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 rangelands 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 range land, 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 out sized 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.
>> I've been meaning to get with Hugh Barrett [assumed spelling] to discuss some of these things as well.
>> Yes.
>> But I think, as I recall from one of our fire conversations, he had some hand in this terminology that has since taken off, the capture, store, and safe release.
>> Yes.
>> What's the story behind that?
>> That's a fun story and we get a lot of mileage out of it. Back in the '80s and '90s, I don't remember exactly the date, we wrote a book. It was called "Rangeland Health." And this book was I guess the senior author was Hugh -- Fee Busby. And Fee's a professor out of Utah State. And anyway Fee was -- and I was on the committee and I wrote chapter four which modestly stated is the most important part of the chapter. You know, that's me.
>> This is the 1994 National Research Council --
>> Thank you, Tip.
>> Okay.
>> So you said in the beginning you need to record it because I couldn't remember. Yes. That's the one. That hit the range community kind of like a blunderbuss. Big boom. Many, many people were excited about it. They saw it as a chance to turn this whole kind of spinning our wheels deal around. Some of the old timers kind of felt that it was a slap in their face and the work that they had done. So I got chewed out pretty royally by one of the old timers at an SRM meeting one time, C. Wayne Cook, who's one of the well known gods. Explained to me that, you know, I didn't have to crash the old guys just to get my point across. And I of course told him that that was never the intention. And then I wrote an article and published it somewhere that was entitled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants." And that's when I saw this rangeland health book to be. We took the things that the C. Wayne Cook's and the people that had established means to classify rangelands in many, many different arrangements, circumstances, and put them together to make the next step. And I saw it as standing on the shoulders of giants.
>> Which they had also done likely.
>> Oh. Of course. That's the way we all -- building on stuff that's gone before. That caught on that particular part of it now because now they somebody said, you know, "He wasn't just trying to do self aggrandizement. But rather do something for the good of the order." And so that was all well and good until one day a few months later one of the agency people over in Burns came up to me and basically said, "I'm convinced we should do this." How? And I realized in all of this high minded talk that we had spelled out a really good overview, a really fine view of where we collated the stuff that's gone before and put it into something that could be valuable in the future to understand. Now here's this guy standing in front of me holding out his hand saying, "Give me the car keys. I'll go do it. Where do I go? What do I do?" Well, oh. And so the agencies got together, each of them. [Inaudible] took the major role on this one, but -- and put together something like they called guidelines, something in guidelines. And took the idea of how we're going to particularly the soils and vegetation part and how you would measure it and what you would go for and how you would put this together. And there were fellows like that group out of San Dimas and down in -- in [inaudible]. And what's the young man's name?
>> Jeff Herrick?
>> That's the one. Sharp young man. This is while --
>> He might quibble with the young descriptor now.
>> Well, he'd probably like it.
>> I'm sure he would.
