| Editor's
Note: This essay was originally published in
Wendell Berry's latest collection of essays, "The
Way of Ignorance," published by Shoemaker &
Hoard in November, 2005 and republished here in two
parts with permission.
I have asked Courtney White to lend his
essay, “The Working Wilderness,” to this
collection for three reasons:
First, I think it is a good essay.
Second, it tells of a serious and continuing effort
on the part of some ranchers and conservationists to
develop local knowledge sufficient to support a locally
adapted land economy. This is an effort that is needed
simply because it is necessary. If humans don’t
learn to adapt their land economies to the nature of
their places, that will be a disaster, first for their
places and then for the humans.
Third, it is an essay about cooperation between people
and nature, between people and their places, and between
ranchers and conservationists. This, again, is necessary.
The only possible result of the human effort to “conquer”
nature and one another is human defeat. The longstanding
conflict between ranchers and conservationists is not
only hopeless and ruinous for both; it is, as Dan Kemmis
points out, outmoded: “Cooperation is an indispensable
way of doing business if we hope to prosper in this
hard country.”
Courtney and I know, of course, that some people are
going to disagree with his thoughts, as some will disagree
with mine. As essayists, we know that the purpose of
an essay is not to deliver the final word. An essay’s
purpose is merely to take part in a conversation. So
let the disagreements come. Long live the conservation!
- Wendell Berry
"The only progress that counts is that on
the actual landscape of the back forty."
- Aldo Leopold
While
taking a group break in the shade of a large pinon tree
during a tour
recently of the well-managed U Bar Ranch, near Silver
City, N.M., the leader of our band of participants asked
me to say a few words about a map given to me recently
by a friend.
I rose a bit reluctantly (the day being
hot and the shade being deep) to explain that the map
was commissioned by an alliance of ranchers concerned
about the creep of urban sprawl into the 500,000-acre
Altar Valley, located south of Tucson, Ariz. The map
was important, I told them, for what it measured: indicators
of rangeland health.
Drawn up in multiple colors, the map expressed the
intersection of three variables: soil stability, biotic
integrity, and hydrological function – soil, grass,
and water, in other words. The map displayed three conditions
for each variable: 'Stable,' 'At Risk,' and 'Unstable.'
A color represented a particular intersection. For example,
Deep Red designated an 'Unstable,' or unhealthy, condition
for soil, grass (vegetation), and water, while Deep
Green represented 'Stable' for all three. Other colors
represented conditions between these extremes.
In the middle of the map was a privately owned ranch
called the Palo Alto, I told them. Visiting it recently,
I was shocked by its condition. It had been overgrazed
by cattle to the point of being nearly totally "cowburnt,"
to use author Ed Abbey's famous phrase. As one might
expect, the color of the Palo Alto on the map was blood
red and there was plenty of it.
I paused briefly – now came the controversial
part. This big splotch of blood red continued well below
the southern boundary of the Palo Alto, I said. However,
this was not a ranch. This was the Buenos Aires National
Wildlife Refuge, a large chunk of protected land that
had been cattle-free for nearly sixteen years. . . .
That was as far as I got. Taking offense at the suggestion
that the refuge might be ecologically unfit, a combative
young environmentalist from Tucson cut me off. She knew
the refuge, she explained, having worked hard to help
"heal" it from decades of abuse by cows.
"We didn't change our ethics.
– Julia Davis-Stafford,
New Mexico rancher
I countered by explaining that the map did not blame
anyone for current conditions; nor did it offer opinions
on any particular remedy. All it did was ask a simple
question: Is the land functioning properly at the fundamental
level of soil, grass, and water? For a portion of the
Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge the answer was
"no." For portions of the adjacent privately owned ranches,
which were Deep Green on the map, the answer was "yes."
Why was that a problem?
I knew why. I strayed too closely to a core belief
of my fellow conservationists—that 'protected'
areas, such as national parks, wilderness areas, and
wildlife refuges, must always rate, by definition, as
being in better ecological condition than adjacent 'working'
landscapes.
Yet the Altar Valley map challenged this paradigm at
a fundamental level and when the tour commenced again,
on a ranch that would undoubtedly encompass more Deep
Greens then Deep Reds on a similar map, I saw in the
reaction of the young activist a need to rethink the
conservation movement in the American West.
From the ground up.
Knowledge
My conviction received a boost a few weeks later while
sitting around a campfire after a tour of the CS Ranch.
I was thinking about ethics. I believed at the time,
as many conservationists still do, that the chore of
ending overgrazing by cattle in the West was a matter
of getting ranchers to adopt an ecological ethic along
the lines suggested by Aldo Leopold in his famous 'Land
Ethic' essay, where he argued that humans had a moral
obligation to be good stewards of nature.
The question, it seemed to me, was how to accomplish
this lofty goal.
