Not My Words: Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption

BLM and open-range land near Cañon City, CO 

Every January, I walk my A.P. U.S. Government students through the concept of "iron triangles." It is the policy-making relationship between congress, bureaucratic agencies, and special interest groups. E.g., an interest group will give money to a congressional campaign in return for friendly legislation and so on and so forth. Iron triangles are generally considered detrimental to democracy because the common good is ignored for special interests. Christopher Ketcham's This Land is a deep dive into the destructive relationship between corporate cattle farming, Congress, and federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. As one chapter's epigraph reads: "The real history of the western livestock industry is a country mile from our idealistic cowboy fantasy..." 

"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 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. The fatal error of the [The Establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument] was that it continued to allow cattle grazing. This was for political expediency, to quiet the opposition of cattle interests. There is no way to square that decision with the science of botany. How can you preserve a wild and unspoiled landscape with a ruinous alien bovine on it? You can't. It's an impossibility, an absurdity." -- Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West (2019)

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