things computer, and he's got kids that are brilliant and are now -- one of them's high school junior. She is working with a Stanford professor. They live in Palo Alto, and working on issues of smoke, wildfire and smoke and some of the things that smoke does, and she's all excited about the various aspects of that. Well, there are lots of aspects to not just smoke, but this whole wildfire thing. We've come some distance on that. We came from when my father was active, wildfire was a moral equivalent of war. You jumped on any wildfire with both feet. Had a lightning strike up on the mountain, you were out of bed, got your boots on, in the pickup and racing up there to put that thing out before it became something more. Now, there are different views of it. Wildfire was a natural part of the ecosystem, but it's a question of how is it managed, and do you put it off until you can't manage it and then you burn down your communities, or can you do something more like we've done in Sisters, Oregon, where they've got an active fire management plan for the Ponderosa pine and the understories to keep that so that when a wildfire does get roaring, it's at least slowed down in that area, and probably doesn't even get going. When we had those big fires a few years ago around the top of the Cascades, the fire burned around those areas, and it is so good to see (not that we like seeing the burned stuff), but hey, you can manage this. Look at here, as opposed to there. So I'd like to see much more of that, and then this climate change stuff. I think there are ways we could do good things. This watershed piece that I spoke of a while ago fits into that quite wonderfully. If we had our high watersheds working the way they should, I think our climate balances would be much more in keeping with moderation, because they would have means of ameliorating each other, and but we don't. We've moved to extremes, so we get this extreme versus that extreme, and that's tends to be a huge problem for us, but I'd like -- those are two things I'd really like to see us work on. And there's a lot of room for work.
>> There is. I think there's also a lot being done that is encouraging.
>> Oh, fortunately there is, yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm not the only one that would see something like that. I think maybe anybody that's in natural resources could probably see that one pretty clearly.
>> Mm-hm. Ad I do think we've -- we, collectively, have been doing maybe a good job of moving away from some of those extremes recently. I'm thinking of some of the research out of the burn station here in Oregon, outlining or trying to help understand the effects of grazing on the plant-soil interface, and the likelihood of burning and the speed of burning. And, you know, you -- I often, as likely you have over the years, find myself in this middle spot between the ranchers who say, "Well, if you just graze it all, it can't burn," and then, you know, the other side that says, "Well, it's flammable because we over grazed it, and now we have invasive annual grasses that would not have been there if it hadn't been destroyed in the first place." And it seems that, at the moment, if we deal with the hand that's been given to us, we do have invasive annual grasses, and we have an obligation to manage those in a way that is going to reduce risk, but I see -- I do see both of those extremes moving back toward the middle, which is that some amount of what I would call sustainable grazing or proper grazing does not eliminate the risk of fire, but it changes the likelihood and the frequency and the severity and the speed and the aerial extent of fire when it does burn.
>> Your grandmother was right, Tip. She told you moderation in all things, yup.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Yeah. I think we are seeing logic of that, and that's a good example.
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