Biological Soil A Point of Contention Between Environmentalists and Southern Utah Ranchers

Southern Utah’s arid deserts might seem like dead wastelands to the uninitiated. It’s hot. It’s dry. There are no lush trees to provide shade and relief to anyone hiking through the landscape.

But to those in the know, Utah’s deserts are anything but lifeless.

Spiny Joshua trees dot the landscape, accompanied by juniper and pinyon pines. Bushes of aromatic sagebrush give way to prickly pear and short grasses. Spreading out in the open spaces, just as alive as the trees and bushes, is biological soil crust.

“Biocrust cover is like a giant leaf lying on the ground. It is photosynthesizing like other plants,” said Mary O’Brien, a botanist and director of the Utah Forests Program at the Grand Canyon Trust. “It’s the desert’s way of having a continuous cover of plants.”

Biological soil crust is a species of many names. Cryptobiotic soil. Micro biotic soil. Biocrusts. Cryptogamic soil. Whatever the name, they refer to the dark crunchy, crusty soils that grow in arid deserts around the world.

The most mature biological soil crusts in Utah are bumpy and black. Mosses and lichens make their home in the rough topography of the crusts and they almost look like half-inch tall sandstone rocks.

To biologists and botanists and environmentalists, these soil crusts represent an imperative part of the overall desert ecosystem in Utah.

“In really dry areas and arid lands plants can’t grow right beside each other like they can in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast. The soil is inevitably exposed,” O’Brien said.

Biological soils help to prevent soil erosion—which is important for maintaining clean waterways and plant diversity. Biological soils also facilitate water absorption into the ground, and the rough topography enables greater plant growth and nutrient adhesion.

When biological soils are broken—most commonly by compression disturbance from hikers, grazing, or machinery—the damaged soil results in multiple problems.

First, the benefits disappear. Second, compression loosens the soil enabling silt to blow away. This silt lands on other biological soil areas and prevents those areas from flourishing. The sediment can also land on snow and cause premature melting, get into the air and damage air quality, and also enter streams and rivers creating problems with the cleanliness and makeup of water.

Biological soil can’t be called a single purveyor of optimal health in an ecosystem, but it affects so many other parts of the environment that scientists who study biological soil and climate change credit it with being an essential part of the ecosystem.

But, according to O’Brien, the Bureau of Land Management in arid desert areas doesn’t see biological soil as the important factor it is.

“In their minds biocrust doesn’t support a cowboy. The cowboy trumps the biocrust,” O’Brien said. The BLM is charged with managing public lands and manages cattle. O’Brien said grazing on arid desert land is the number one cause of damage to biological soils, which can take over half a century to recover.

The BLM did not respond for comment.

A 2018 study about the services biocrusts provide to ecosystems said that while the benefits are evident, society at large doesn’t always recognize them.

O’Brien said the mystique of cowboy Americana is what keeps grazing of such high importance to the BLM.

“We’re trying to keep the cowboy culture alive,” she said. “Western culture is a codeword for extraction and the romantic culture of the cowboys. Never mind that the largest number of [land] allotments is for a billionaire in Santa Barbara.”

Hal Hamblin is a fourth-generation rancher in Kanab, Utah. He has cattle grazing on the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument.

“The real environmentalists are cowboys,” he said. “My cattle operation is secondary. I’m a hunter, I’m a sportsman.” Hamblin said he wants to see the land flourish because his livelihood depends on it.

In his perspective, biocrusts are “Mother Nature’s last resort” for preventing erosion, and that if the land is just left alone, erosion increases and water availability decreases.

O’Brien disagreed. “[Biocrust] is what’s natural. It’s what’s native,” she said. “It’s all over the world, where the plants naturally don’t grow next to each other because there’s not enough water.”

Hamblin emphasized that ranching is a way of life, and that if done with care the land can be preserved. He thinks humans engaging in the environment is what keeps it healthy. “When we do nothing we destroy Mother Nature,” he said. “It is going to erode. It is going to go downstream.”

O’Brien said ranchers prioritize grass for their cattle, so it makes sense that biocrusts wouldn’t be their main priority. But, she said, they are important enough to the ecosystem that when President Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument in 1996, the proclamation included language about protecting “fragile cryptobiotic crusts,” as they are called in the proclamation. “[They] play a critical role throughout the monument, stabilizing the highly erodible desert soils and providing nutrients to plants,” the proclamation said.

For Hamblin, the solution to environmental problems is for environmentalists and ranchers alike to come together, get past each other’s’ biases, and to find scientific solutions together.

For now, the conflict continues between the two.

“Him talking about biocrusts as a last resort,” O’Brien said in response to Hamblin’s opinion, “it’s the first resort in arid lands.”