Galyn Knight stands near a stretch of the near the Little Colorado River that crosses the leased land.

A Look At Forest Guardians

Forest Guardians is a non-profit environmental group headquartered out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Compared to the Knights and many ranching families in the Arizona, the non-profit activist organization is fairly recent to the state grazing scene.

Organized in the late 1980’s, one of the group’s goals is to eliminate all free ranging livestock of any kind on public lands (see Forest Guardians’ web site). The web site states that: “Livestock production is by far the most widespread destructive activity on the arid and semi-arid western landscape. Forest Guardians is working to eliminate livestock grazing on public lands by enforcing federal environmental laws, challenging wasteful and ecologically harmful ranching subsidies and educating the public about the real ecological costs of livestock production in the arid Southwest.” Forest Guardians goes on to provide an example by stating that: “One example of the ecological cost of ranching is the conflict between livestock and endangered Mexican grey wolves. Under pressure from the livestock industry, wolves have been increasingly scapegoated for problems and if trends don’t change, could become extinct in the wild for the second time.” Finally, Forest Guardians states that: “We are documenting the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service management practices on our public lands to show the effects of grazing and the benefits of removing cattle from riparian areas.”

To achieve its goals, Forest Guardians identifies “strategic litigation” as one of its activism tools. Indeed, the group has energetically filed numerous lawsuits in the state and federal courts, many of which create huge expenses for the defendants. For instance, in 2005 the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver found that Forest Guardians did not have to pay the U.S. Bureau of Land Management approximately $88,000 in copying fees (Forest Guardians v. United States Dept. of Interior, 416 F.3d 1173 (10th Cir. 2005), 04-2098). That’s just copy fees. Imagine the attorney fees and other expenses … paid for the defense by tax dollars.

A November 2002 articles penned by Jim Carlton of the Wall Street Journal described Forest Guardians’ “strategic litigation.” According to the article,

. . . the Guardians' most controversial tactic is to single out the financially vulnerable -- ranchers who have used their permits as collateral for bank loans, a common form of financing for small ranching operations. "We want to put the squeeze on ranchers to get off the land," says John Horning, the coordinator of the Guardians' antigrazing campaign. "If some ranchers go out of business along the way, so be it." [See , In the old West, a tense showdown over federal lands]