Ranchers and Environmentalists Collaborate: Learning from a corner of the Southwest

In hundreds of communities in our eleven western states, ranchers, environmentalists and federal land managers are wrestling with each other's differences in values, motives, needs and cultures. They meet in collaborative decision making groups to address the condition, use, or non/use of our public lands, which are administered for the most part by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the various state land offices. There is little intergroup coordination or intergroup communication and the collaborations have been joined by only a few national environmental advocacy organizations.