| When author Dan
Dagget gave a talk recently at the annual Bioneers Conference,
near San Francisco, he began by asking audience members
if they had taken care of their environmental responsibilities
that day. Had any of them gone hunting in a pack? Started
a grass fire? Piled rocks in a gully? Chased any bison
off a cliff?
In response, some people jumped to their feet and walked
out of the auditorium.
This didn't surprise the former Earth First!
activist. Dagget has been causing people discomfort
ever since the early 1970s when he fought strip mines
in his native southeastern Ohio. Over the years, he
has become something of a professional provocateur,
tilting at sacred windmills right and left.
His Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "Beyond
the Rangeland Conflict" (1995), for example, challenged
the long-standing idea that environmentalists and ranchers
in the American West held incompatible goals, earning
him a great deal of teeth-gnashing from all sides of
the grazing debate as a result.
The reaction to his latest book "The Gardeners
of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature"
(2005) will likely be no different.
In it, Dagget argues that we have become aliens on
our own planet. Once upon a time, he argues, humans
enjoyed a mutualistic relationship with nature. In much
the way that bees depend on flowers, beavers on creeks,
and wolves on elk, ecosystems evolved in the presence
of humans and began to depend on them, over time, to
set fires, apply hunting pressure, and cultivate the
soil. We were gardeners in Eden – natives living
with, and using, nature symbiotically (despite the occasional
mega fauna extinction).
No more.
Today, Dagget writes, we "get our food,
fiber, and other products from nature via a system of
extractive technologies more characteristic of aliens
than of a mutually interdependent community of natives."
"The Leave-It-Alone
– Dan Dagget,
Author, "Gardeners of Eden"
Our transformation into an alien species has had serious
consequences: global warming, the endangering of plants
and animals, the erosion of the connection between humans
and nature, and increasing isolation as more and more
of us live in cities, surrounded by what Dagget calls
an "exploitosphere" where we extract everything
from food to recreation.
One response to this transformation, more than a century
ago, was the creation of a conservation movement, which
aimed at correcting the exploitation of the natural
world by shielding places we valued from the long arm
of industry. The rise of environmentalism after World
War II, with its emphasis on pollution and other toxic
activities, also aimed at mitigating damage done by
people.
Dagget thinks these movements have led us to a dead
end.
"Ironically, those countermeasures have been,
for the most part, just as alien as the situation they
were created to correct," he writes. "We
have created ever larger preserves and protected areas,
and removed ourselves and our impacts from them. Acting
as if we're trying to fool nature into thinking
that we're not here, we have behaved as aliens
would. We treat this land outside our exploitosphere
as if it were a combination art exhibit, zoo, cathedral,
and adventure park. There we limit ourselves to roles
as sightseers, worshippers, caretakers, and joy riders."
Dagget believes that since humans were once an important
part of the very ecosystems that we are now laboring
to protect and restore, our efforts are doomed ultimately
if we don't include the key piece of a very complex
puzzle – us.
"If removing wolves or some other predator does
harm to an ecosystem," he continues, "if
causing a species such as the red-legged frog or the
tiger salamander to become extinct threatens the security
of all other species, as some of us claim, then it stands
to reason that removing humans who have played a more
widespread, more impactive role must cause even greater
problems."
Talk about tilting at windmills – the answer,
he says, is to become gardeners again, to recreate a
more mutualistic relationship with nature through work.
"This book offers a way to become native once
again," he writes, "to reassume some of
the responsibilities we evolved to uphold, at least
as much as possible in the context of a modern technological
world."
Leave It Alone
"Gardeners of Eden" is the product
of a long and winding road for the longtime activist.
In 1992 he was selected by the Sierra Club as one of
the nation's Top 100 activists for his leadership
in a fight to stop a proposed uranium mine near the
Grand Canyon. He also worked strenuously to create more
wilderness areas near his new home in Flagstaff, Ariz.
He believed in the mantra of the era, that human use
was tantamount to abuse, including livestock grazing,
which he assumed to be part of the "exploitosphere"
as well.
 |
Dan
Dagget's "Gardeners of Eden" has been
called the most important conservation manifesto
since Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic." University
of Nevada Press, 2005.
|
To his surprise, however, he began to notice significant
amounts of healthy land that were also being grazed
by cattle under the care of environmentally concerned
ranchers. While this challenged his environmental paradigm
(it's hard to have your own windmills tilted at),
what changed Dagget's mind for good was not just
the ecological health he saw on well-managed ranches,
but the dogmatism of the Leave-It-Alone philosophy of
his fellow activists.
