The Mexican gray wolf, the lesser prairie chicken, the dunes sagebrush lizard, the bison--all sacrificed to economic interests in violation of the spirit, and often the letter, of the Endangered Species Act.

As with grazing on the BLM rangelands, the destruction of our forests is heavily subsidized. The most common estimate is the Forest Service loses between $1,400 and $1,900 per acre logged.

Overall, the cost to the Forest Service to prepare and administer the timer sales, to oversee the construction of the roads, to mitigate (in usually small ineffective ways) the damage to the landscape far outweighs any fiscal return.

In eastern Oregon and Washington, where grazing reigns supreme, an estimated 90 percent of the sage biome is gone.

The fate of our national mammal is decided by ranchers who act as self-appointed representatives of the American people.

Attack the value of public lands as a national birthright, reduce their worth in the public eye, diminish the institutions that protect the land, cut down their authority, bring them into disrepute, undermine public confidence, neuter enforcement, create a climate of uncertainty and disorder, demoralize the land managers--this is the long game now being played.

DeVoto observed in the 1940s that no rancher in his right mind wanted ownership per se of the public lands. That would entail responsibility, stewardship, and worse, the payment of property taxes. What the rancher who is farsighted has always wanted, and what extractive industry wants in general, is private exploitation with costs paid by the public.

The top 10 percent of grazing-permit holders on federal lands own 50 percent of all livestock on those lands; the bottom 50 percent own just 5 percent.

Unmolested and with grass to eat, a tortoise can live eighty years. Their populations have plummeted in the Mojave in recent years, victims of a perfect storm of drought, sprawl development, solar energy projects, off-road vehicle enthusiasts (who crush them under their wheels), poaching, vandals with pistols (who use them for target practice), and, not least, livestock grazing.

Everything I thought about cows as an Easterner-come-west is wrong. They are not symbols of a noble culture of mounted herdsmen. They are not cute. They are an invasive species, Bos Taurus, a water-loving European animal not fit for arid climates, and their cancer-like effects on the land have not ceased.