Meet our Guests: Susie Knezevich

Susie Knezevich

Interior designer and co-owner of Johnson Lakes Canyon property

Kanab, UT

9/30/21

     Recent rains have turned large portions of the road leading to Johnson Lakes Canyon outside of Kanab, UT, into soup, but this doesn’t stop Susie Knezevich from reaching the property that she has worked so hard to restore. Almost 20 years ago Susie and her husband Rick, who both reside in Aspen, CO, were looking for a parcel of land where they could hike and camp. In 2004 they purchased an 800-acre private inholding in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a land dominated by sand, sage, and bluffs. Their land, however, was not in the best condition for hiking. Decades of cattle grazing had destroyed native vegetation and allowed prickly invasive plants such as Russian olive and bull thistle to proliferate.

     “We decided to take the cattle off the land because we noticed the damage and we needed to begin fixing that,” Susie said. The Knezevichs worked with the Grand Canyon Trust, a regional environmental group, to put their land under a conservation easement in 2015 to ensure that it will remain free from the beefy ungulates in perpetuity.

     The Johnson Lakes Canyon property now serves as a reference area for the surrounding National Monument which remains heavily grazed by cattle. Susie and her husband have worked with ecologist and SITW guest educator Mary O’Brien to bring in biologists, students, and volunteers to conduct research and restoration projects with the goal of showing how the land has rebounded since grazing has ceased. Susie excitedly shared that the native oaks, cottonwoods, and willows are reaching heights and numbers not noted for years. “We were unlikely characters to get involved in conservation treatments, but now we are really hooked!” says Susie.

By Ani Pham

Meet our Educators: Mary O'Brien

Mary O’Brien

Scientist, activist, stakeholder member of Monroe Mountain Working Group

Castle Valley, UT

9/16/21 - 10/3/21

Mary O’Brien has worn a lot of hats during her more than 30 years of work on environmental causes. She is a Ph.D. botanist and an activist who has been involved with kickstarting regulations for toxic chemicals in Oregon, preserving the Hells Canyon National Recreation area, and, most recently, pushing for responsible management of range areas. In the intermountain West this applies to a vast amount of land given that most public land in this country is open to livestock grazing. Mary has seen and documented the negative impacts cattle have on these places—trampled and incised streams, loss of riparian habitat, and reduced biodiversity in forest—and she believes there need to be fewer cows on public lands.

On Monroe Mountain in south-central Utah, the Forest Service is currently undergoing a restructuring of grazing allotments. They will decide how many cattle will be allowed in what areas, and what environmental standards will be enforced for the foreseeable future. Mary gathers scientific data such as the height of grasses in riparian areas, to hold organizations like the Forest Service accountable to commitments they have made to conserve habitat.

Mary explains that “the interesting thing about numbers and methods that anyone can repeat, is that you can’t deny that . . .if they think we’re making stuff up, they can go to that spot and rerun their own transects.” The Forest Service must take this undeniable proof (i.e. data collected in the National Forest) into account when they make decisions. She sees science as a way of taking the human perspective out of the picture, and letting other species speak through the data. She firmly believes the nonhuman members of the Utah ecosystem deserve a seat at the decision-making table.

     Mary works hard, walks fast, and holds herself and her work to a high standard of accuracy. She pushed the Westies to do what it takes to get accurate and precise data, hiking far over cacti and scrambling through juniper trees to set the tape measure in a straight line for a transect. When it came time to write up reports, she edited the work that 20 students produced almost as fast as it could be written. Multiple drafts later, reports were sent in to the Forest Service to be considered when planning the new grazing rules in Monroe Mountain.

By Reya Fore

Meet our Guests: Jeff Fields and Randi Movich

Jeff Fields and Randi Movich

Zumwalt Prairie Preserve Project Director, The Nature Conservancy

Nurse Care Manager, Winding Waters Clinic

Enterprise, OR

8/22/2021

Twelve years ago, Jeff Fields and Randi Movich moved to the small town of Enterprise in Wallowa County, Oregon, and began to connect with disparate groups within the rural community.

Jeff is The Nature Conservancy’s Project Director for the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, a 33,000-acre section of land in northeastern Oregon that represents the largest intact bunchgrass habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Jeff is in charge of the management of the prairie, which includes grassland monitoring and working with local landowners to manage livestock grazing on the prairie. He has also recently worked with several tribes whose traditional homelands include the prairie, including the Nez Perce (Niimíipuu), to open access to First Foods.

  When The Nature Conservancy first bought the land in 2000, anxiety soared as local community members questioned whether the environmental group would continue to allow cattle to graze on the land. To assuage those fears, The Nature Conservancy partnered with local ranchers to make the preserve available for grazing while attempting to retain healthy native grasses. According to Jeff, this grazing is critical to working in Wallowa County, saying that saving land purely for biodiversity reasons is “[a luxury the] majority of the planet, at this point in time, doesn’t have.”

Randi, a nurse at the community health clinic and Jeff’s wife, says that many local voices are often not present in these ecological management conversations. As a part of her job, Randi gets an intimate glance at a different set of Wallowa County residents’ lives. Many Wallowa County residents remain below the poverty line. Randi says while The Nature Conservancy works with local stakeholders with land or family ties on the prairie, those without — including those that she works with on a daily basis — aren’t represented in groups like those currently working with the Zumwalt Prairie .

“What voices do we bring to the table, and how do we get them to the table?” she asked.

Jeff and The Nature Conservancy are currently hoping to incorporate more ideas and viewpoints within the management of the Zumwalt.

“The human capital we have in this community… is really amazing,” Jeff said. “If you can get all that energy harnessed in a common vision, that supports both the economy and culture — then that’s amazing, that’s where we’re trying to go.”

By Emma Fletcher-Frazer