His epiphany happened one day during a meeting of a
group called ‘6-6' (six of us, six of them)
near Tucson, Ariz., when a rancher said to the group
"Tell me what you'd like this place to look
like, and I'll make that my goal and work toward
it and that way we can be allies instead of adversaries."
"There's only one thing you can do to make
this place better," an environmental activist
responded. "You can leave. Because if you stay,
no matter what you do to the land, no matter how good
you make it look, it will be unnatural and therefore
bad. And if you leave, whatever happens to this place,
even if it becomes as bare as a parking lot, it will
be natural and therefore good."
This was the critical "ah-ha"
moment for Dagget.
"I realized that this is the essence of contemporary
environmentalism," he writes, "this assumption
that the only way we can really heal the land is to
protect it from impacts created by humans: to ‘leave
it alone.' This assumption – that the only
way we can heal the land is to protect it – isn't
just the domain of activists in the environmental trenches,
it is woven into the very essence of our society's
awareness of what we call the ‘environment.'
We think of it as a matter of fact, like gravity."
The ecological health of the ranch, however, belied
the Leave-It-Alone philosophy.
After a lot of thought, Dagget reached the conclusion
that to our way of thinking about the environment, "the
health of a piece of land or a collection of ecosystems
is not a matter of their condition. It is purely a matter
of how that land is managed." If land is left
alone, goes the paradigm, then its condition is automatically
assumed to be good. If it is used by humans it is less
healthy.
"The Leave-It-Alone assumption," Dagget
says, "has brought us to the absurdity that the
actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to
determining if it is healthy or not."
The absurdity became painful to Dagget as he began
to study places where "no use" (read: no
ecological disturbance) intersected with declining land
health, such as the famous Drake Exclosure, in central
Arizona, which had been excluded from livestock use
for forty years. The land inside the fence had become
a biological wasteland – a condition that was
unacceptable to the now-awakened environmentalist. Dagget
knew something was very wrong with this picture.
And that's where the Gardeners of Eden came in.
The Lost Tribe
Provocatively, Dagget now calls the "protection"
of land a form of "abandonment." What he
seeks instead, and details in his book, are examples
of nature/human mutualism and symbiosis. The key to
the future, he believes, is maintaining the relationships
that create life.
"One could say the purpose of this book is to
establish that humans actually can be a part of this
sort of relationship with nature and to make us better
able to recognize the instances in which we are."
To make his point, Dagget chronicles the work of landowners
across the region who are healing nature by working
within natural models.
Ranchers Tony and Jerrie Tipton, for example, have
successfully used the ‘poop-and-stomp' action
of cattle to grow grass on eroding and desiccated mine
tailings in western Nevada. They believe a similar approach
could restore life to the now lifeless Teels Marsh,
once a thriving home for migrating waterfowl.
David Oglivie, manager of the U Bar Ranch,
west of Silver City, N.M., oversees a landscape that
is home to nearly half the world's population
of critically endangered southwestern willow flycatchers.
A recent restoration project on the ranch resulted
in habitat that is now home to the fifth largest population
of southwestern willow flycatchers – where none
existed before. The U Bar Ranch also has one of the
highest densities of nesting songbirds in all of North
America.
A comparison of Gene Goven's ranch land, which
employs progressive cattle management, to a neighboring
stretch of "retired" land reveals that the
water cycle and soil fertility of the Goven Ranch is
significantly healthier – a consequence, Goven
believes, of the hoof action of his cattle.
These and other stewards are members of what Dagget
calls a "Lost Tribe."
"They're like a lost tribe dispersed among
us whose members possess an important skill that could
be extremely valuable to the rest of us if we would
bother to ask and to listen, but we don't,"
writes Dagget. "We don't listen because
we consider the members of this "tribe"
to be irrelevant, out of date, out of fashion, weird,
crude, obsessed. That's not a lot different than
other lost tribes – indigenous peoples scattered
and neglected, whose skills and knowledge are considered
to be little more than curiosities in our cocksure technological
society."
It is to these leaders of the Lost Tribe, these Gardeners
of Eden, that we must now turn and listen, concludes
Dagget, if we are to create a healthy, sustainable and
equitable planet for the long run.
As well as a West that works.
| 