>> But any rate began to put some details. Okay. Well, if you're going to see whether or not soil has some stability we don't just say that we need soil stability. How do I measure it? So he came up with some ways to measure it. And this sort of thing. So it evolved from there. Hugh became the person that was in charge of those standards. That's the word. Standards and guidelines for the BLM to get that written. So he spent a lot of time in D.C at that time taking the overall concept from the book that Busby had coordinated. And details for this. And further details with guys like Jeff Herrick that are adding the nitty gritty kind of stuff to it. And put that together. And so Hugh is kind of a middle man in the sense that he's in between those two things. But very, very crucial because he got the Bureau of Land Management to accept that a concept was valid and here's something that should go from there. He got involved with this. I began to gain some kind of a national reputation. When he would tell stories usually on one of my -- he and I have been friends for a long, long time. I'll go on a field trip and he'd tell students a story and that story over time became well known. Hugh's family are a well to do family that owned a ranch down in Half Moon Bay in California. And Hugh spent his time on the ranch and he would especially like to go out on a rainy day and lay on the ground and watch the water coalesce in their little rivulets and various things and where did it go and what did it do. What stopped it? What encouraged it to go pell mell and this sort of thing? And he kind of like me is saying, "I want to stop soil erosion as a 10 year old." As a perhaps a teenager and a bit younger he came up with the idea that the whole idea, the essence of watershed management, is the capture, the storage, and the safe release of raindrops or precipitation if it's not. Well, that's it. You know, that's -- that's my whole career. I studied infiltration or I studied the, you know [inaudible] the capture or I would have studied something about soil's holding capacity, water holding capacity or how it released water or something like this. And then the safe release. How did you get the water from that soil sponge into the springs and the seeps and so forth in a way that it came over time and was useful to you? So instead of having water coming off the mountain like a toilet being flushed and going down a pipe it came later in the year. And we could prolong the water coming to the stream by two weeks maybe, maybe a month. And that's something. If I can deliver you cool clean water in August that's 50 degrees, and that temperature is -- there's all kinds of things that go in to this. Then I've done a tremendous favor to you and your salmon. Whereas if my water's come and gone by May then that's a whole different story. And it's again a concept that can be sold because people can see it. And you can come up with all kinds of examples. The hair on your arm is a vegetation on a hillside and the angle of your arm is its deepest avail and so forth. And we can demonstrate stuff and it's visible. You can imagine this. So at any rate Hugh came up with the concept or the phrase capture, store, and safe release. Hugh is very articulate once you get him going. But he's nervous as a cat when you approach him with a microphone. You can just about give him heart failure. And so he stutters and sputters until you get him going. But together we made a great team because I could tell the story. And he came up with the concept. And then of course if he's with me he can't stand it and before very long he's pitching to. And it works really well. So the capture, store, and safe release thing has been very, very useful for watershed management for rangeland management. And interestingly enough maybe for everything else. I have some training as a civil engineer and I was at a civil engineering convention one time and this guy's up there talking about how the whole concept of this project is capture, store, and safe release, but it was of something else. It was some [inaudible] or something. Well, I'll be damned.
>> It's traveled.
>> It's traveled. And so but yeah. We didn't think about it. Maybe that's kind of how everything works.
>> I recall you saying at some point that I'm pretty sure I've reviewed it at least 1,000 times at this point that we should think of them as water catchments and not watersheds because of the whole idea that we're not shedding water except in a controlled manner that provides for [inaudible] stream [inaudible].
>> That's a wonderful point, Tip. It's a whole different mindset, isn't it? Watershed is a civil engineering concept. It's a concept that says the way to solve a flooding problem is to get rid of the water. It's why the civil engineers put ditches down every stream in the west.
>> Yeah.
>> It's the reason why they build dams, all this stuff which from a natural resources point of view you would handle through natural functioning of the land and soil, vegetation. So at any rate yeah. When you tell that story you tell it well. And so I think that's really good.
>> Yeah. And to some of your other points previously I do think that these tie together. This -- and you were alluding to it. Maybe we can come back to it. This idea of increasing water in soils, increasing the vegetation that's occupying them, all of that involves an accumulation of carbon, you know, below the soil surface. And that's one of the things that people are paying attention to now even if they're not thinking about water catchment function or the [inaudible] interface. They are thinking about where do we have carbon? And all of those riparian systems that once had thicker riparian soils even the more temperate parts of the world looked like peat bogs when it was a gigantic amount of carbon. And many of those have been lost and we're in the process of rebuilding them.
>> Yes.
>> But that all affects climate, fire, wildlife, water, you name it.
>> All tied together, isn't it? And sometimes I guess it's hard for us to see how individual things really are tied together, but they are. There's a woman who's up in Montana now, but she -- named Linda Poole [assumed spelling] that managed the Sycan Marsh for the Nature Conservancy. Sycan Marsh used to be the [inaudible] cattle ranch and it was the largest cattle ranch in Oregon. Now the Nature Conservancy owns it. One of the caveats of the sale was that Linda had to provide them with a 30,000 AUM cow permit annually for the next 30 years. And then yes they can buy the ranch. And so Linda who's one of my former students all of a sudden is managing for trying to bring back native vegetation. But is trying to manage 30,000 AUMs which is big time in anybody's book.