I decided to ask Julia Davis-Stafford, our host, for
advice. Years ago, Julia and her sister Kim talked their
family into switching to progressive ranch management
on the magnificent 100,000-acre CS, located in northeastern
New Mexico. It was a decision that over time caused
the ranch to flourish economically and ecologically.
In fact, the idea for my query came earlier in the day
when I couldn't decide which was more impressive: the
sight of a new beaver dam on the ranch or Julia's strong
support for its presence.
The Davis family, it seemed to me, had embraced Leopold's
land ethic big time. So, over the crackle of the campfire,
I asked Julia "How do we get other ranchers to change
their ethics, too?"
Her answer changed everything I had been thinking up
until that moment.
"We didn't change our ethics," she replied. "We're
the same people we were fifteen years ago. What changed
was our knowledge. We went back to school, in a sense,
and we came back to the ranch with new ideas."
Knowledge, I suddenly realized, more than ethics, is
the key to good land stewardship. Her point confirmed
what I had observed during many visits to livestock
operations across the region: ranchers do have an environmental
ethic, as they have claimed for so long. Often their
ethic is a powerful one. What many lack, however, is
new knowledge.
The same thing is true of many conservationists. In
the years since I became an activist, starting as a
Sierra Club volunteer and later co-founding a nonprofit
organization dedicated to bridge-building between ranchers,
environmentalists and others, I came to the conclusion
that it had obviously been a long time since any of
us were in school. This is a problem because land management
knowledge, like any knowledge, does not sit still for
very long.
If conservationists could go back to school, as the
Davis family did, what would we learn? Aldo Leopold
had an idea: the fundamentals of land health, which
he described as "the capacity of the land for self-renewal."
He also described conservation as "our effort to understand
and preserve this capacity."
By studying the elements of land health, conservationists
could learn that grazing is a natural process. The consumption
of grass by ungulates has been going on in North America
for at least sixty-six million years – not by
cattle, of course, but because they are domesticated
animals they can be managed in a way that mimics the
behavior of bison, recreating a relationship between
We could also learn that many landscapes
need periodic pulses of energy, in the form of natural
disturbance, to keep things vibrant. Many conservationists
know that 'cool' fires are a beneficial form of disturbance
in ecosystems because they reduce tree density, burn
up old grass, and aid nutrient cycling in the soil.
But many of us don't know that small flood events can
be a positive agent of change too, as can drought, wind
storms, and even insect infestation. And nearly all
of us fail (or refuse) to understand that animal impact
caused by grazers, including cattle, can be a natural
form of disturbance as well.
We could further learn, as the Davis family
did, that the key to proper 'disturbance' with cattle
is to control the timing, intensity, and frequency of
their impact on the land. Too often, western ranchers
employ the "Columbus school" of grazing management:
turn the cows out in May and go discover them in October.
Left alone, cattle will choose to 'hang out' along streams
and creeks, causing them to degrade due to excessive
trampling and overgrazing. This continuous or unmanaged
grazing is not a positive ecological disturbance.
By contrast, the CS, and other progressive ranches,
bunch their cattle together and keep them on the move,
rotating the animals frequently through numerous pastures.
Ideally, under this system no single piece of ground
gets grazed by cattle more than once a year, thus ensuring
plenty of time for the plants to recover – which
is the way nature meant for grass to be grazed. The
keys are control of the cattle, which can be done with
fencing or a herder, and timing, in which the herd moves
are carefully planned and monitored.
In fact, as many ranchers have learned, overgrazing
is much more a function of timing than numbers of cattle.
Conservationists could also learn, as I did, that much
of the damage we see today on the land is historical
– a legacy of the 'Boom Years' of cattle grazing
in the West. Between 1880 and 1920 millions of hungry
animals roamed uncontrolled across the range and the
overgrazing they caused was so extensive, and so alarming,
that by 1910 the US government was already setting up
programs to slow and heal the damage. Today, cattle
numbers are down, way down, from historic highs –
a fact not commonly voiced in the heat of the cattle
debate.
The Davis family had done what was necessary to maintain
their ethic and stay in business. New knowledge allowed
them to adjust their operation to evolving values, technologies,
and ideas. Rather than fight change, they had switched.
As the embers of the campfire burned softly into the
night, I wondered if the conservation movement could
do the same?
Land Health
My friend Dan Dagget likes to tell a story about a
professor of environmental studies he knows who took
a group of students for a walk in the woods near Flagstaff,
Arizona. Stopping in a meadow, the professor pointed
at the ground and asked, not-so-rhetorically, "Can anyone
tell me if this land is healthy or not?" After a few
moments of awkward silence, one student finally spoke
up. "Tell us first if it's grazed by cows or not," he
demanded.
