“Ranching is one of the few western occupations that have been renewable and have produced a continuing way of life.”                          —Wallace Stegner

It was a bad year to be a blade of grass.

In 2002, the winter snows were late and meager, part of an emerging period of drought, experts said. Then May and June exploded into flame. Catastrophic crown fires scorched over a million acres of evergreens in the “four corner” states—New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah—making it a bad year to be a tree too.

The monsoon rains then failed to arrive in July, and by mid-August, hope for a “green-up” had vanished. The land looked tired, shriveled, and beat-up. It was hard to tell which plants were alive, dormant, or stunned, and which were dead. One range professional speculated that perhaps as much as 60 percent of the native bunch grasses in New Mexico would die. It was bad news for the ranchers he knew and cared about, insult added to injury in an industry already beset by one seemingly intractable challenge after another.

For some, it was the final blow. Ranching in the American West, much like the grass on which it depended that year, has been struggling for survival. Persistently poor economics, tenacious opponents, shifting values in public-land use, changing demographics, decreased political influence, and the temptation of rapidly rising private land values have all combined to push ranching right to the edge. And not just ranching; according to one analysis, the number of natural-resource jobs, including agriculture, as a share of total employment in the Rocky Mountain West has declined by two-thirds since the mid-1970s.

Today, less than one in thirty jobs in the region is in logging, mining, or agriculture. This fits a national trend. In 1993, the U.S. Census dropped its long-standing survey of farm residents. The farm population across the nation had dwindled from 40 percent of households in 1900 to a statistically insignificant 2 percent by 1990. The bureau decided that a survey was no longer relevant.

If the experts are correct—that the current multiyear drought could rival the decade-long “megadrought” of the 1950s for ecological, and thus economic, devastation—the tenuous grip of ranchers on the future will be loosened further, perhaps permanently. The ubiquitous “last cowboys,” mythologized in a seemingly endless stream of tabletop photography books, could ride into their final sunset once and for all.

Or would they?

After all, for millions of years, grass has always managed to return and flourish. James Ingalls, U.S. Senator from Kansas (1873-1891) once wrote:

Grass is the forgiveness of nature-her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass, and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become grass grown like rural lanes, and are obliterated; forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.

Few understand these words better than ranchers, who, because their cattle require grass, depend on the forgiveness of nature for a livelihood while simultaneously nurturing its beneficence. And like grass, ranching’s adaptive response to adversity over the years has been patience—to outlast its troubles. The key to survival for both has been endurance—the ability to hold things together until the next rainstorm. Evolution favors grit.

Or at least it used to.