>> It's a lot of grass.
>> Yeah. She did it. She pulled it off beautifully through coordinated resource management planning. She got her supporting agencies that -- as far as [inaudible] and others to work with her. She brought in Bill Anderson and myself to talk to her about how to keep the ball rolling and me particularly on the hydrology part. Your peat bogs and these sorts of things that you mentioned became fascinating to me because she said, "John, I don't know what to do. I'm going to go in and tear out all of the homesteaders waterworks" that they had thrown up to get water out of there. The gray watershed. We're going to get rid of this water. And I said, "Well, before you do that let's you and I go to the high point on the place where we can see the whole marsh and talk about how this water functions, how it works there." So we sat up there on a rock for half a day and followed the stream courses out. And the key to that whole thing before settlement was they would come in from these various [inaudible] and down through the marsh and filter through the marsh and grow up huge volumes of vegetation which would die back and then you had peat bog and so forth. And it would break down. And wash down to the south end of the thing where there was a construction. And it would jam up there and it formed a peat bog that -- a peat dam that was about 8 feet high and 50 or 60 feet long. And it was like an earthen dam only it was peat. And it was serious. It was a serious dam. And it controlled water all the way up the marsh. First thing the homesteaders did when they got in there was light it on fire and burn it out. They burned that sucker out. And then they put in their little dams, their head dams and their other ditches and other things that they had to try to get the water flowing out. And so we're sitting up there and we're looking at it and I said, "First thing. You really need to get that dam reconstructed." Yeah. Right. "How am I going to create a peat dam that's that big that only took 3 million years there [inaudible]?" And I got like, "Day after tomorrow." You know. They didn't go for it. I said, "Well, let's think about this." We brainstormed that for a while. And agreed it really looks a lot like something that CH2M Hill engineering company can create. They might cut out a levee. And it's only made out of peat. It will be made out of concrete and steel. But guess what? It could work the same way. And then she and her advisers, mostly her advisors -- she was in the hard position because the advisors all wanted what they wanted and they wanted it now. Wanted to tear out all of the dikes and ditches and head water structures that the pioneers had put in over decades because they were put in for the wrong reason. They were put in to get the water out rather than in. As flat as that marsh is, I'll bet we ought to be able to make them go run the other direction like they did naturally. They want to anyway. And we've already got some of the work done. She took advantage of all those things that had gone before in one way, form, or another. And so instead of tearing out the dams and tearing out the ditches and things she got them all working, water running the other way now. And within three years she had reestablished native perennials in that marsh. And within five years she had brought bull trout back to Coyote Creek which is one of the little streams that come in to the main Sycan river. And that was a disappointment though. When Noah heard that they had reestablished bull trout in a place that had been previously devoid, they came in and took over the management of that area because that was way, way, way too important to turn over to a bunch of cowboys was their expression literally. It pissed everybody off. And you can imagine Linda was furious about how that light that put her in. Wayne Atmore [assumed spelling] the guru of --
>> The godfather of riparian management.
>> Yes. Was so angry that he was in on the whole thing too. He wrote them a letter and said, "This happened because you got this person to make it happen. Leave her alone." They said, "You don't fully understand." And so they didn't leave her alone. Really, really a disappointment. I can see when something like that happens how discouraging it must be for one of our land managers, agency or private, who's doing their very best to do something good and then gets a hand slapped. Feel. And so I guess that tells us that we still have lots of work to do in the human side of things. You know, getting it together or a better peace. You know, go figure, you highfalutin agency people watching D.C, that this girl who's a pretty darn good horseman might know something.