A kayaking lawyer from Santa Fe told me that a monitoring
workshop at the boundary between a working ranch and
a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque had completely
rearranged his thinking. "I've done a lot of hiking
and thought I knew what land health was," he said, "but
when we did those transects on the ground on both sides
of the fence, I saw that my ideas were all wrong."
These two instances illustrate a recurring theme in
my experience as a conservationist. To paraphrase a
famous quote by a Supreme Court justice, members of
environmental organizations "can't define what healthy
land is but they know it when they see it."
"It all comes down to soil.
– Kirk Gadzia,
Co-author, "Rangeland Health"
The principal problem is that we are 'land
illiterate.' When it comes to 'reading' a landscape,
we might as well be studying a foreign language. Too
many of us don't know our perennials from our annuals,
what the signs of poor water cycling are, what an incised
channel means, or whether a meadow is healthy or not
simply by looking.
For a long time this situation wasn't our fault. What
all of us lacked – rancher, conservationist, range
professional, curious onlooker – was a common
language to describe the common ground below our feet.
That has changed.
In 1994 the National Academy of Sciences published
a book entitled Rangeland Health: New Methods to Classify,
Inventory, and Monitor Rangelands. In it, the authors
define health "as the degree to which the integrity
of the soil and ecological processes of rangeland ecosystems
are sustained."
They go on to say, "The capacity of rangelands to produce
commodities and to satisfy values on a sustained basis
depends on internal, self-sustaining ecological processes
such as soil development, nutrient cycling, energy flow,
and the structure and dynamics of plant and animal communities."
It is the language of soil, grass, and water.
The concept behind rangeland health is a simple but
powerful one: before land can sustainably support a
value, such as livestock grazing, hunting, recreation,
or wildlife protection, it must be functioning properly
at a basic ecological level. In other words, before
we, as a society, can talk about designating critical
habitat for endangered species, or increasing forage
for cows, or expanding recreational use, we need to
know the answer to a simple question: Is the land healthy
at the level of soil, grass, and water?
If the answer is "no," then all our values may be at
risk.
Or as Kirk Gadzia, a coauthor of the book, likes to
put it, "It all comes down to soil. If it's stable,
there's hope for the future. But if it's moving, then
all bets are off for the ecosystem." It is a sentiment
echoed by Roger Bowe, an award-winning rancher from
eastern New Mexico, who says, "Bare soil is the rancher's
number one enemy."
It must become the number one enemy of conservationists
as well.
The publication of Rangeland Health was the touchstone
for a new consensus within the scientific and range
professional communities. It paved the way for the debut,
in 2000, of a federal publication entitled Interpreting
Indicators of Rangeland Health, which provides a seventeen-point
checklist for the qualitative assessment of upland health.
The indicators include the presence of rills, gullies,
bare ground, scouring, pedestaling, litter movement,
soil compaction, plant diversity, and invasive species—the
vocabulary of land health.
These were the indicators that formed the basis of
the Altar Valley map that I described.
The National Riparian Team, a federal interagency team
dedicated to stream health, developed a similar approach.
Their seventeen-point checklist assesses the physical
functioning of riparian and wetland areas through "consideration
of hydrology, vegetation, and soil/landform attributes."
The goal of this assessment, which the National Riparian
Team calls Proper Functioning Condition (PFC), is "to
provide information on whether a riparian-wetland area
is physically functioning in a manner which will allow
the maintenance or recovery of desired values, e.g.,
fish habitat, neotropical birds, or forage, over time."
Scientists at the USDA's Jornada Experimental
Range, near Las Cruces, N.M.,, recently published a
peer-reviewed protocol for quantitatively measuring
rangeland health, the next step after an assessment.
Using a methodology that quantifies a watershed's ability
to resist degradation, as well as recover from disturbance,
this protocol, according to the manual, "is designed
to quantify the potential of the system to function
to support a range of societal values rather than to
support any particular value."
Healthy land, in other words, supports many values
while unhealthy land offers diminishing support over
the long run.
At the risk of bending the medical metaphor too far,
consider the issue this way: if it is your personal
goal to run a marathon, work in a garden, write a novel,
or simply survive another busy day, your ability to
accomplish these goals depends on whether you are functioning
properly, i.e., whether you are healthy.
That's why your doctor evaluates various standard indicators,
such as pulse rate and blood pressure, when determining
your relative health.
This was the message I tried to communicate to the
young activist under the tree that hot summer day –
that a rangeland health paradigm, employing standard
indicators, allows all land to be evaluated equally
and fairly. By adopting it, the conservation movement
could begin to heed Aldo Leopold's advice that any activity
which degrades an area's "land mechanism," as he called
it, should be curtailed or changed, while any activity
which maintains, restores, or expands it should be supported.
It should not matter if that activity is ranching or
recreation.
Coming next month: Part
II of the Essay
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