CPW’s SWAP. The Nature Conservancy calls the Southern High Plains a “priority area”. Just the other side of Halloween ...

CPW’s SWAP

I posted a bit back about CPW’s (in a newsletter that had a quick rundown of the US Forest Service’s assessment of the Comanche Grasslands -- see both in the first link below) State Wildlife Action Plan.

It’s a plan that lays out threats and possible responses to state wildlife.

I had a reader send me another version of that, roughly the same info but a different format. The second link below is to CPW’s SWAP (Statewide Wildlife Action Plan) dashboard.

You may or may not find it easier to navigate, but you have it now.

https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/i-smell-a-rosmarino-colorados-own?r=15ij6n

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cpw1247/viz/ColoradoSWAPDashboard/MainDashboard?publish=yes

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The Nature Conservancy (TNC) calls the Southern High Plains a “priority area”

According to their page linked first below, The Nature Conservancy is “... working to protect 2 million acres of native grasslands within the 71-million-acre Southern High Plains—one of the world’s least protected and most threatened ecosystems.”

If you want to see details about where their area of interest lies, I took a screenshot of their map and attached it as screenshot 1.

When you read through TNC’s page and read into their plans a little, you might come away with the sense that they’re interested in working with folks who depend on the land for their living. The pair of quotes (from their blog posts linked second and third below--same order as the quotes) are representative and certainly give that impression.

From the Huefrano River Canyon Ranch purchase:

“TNC will protect the property with a conservation easement while land management—including a focus on regenerative agriculture with community partners—is underway. TNC plans to sell the protected Huerfano River Canyon Ranch to a conservation-minded buyer who will carry on the work to support conservation and livelihoods.”

From the SOARing to New Heights blog post:

“The State Land Board only sells land when it is clear that the reinvestment of the proceeds can provide a greater benefit to the trusts they manage on behalf of schools. In July 2023, the State Land Board Commissioners voted unanimously to make the Bohart Ranch available to a conservation-focused buyer, supporting their financial mission while protecting the land’s ecological and agricultural values, as well as airspace above it. Conservation is not unheard of at Bohart Ranch. TNC has held a lease on the property since 1998 to sustainably manage the property’s prairies and diverse wildlife. TNC, in turn, subleases the ranch to a multi-generational ranching family known for their stewardship of the land.”

The overall idea works like this.

TNC wants to lock down the land. So they, or someone they connects to the sale, buys the land and gets a conservation easement. The easement allows for tax breaks, but the easement means that certain restrictions are put on the use of the land. Some of these are standard, some are negotiated at the time of the easement. As an added bonus, sometimes carbon indulgences can be sold. Southern Plains Land Trust makes money this way on their easement land.

One of the things that some people are jazzed about with regard to conservation easements is that it can be written to specify that the land be used for agricultural purposes. This is likely what is meant by TNC above when they say they’re “protecting the land’s ecological and agricultural values”. Land is kept in production for Ag, it’s conserved, future generations can ranch.

While I have no doubt at all that conservation and good stewardship of lands are not exclusive, I remember back to an earlier newsletter from late June which I link to fourth below.

In brief, that newsletter contained a story about someone who’d put his ranch in an easement, but now finds the strictures of that easement to chafe with rising costs.

Quoting my newsletter: “Such is the case with the rancher in the Sun article below. He has a conservation easement with the Colorado Cattleman’s Agricultural Land Trust which is years old by now. One of the problems this rancher is facing has been rising costs, and, with the easement, a struggle to bring in enough revenue to keep the land.”

The question in my newsletter, and in the Sun article which provided the backbone, was whether or not conservation easements should be renegotiable. Currently, they’re not automatically so. For the rancher in the article, the lease (and the lease holder) would not allow him to have events as a way to raise extra money.

And with that, we finally arrive at my point.

Over and over, in TNC’s website, you see modifiers on the words regarding agriculture and ranching. You can see it yourself. Look in the quotes above, look in the blog posts.

