Grass: In Search of Human Habitat

14. Subsidizing John Wayne

F O U R T E E N Subsidizing John Wayne 117 Figure 14. Accoutrements of ranching. Drawing by Casey Landrum. Most people in the small town where I live depend heavily on a food supply brought from long distances. Even those who harvest backyard gardens , milk goats, or annually kill a deer or cow get most of their calories from town. The food on the supermarket shelves—bread, milk, beans, vegetables , breakfast cereals, bacon, hamburger, and corn and soybeans in a thousand guises—comes from animals and plants grown in faraway places and shipped down highways built and maintained mostly by other people’s money. In this sense, we are subsidized. My dictionary defines subsidy as a “gift or grant to aid the needy.” Government subsidies to aid indigent people or elevate corporate profits have become widespread in America, and their dispensation a recurring point of contention among politicians and ordinary people. The federal government provides so-called subsidies to family farmers, ranchers, homeless and jobless people, poor communities, and home districts of powerful politicians. Giant corporations have come to claim more than their fair share of farm subsidies. Regardless of need, few of those offered subsidies nowadays seem to refuse them. Indeed, the term needy in my dictionary’s definition seems out of date, having little relation to where government subsidies actually go. As a consequence I have taken to defining subsidy simply as aid from the outside. My community gets a lot of outside aid, sometimes called subsidies but more often not. Our sparsely populated county qualifies by some government criteria as disadvantaged, but most of us drive late-model cars and only mediumaged trucks. I see no sign that any of us goes hungry—a measure of wealth not many cities can claim—and we don’t spend a lot of money on property taxes, water bills, or police protection. We pay only a small fraction of the costs of the roadways, utility lines, flood control structures, and health care facilities that put us more or less on a quality-of-life par with city folks. Taxpayers in other places foot most of these bills. As politicians well know, careful choice of words can blow a smoke screen over the dispensing of subsidy. Receiving “pork” or “welfare” plays poorly among those who admire self-sufficiency. Getting a “grant” or “contract” may mean the same thing, but it sounds a lot better. I remember my father’s outrage at the notion of able-bodied people living on food 118 stamps when job openings existed. But in his later years he picked up free government cheese advertised as surplus commodity. I don’t know whether the word surplus fooled him, or whether he saw free cheese as small payback for the taxes he’d paid over the years. Regardless, it gets very confusing, trying to figure out who is getting subsidized by whom and whether it’s a good or bad thing. In some ways subsidies resemble addictive drugs. They come in various forms, often disguised as normal ingredients of living. Applied in judicious doses under the right circumstances, some yield benefits. But incautiously applied, they can encourage addiction and generate side effects not anticipated by the provider or recipient. Sometimes the side effects spread to other times and places in unexpected ways. . . . . . In the early 1980s I first learned about the impacts of subsidy on Great Basin rangelands. This vast region between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains on the west gets little rain and supports primarily ranching. At the University of Nevada in Reno, I called at the office of the man many knew as the eminent range historian of the Great Basin, James A. Young. Ranching paraphernalia draped the walls of Young’s office. Old horseshoes , weathered bridles, bits, branding irons, and faded photographs gave authentic backdrop to his reputation. Here was a man steeped in the lore of the West and educated in the history of ranching. We talked of the times before cattle, of the silver, gold, grass, and small pockets of water that pulled Americans to the Great Basin in the late 1800s. Of the hopes and dreams of those Euro-Americans who, drawn to these great open spaces, were now replacing the native Americans, so recently diminished by disease and displacement. The grass...