A reader response to the Sept. 11 article on Western Watersheds Project’s stance on public lands recommended discussing the topic with Dr. Rick Knight. This article takes that advice, presenting Knight’s academic perspectives as a conservation biologist. Knight is a professor emeritus at Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources. He started teaching there in 1987, after completing his PhD in wildlife science at the University of Wisconsin and several postdoctoral fellowships in the field.
“I never thought I’d be an advocate for sustainable ranching,” Knight said in conversation with The Sopris Sun, reflecting on the beginning of his career in northern Colorado. Knight sees himself first and foremost as a conservation biologist, which has led him to defend managed private and public-lands grazing of livestock. “I became an advocate for [this],” he said, “in lieu of rural subdivisions, because that’s where our natural heritage of conservation value resides.”
Knight recounted that 35 years ago, “I started to wonder, could ranching be done in a sustainable way?” The answer he landed upon was “yes,” within the broader context of how humans interact with land, not just how domestic and wild species move across it. “The research and work I do is focused on conserving our natural heritage.” To Knight, that means looking at the full ecosystem of public and private land, including human interactions.
About 43% of Colorado land is public, while the other 57% is private. “We will not successfully conserve our natural heritage if we focus only on public lands,” Knight explained. That means thinking about and working with landowners and those with permits to utilize public land to make impacts as sustainable as possible. The biggest problem species, it seems, is humans. “If you ignore the human economic dimension and focus only on the ecological dimension, policies will fail,” Knight pointed out. “We as humans are part of these ecosystems.”
Residential developments and outdoor recreation have immense, often-overlooked impacts, and Knight emphasized that it is important to keep that in perspective. Based on land use, current economic incentives drive private land use toward residential development, which deteriorates the ecosystem more than grazing and ranching, Knight said. Moreover, “Outdoor recreation is the number two cause of degradation on our public lands.”
Knight shared several academic and scientific articles of his and colleagues’ research on public lands use to help establish understanding of the topic. In a 2007 study, Knight, alongside Collin Tallbert and John Mitchell, surveyed 48 Rocky Mountain counties and nearly 5 million acres of private lands and over 14 million acres of public lands with federal grazing leases. They found that the private lands had more productive soil and double the stream density. One of the implications they identified was “the viewpoint that all livestock grazing is damaging to ecosystem health is being replaced by a better understanding of the way climate, grazing, soils and other factors interact to shape rangeland environments.”
Another resource shared was a 30-page 1999 study by Thomas Stohlgren in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey and Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory on the effects of grazing and soil quality on native and invasive plants in the Rockies. The generalized implications of that study showed “(1) grazing probably has little effect on native species richness at landscape scales; (2) grazing probably has little effect on the accelerated spread of most exotic plant species at landscape scales; (3) grazing affects local plant species and life-form composition and cover, but spatial variation is considerable; (4) soil fertility, climate and other factors may have a greater effect on plant species diversity than does grazing; and (5) few plant species show consistent, directional responses to grazing and cessation of grazing.” In other words, managed grazing is less of a threat than soil quality and climate, among other inputs.
Knight also weighed in on the contentious debates about predator species. On wolves, he said, “we need a series of interventions to make this introduction work better,” noting that prevention is the best strategy to protect wolves and domestic stock alike. He noted that CSU has a full-time faculty member working with Colorado ranchers to identify the best ways to prevent depredation from ever happening. Once depredation happens, it is much harder to prevent because it becomes a cultural option for the wolves, Knight said.
In interactions with wild predators, he articulated the importance of establishing aversion to humans with minimal possible harm. “If interactions with humans have a penalty, wildlife will avoid humans. If interactions have a reward, they are attracted to humans. If there is neither penalty nor reward, wildlife become habituated, which is the most dangerous option for those species.” That doesn’t mean that wildlife should be deliberately lured in or harmed. It does mean that one of the challenges Colorado Parks and Wildlife is trying to solve is how to establish wolf avoidance of humans and ranches during the reintroduction process.
Knight connected this to mountain lions as well. He feels strongly that voters should opt against Proposition 127, which proposes banning hunting of the big cats. He pointed out that California outlawed hunting of mountain lions in 1990. In the 34 years since, California Parks and Wildlife has had to kill many more lions than were killed when permitted hunting was a policy. The lions have become habituated to people, increasing risk to humans and lions. “Incentivizing aversion to humans is the safest thing for the mountain lions,” Knight said.
