Nonetheless, according to scientists, the Borderlands remains one of the most bio-diverse regions in all of North America, with an estimated 4,000 species of plants, 104 species of mammals, 295 species of birds, 136 species of reptiles and amphibians, and the greatest known diversity of bees in the world. Thirteen species are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

A visitor to the Malpai Borderlands could be forgiven for thinking that its wildness is simply natural—the result of humans not doing things there that they’ve done elsewhere: paving roads, building houses, and so forth. But a great deal of human work has been required to keep these things from happening.

In 1994, a handful of ranching families, assisted by The Nature Conservancy, formed the Malpai Borderlands Group (MBG), a non-profit organization. Sixteen years and many thousands of hours of work later, the MBG has become one of most celebrated examples of community-based conservation in the United States. Its staff and its board are almost entirely local residents, but its successes have come by reaching out and forming working relationships with a remarkable array of people and institutions: scientists, government agencies, foundations, artists, journalists, environmentalists and like-minded souls from across the country and around the world.

I first encountered the MBG in the mid-1990s, when such alliances seemed impossible. Ranchers and environmentalists had been locked in conflict for decades over the condition and use of public rangelands in the West, and ranching appeared to be losing. Public agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and private groups like The Nature Conservancy, were buying ranches and removing the livestock to create new refuges for plants and wildlife. Other agencies, such as the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), were under increasing pressure to shut down livestock grazing on their lands, whether to comply with environmentalists’ lawsuits or to satisfy recreationalists’ ever-increasing demands. Meanwhile, private ranch lands were rapidly converting to residential and commercial uses throughout the West—about one million acres a year, on average, beginning in the 1960s.

I attended a meeting of the Arizona Cattlegrowers’ Association, where the head of the MBG and a vice-president from The Nature Conservancy gave a joint presentation. They described how they had persuaded a bank to take second position on a ranch mortgage, behind a conservation easement prohibiting subdivision. I was utterly floored; it seemed, well, impossible. Later I had a chance to work with the Group and get a first-hand look at how they had done it.

The MBG was born out of a series of meetings, beginning in 1991, in which a small group of ranchers and environmentalists found common ground in a place they came to call “the radical center.” It was in the center because it was not at either extreme of the debate, and it was radical because it sought to transcend the debate altogether. They concluded that both sides were, in fact, losing as ranches turned into subdivisions, and that even if they differed on some issues, they nonetheless shared a common interest in “the health and unreduced diversity of the native biotic community.”

Ray Turner, an ecologist whose daughter had married into one of the ranching families, helped draw both sides’ attention to another way that their common interest was imperiled: for a century, fire had been suppressed throughout the West, and in the Southwest this had resulted in dramatic changes in the vegetation. Shrubs and woody species, especially mesquite, had gained the upper hand over the perennial grasses that dominated in the 1880s. It was a self-reinforcing cycle: fire needed grass for fuel, and grass needed fire to set back the shrubs.

Yet the public agencies that held roughly half the land in the Malpai Borderlands—the Forest Service, the BLM, and the state land departments of Arizona and New Mexico—continued to suppress fires as a matter of longstanding policy, even when the affected ranchers asked them not to. To change fire management required forging a consensus, first among the ranchers in the area and then with all the agencies.

The ranchers met at the Malpai Ranch in March 1993 and drafted a declarative invitation: “We, the undersigned, are committed to the development of a fire management plan for the area encompassed by the ranches we represent. We request that the agencies involved coordinate with us in the development of this plan.” A month later they met with representatives of all the agencies, for two days, and left with a Memorandum of Understanding that fire policy would henceforth be “informed and guided by the management goals of the ranchers.” A year later, the Malpai Borderlands Group was incorporated. Since then, some 534,000 acres have burned in the Malpai Borderlands, including the largest successful prescribed fire in the history of the Forest Service.

Little did anyone know how many more meetings would follow, and how far the radical center would carry them. A comprehensive fire plan for the entire area eventually took more than a decade to complete, complicated by fears that fires might harm endangered species such as the New Mexico ridgenose rattlesnake and the Lesser long-nosed bat. The specter of subdivision loomed over the whole process: If houses were built, having fires would become next to impossible in any event. So the Malpai Group partnered with foundations to secure conservation easements, paying ranchers in grass or in cash for the development rights on their private lands. More than two-thirds of the private land in the area is now protected.

To address endangered species issues in a comprehensive fashion took five years of meetings with state and federal wildlife agencies, resulting in a 2008 Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) that harmonizes all MBG activities with the needs of 19 listed or rare species. In the course of fire planning, the MBG had partnered with scientists from universities and public agencies to investigate how fires affect the habitat essential to the bat and the snake. What they learned helped make the HCP possible.

For three years, I participated in MBG meetings of all kinds, including many related to the HCP. Again and again, I was struck by the power—and the challenge—of working in the radical center. The patience and dedication it required was almost superhuman, but it was also exciting and self-reinforcing, like fire and grass: each new person at the table brought new perspectives and new possibilities, and each new accomplishment attracted new people.

The Malpai Borderlands Group has a credo: ‘We will never do anything to somebody. We will only do things with them, at their invitation.’ It’s not an easy one to live by when opinions differ and the stakes are high. But if you can live by it, the result is trust among everyone involved. Such trust was virtually extinct between ranchers and environmentalists back in 1994, but today you can find instances of it across the West. The radical center is now practically mainstream, you might say. But it’s no less radical for that.

Nathan Sayre is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has fifteen years’ experience working on conservation issues as both a scholar and an independent author and consultant. He is the author of Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range (Rio Nuevo, 2005), Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest: Species of Capital (University of Arizona Press, 2002), and The New Ranch Handbook: A Guide to Restoring Western Rangelands (Quivira Coalition, 2001).