A recent ruling by a federal administrative law judge giving the conservationists at the Grand Canyon Trust the right to buy, manage and, maybe, retire grazing allotments in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument should be seized as a means to such an end.
Because, despite what has been argued by such misguided participants as the governments of Kane and Garfield counties, the real enemy of responsible ranching in the West is not the Grand Canyon Trust or any other environmental group.
The enemies of sustainable ranching in the West are the agribusiness giants - Swift, Tyson and Excel - who have exploited their unchecked market power to turn a time-honored life-cycle lifestyle into a destructively efficient industry.
Ranchers today face a world where quantity is valued over quality, where there is one take-it-or-leave it offer from the only buyer who operates in their area, where beef processors hold price-fixing advance contracts on millions of head of cattle and operate in open defiance of both the spirit and the letter of anti-trust laws.
The marketplace as it is currently allowed to exist demands the maximum output from minimum inputs. It pressures ranchers to graze more cattle than a given area of land can sustain, especially when that land is of the parched sort found in southern Utah.
Kane and Garfield counties, vigorously supported by state Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, had argued that the Trust should not be allowed to hold grazing rights because its goal is not to make money selling cows but to spend money preserving land.
That argument was always pointless and, in a supposedly free market, offensive. The Trust is a willing buyer that paid willing sellers $1.5 million for their allotments - some that will be used less intensively, others that may be retired on the basis of proper analysis. The central planners of big beef, meanwhile, expect ranchers to take a loss on every cow sold and be happy about it.
To spend so much taxpayers' money defending that destructive status quo never made any sense. Now, perhaps, this destructive conflict can end, and all that energy can be brought to bear on the real threats to Western life.