It’s not just ranching, it’s conservation-minded.

Money and ownership afford a measure of control, and I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t what TNC is after. They clothe it in the guise of keeping the land free for conservation and agriculture, but what does that mean to them?

They have resources enough to gobble up land in their priority area, resources enough to do things like convince the State Land Board (probably didn’t take much convincing--they’re Polis appointees) to sell them the land instead of continuing to lease it or sell it to a private developer.

Once they have the land and the easement, they loudly proclaim how it will be kept in use for agriculture, but it must be remembered that what they don’t say is they get to set the terms on which it will be used, terms which are difficult if not impossible to change.

I wonder, are those uses going to be exactly the same as they were before with the State Land Board? Who gets the nod? Is it a bidding process like with the state or only the people TNC likes? Do they get to dictate whether you can use fly control in a mineral tub? Whether you get to mitigate against prairie dogs?

Lastly, if you don’t like the way things are going, do you get a chance to have public comment like with the State Land Board?

This is all somewhat speculative, but it’s not pure speculation. There is plenty of documented cases of TNC behaving poorly with landowners and easements to spur my concern.

If you’d like to read up some on TNC (their funding, their leadership, their poor behavior, etc.), I included a link to their Influence Watch page fifth below.**

In it, you’ll find an interesting blurb about something they got in trouble over turning over easements to their buddies. Quoting the Influence Watch article (with link intact):

“The U.S Senate Finance Committee was particularly concerned with whether or not the Nature Conservancy was using conservation easements to provide significant tax breaks to wealthy donors seeking to build large homes on land otherwise closed to development. ¹³“

Rightly concerned they should be apparently, for there’s good evidence they were doing just that. See the 6th link below for a reprint of a Washington Post article on it.

If TNC is willing to do things like this for their friends, if they’re willing to do the things like you’ll see in the screenshot with the footnote, is it a stretch to imagine they’d say they are open to continue ranching but have the reality be far from it? Is it a stretch to imagine that they’d open the land for grazing to only the people that do it their way?

No. It isn’t.

There is no guarantee that TNC will follow the same playbook in Colorado, but their making the high plains a priority should at least get your ears perked up and get you paying attention.

If you see things or hear things, share them. Tag me or others.

**See screenshot 2 for a particularly interesting niblet.

https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/southern-high-plains/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNsrWJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFsUmlzNWtHcFI2WDF0ZDNmAR6HgY3DW1nTlFV6rMVVMTMv2_Hw2QxeYuLbTWLhLnnKPNfsdOoDFJDTUp4mFQ_aem_5Jne32nk6N2rPiDG7pjguA

https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/colorado-huerfano-ranch-acquisition/

https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/colorado/stories-in-colorado/soar-initiative/

https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/should-conservation-easements-be?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/nature-conservancy/

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/adm/loeb/04a20-2.pdf

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Just the other side of Halloween ...

I got out the day after Halloween to prune my rabbitbrush for the winter. With the hard freezes we’ve had, I figure it’s fully dormant and it’s a mature shrub.

The pruning is, as you can see, pretty severe. I have found that rabbitbrush can take it, however. I will start this year with pruning my apache plume the same way; some shrubs you can really cut down without too much harm.

Besides having a nice winter, skeletal look to it (just a shade late for Halloween), I have to do something to keep this guy in check. It fronts up to a sidewalk and rabbitbrush have this nasty habit of splitting at their bifurcations.

The wood isn’t soft, but you can easily grab any point at which a branch splits and snap it back. Left to its own devices, this shrub snaps and lays down branches all over, something readily apparent in the photo from late Fall where it was in its full glory. The branches don’t die, but I’m left with the problem of blocked sidewalks and debris collecting.

One last tidbit. As you can probably imagine the seeds that resulted from all those golden flowers filled my trash bin. Filled it to the top! So, I have a pile of branches awaiting the next garbage day and an empty container.

Winter pruning at my house is as much about timing it for an empty garbage bin as it is timing it for the plant!