>> Part of what's encouraging about that is that transformation occurring much more rapidly than a person might think it could. I've seen a few other situations like that. One of them was actually in northwest of Ellensburg on the Teanaway Community Forest. This was an area that had really, really big pine trees in the past and there was actually a book written about the area called "The Pine Log Express." But at one time they had spur railroad lines going up all of the little tributaries to this main stem of the Teanaway River. And in order to keep those railroad beds dry they cut a trench down the side of each of the railroad beds and it did it just exactly what you described 1,000 times. It drained the bathtub. Because the trench was about 6 foot deep and so it dropped the water table to below the root zone of the plants that were in these, you know, sub drainages. And dried it out.
>> It would.
>> And of course then there were cows in there and so everybody thereafter associates the dry upland vegetation in these riparian areas with the presence of livestock when the original problem was that we just pulled the plug and dumped all the water.
>> I think it's a similar story to the beaver. When we did that we started a downward spiral. Now the cows undoubtedly had their share, but still you probably ought to understand where credit is due.
>> Right.
>> Or shame if --
>> Right. Well, and to your solution as well in that situation what they did was plug those up with a series of earthen and wooden dams along the length of each watershed. And they filled back in. And they filled back in quickly.
>> Well, good. And hopefully at the same time they said, "Well, as long as we're at it we might as well manage our livestock grazing to something that we know to be more fresh and good than this --"
>> Right. There was plenty to be placed there that was legitimate, but it was compounded, you know, by the history.
>> Which brings me back to Jenny Pluhar's [assumed spelling] comment about west Texas. That is a tough nut. First of all it's really, really difficult country. There's you can -- you can tip it over pretty easily because it's at such a delicate balance. And then secondly you're dealing with the cohort of people that are headstrong and -- what will we say? Quite sure of their own circumstance. And so they are hard pressed to listen to another point of view. I'm trying to say this positively. And that makes that a problem that is hard to solve.
>> What advice do you have for young rangeland professionals? I know it seems like an obvious question, but I do think it's an important one. I feel like I could -- I could guess at some answers from the conversation we've had to this point, but I would like to know what you think, if anything.
>> Sometimes I wonder if I think. Advice to someone coming up the path. I've always liked the idea that you should be a lifelong learner. And a person that is a lifelong learner is in a position to not only educate him or herself, but also learn how to do something that then shares what they've learned so that they can teach because knowing something is interesting, but it's useful only if you can pass it along. And so I think that lifelong learner idea is there. Now that goes not only with the concept of the natural resources things. Jenny's west Texas thing. There are undoubtedly some infiltration or soil holding capacity issues that are unique to west Texas that one should know. But there also is the human piece to it where we learn to appreciate each other's point of view. And if I'm hoping that you hardheaded Mr. X can learn from me, I guess I better be open enough to say maybe I ought to be open enough to accept your points of view or at least listen to them on my part. And I think if we do that they will come around slowly maybe, but then we each get a chance not only to have our -- put our oar in the water, but maybe to learn from the other guy. And maybe all this hard work I've been doing rowing could be modified in a positive way if I just kept the oar at a slightly different angle. And I might be able to learn that from another person. So that's what I would say. That's be a lifelong learner which includes everything. And go from there.
>> That's a good word. Thank you for giving me so much of your time. It was wonderful.
>> It is a pleasure to talk to you and if we were doing it just over beer it would be equally as enjoyable.
>> Thank you for listening to the "Art of Range" podcast. Links to websites or documents mentioned in each episode are available art artofrange.com and be sure to subscribe to the show through Apple Podcast, Podbean, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app so that each new episode will automatically show up in your podcast feed. Just search for art of range. If you are not a social media addict, don't start now. If you are, please like or otherwise follow the "Art of Range" on Facebook, Linked In, and X, formerly Twitter. We value listener feedback. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode or just want to let me know you're listening, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For more direct communication from me sign up for a regular email from the podcast on the home page at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by CAHNRS Communications in the college of agricultural, human, and natural resource sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by sponsors. If you're interested in being a sponsor, send an email to show@artofrange.com.
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