Guardians of the range

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By MATT WEISER
Sacramento Bee
Tuesday, May 08, 2007

On a golden morning in the hills of Yolo County, Scott and Casey Stone sort cattle for shipment to summer pasture.

The brothers, on horseback, silently weave through the noisy herd. With practiced eyes, they match cows with their calves before the truck arrives.

All around them is their 7,500-acre family ranch, a picture-perfect slice of a California landscape that is increasingly at risk.

Open space like this _ rolling hills, ancient oak trees, flower-filled meadows _ defines the state's scenery and supports a huge share of its wildlife. It is also the rallying cry for an unlikely coalition bent on keeping rangeland away from developers eager to satisfy demand for housing.

"There's been a lot of really nice ranches in California that over the years have been purchased and subdivided," said Scott Stone, 50. "We don't want to do that. We're trying to do ecologically friendly, sustainable ranching that benefits both us and the watershed and wildlife."

That's why the Stone brothers and their father, Hank, in 2005 preserved rangeland by selling development rights on their ranch. It's why they support the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition, which aims to protect about 13 million acres of oak woodland and grazing land between Redding and Bakersfield.

Taking on such a task shouldn't be a big deal for the coalition. After all, it's already achieved the unthinkable: getting environmentalists and cattle ranchers to work together.

Last year, 32 environmental and agriculture groups launched the alliance by signing the "California Rangeland Resolution." They committed to keeping grazing lands in the hands of cattle and sheep ranchers and helping them preserve the land by funding conservation projects.

For this, entities like the California Cattlemen's Association joined longtime adversaries such as Defenders of Wildlife, known for battling ranchers to reintroduce wolves in the Rocky Mountains.

Despite historic differences, the two found they care equally about the same California landscape.

California lost 105,000 acres of grazing land to urbanization between 1990 and 2004, according to the state Department of Conservation. The California Oak Foundation projects it could lose 750,000 acres more by 2040.

"We have a common threat, and that is the conversion of ranchland to homes and strip malls and sprawl," said Kim Delfino, California program director at Defenders of Wildlife. "It's actually nice to have a project where we're all working together rather than at cross-purposes. It is ambitious, but there's a great potential for success."

Steve Thompson, regional boss of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is credited with inspiring the coalition. In 2004, when he first came to Sacramento, he met separately with ranchers and environmentalists.

He got an earful about perceived inadequacies of federal environmental law. He challenged them to draft position papers on their environmental priorities, which he later shared with the other side.

"I kept saying, 'I understand what you're against. What are you for?' " Thompson said. "It turned out both the cattlemen and the environmental groups had a tremendous amount of overlap. It didn't surprise me, but I think it surprised them."

The groups later met for a barbecue on a ranch in Sunol in August 2005. The discussion continued a few months later at the cattlemen's annual conference, including a panel discussion called "Boots and Birkenstocks" focusing on common ground.

By January 2006, the resolution was signed and an agenda began to take shape. The Fish and Wildlife Service and cattlemen kicked in money to hire a full-time employee to staff the effort, and environmental groups are raising money to hire another.

It's all a dramatic reversal from rangeland conflict in the 1990s.

"A lot of it had to do with miscommunication, a lack of understanding and just not sharing information with each other," said Tracy Schohr, director of rangeland conservation at the cattlemen's association _ and the first staffer hired by the coalition. "By working together, we can achieve so much more than going on parallel tracks."

(The Sacramento Bee's Matt Weiser can be reached at mweiser@sacbee.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)