| Editor's
Note: This is the second part of an essay that
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 with permission.
The first half of the essay is available online here.
Chaco
In an attempt to understand the issues of
land health better, I paid a visit to a famous fenceline
contrast. This particular fence separated the Navajo
Nation, and its cows, from Chaco Culture National Historical
Park, a World Heritage site and archaeological preserve
located in the high desert of northwest New Mexico.
Cattle-free for over fifty years, Chaco's ecological
condition became a pedagogical issue some years back
when a controversial biologist used the boundary to
highlight the dangers of too much rest from the effects
of natural disturbance, including grazing and fire,
in the park.
I wanted to see the fenceline contrast for myself,
but I knew I would need help with the looking. So I
asked Kirk Gadzia, educator and range expert, to come
along.
Both of us were well aware of the park's history –
that a century of overgrazing by livestock had badly
degraded the land surrounding the famous ruins. We also
understood that the era's typical response to this legacy
of overuse was to 'protect' the land from further degradation,
principally with the tools of federal ownership and
a barbed wire fence. It was a common, and probably appropriate,
scenario played out all across the West at the time.
But Kirk and I didn't go to Chaco to argue with history,
or pick a fight with the National Park Service. We weren't
there to offer 'solutions' to any particular problem
either.
We simply wanted to take the pulse of the land on both
sides of a fence.
Here's what we saw at the eastern boundary of the park:
on the Chaco side we saw a great deal of bare ground,
as well as many forbs, shrubs, and other woody material,
some of it dead. We saw few young plants, few perennial
or bunch grasses, lots of wide spaces between plants,
lots of oxidized, gray plant matter, and a great deal
of poor plant vigor. We saw both undisturbed, capped
soil (bad for seed germination), and abundant evidence
of soil movement, including gullies and other signs
of erosion.
On the positive, we saw a greater diversity of plant
species than on the Navajo side, more birds, more seed
production, no sign of manure, and no sign of overgrazing.
On the Navajo side we saw lots of plant cover and litter,
lots of perennial grasses, tight spaces between plants,
few woody species, a wide age-class distribution among
the plants, little evidence of oxidization, and lots
of bunch grasses. We saw little evidence of soil movement,
no gullies, and far fewer signs of erosion than on the
Chaco side.
On the negative, we saw less species diversity, poor
plant vigor, a great deal of compacted soil, fewer birds,
less seed production, a great deal of manure, and numerous
signs of overgrazing.
"So, which side is healthier?" I asked Kirk.
"Maybe land health isn't
– Kirk Gadzia,
educator and range expert
"Neither one is healthy, really," he replied, "not
from a watershed perspective anyway." He noted that
the impact of livestock grazing on the Navajo side was
heavy; plants were not being given enough time to recover
before being bitten again (Kirk's definition of overgrazing).
As a result, the plants lacked the vigor they would
have exhibited in the presence of well-managed grazing.
However, Kirk thought the Chaco side was in greater
danger, primarily because it exhibited major soil instability
due to gullying, capped soil, and lack of plant litter.
"The major contributing factor to this condition is
the lack of tightly spaced perennial plants," he said,
"which exposes the soil to the erosive effects of wind
and rain. When soil loss is increased, options for the
future are reduced."
"But isn't Chaco supposed to be healthier because it's
protected from grazing?" I asked.
"That's what people always seem to assume,"
said Kirk. "In my experience in arid environments around
the world, total rest from grazing has predictable results.
In the first few years, there is an intense
response in the system as the pressure of overgrazing
is lifted. Plant vigor, diversity, and abundance often
return at once and all appears to be functioning normally.
Over the years, however, if the system does not receive
periodic natural disturbance, by fire or grazing for
example, then the overall health of the land deteriorates.
And that's what we are seeing on the Chaco side."
Then Kirk put a caveat in place.
"Maybe land health isn't the issue here," he said.
"It may be more about values. Is rest producing what
the park wants? Ecologically, the answer is probably
"no." But from a cultural perspective, the answer might
be "yes." From the public perspective too. People may
not want to see fire or grazing in their park."
But at what price, I wondered? Later in the day we
learned that the Park Service was so worried about the
threat of erosion to Chaco's world-class ruins that
they intended to spend a million dollars constructing
an erosion control structure in Chaco Wash. This told
us the agency knows it has a 'functionality' crisis
on its hands.
But how can proper functioning condition be restored
if the Park Service's hands are tied by a cultural value
that says Chaco must be 'protected' from incompatible
activities, even those which might have a beneficial
role to play in restoring the park to health?
This would be like learning that you had a bad heart
condition but telling the doctor that you were personally
opposed to surgery.
As I drove home, I realized that this tension between
'value' and 'function' at Chaco was a sign of a new
conflict spreading slowly across the West – symbolized
by a fence. The cherished 'protection' paradigm, embedded
in the conservation movement since the days of John
Muir, rubbed against something new, something energetic
– something on the other side of the fence.
Untrammeled
The passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 was a seminal
event in the history of the American conservation movement.
For the first time, wilderness had a legal status, enabling
the process of 'wildland' protection, which had been
frustrated in that era of environmental exploitation,
to become possible. Energized, the conservation movement
grabbed the wilderness bull by both horns and has not
let go to this day.
But the Act's passage also had an unforeseen consequence—it
set in motion the modern struggle between 'value' and
'function' in our western landscapes.
This tension took a while to develop. In 1964, there
was intellectual harmony between the social and ecological
arguments for the creation of a federal wilderness system.
No reconciliation was necessary between the Act's definition
of wilderness as a tract of land "untrammeled by man.
. .in which man is a visitor who does not remain" and
Aldo Leopold's declaration, published in A Sand County
Almanac fifteen years earlier, that wilderness areas
needed protection because they were ecological "base
datums of normality."
Leopold asserted that wilderness was "important as
a laboratory for the study of land health," insisting
that in many cases "we literally do not know how good
a performance to expect of healthy land unless we have
a wild area for comparison with sick ones."
Author Wallace Stegner extended the medical metaphor
when he argued that wilderness was "good for our spiritual
health even if we never once in ten years set foot in
it."
But a lot has changed in the years since the passage
of the Wilderness Act. While most Americans still believe
wilderness is necessary for social health, few ecologists
now argue that wilderness areas can be considered as
"base datums" of ecological health.
For example, in an article published in the journal
Wild Earth in 2001 entitled "Would Ecological Landscape
Restoration Make the Bandelier Wilderness More or Less
of a Wilderness?," the authors, including ecologist
Craig Allen, who has studied Bandelier National Monument,
located in north-central New Mexico, for nearly twenty
years, state matter-of-factly that "Most wilderness
areas in the continental United States are not pristine,
and ecosystem research has shown that conditions in
many are deteriorating."
It is their opinion that the Bandelier Wilderness is
suffering from "unnatural change," mostly as a result
of historic overuse of the area, which has triggered
unprecedented change in the park's ecosystems, resulting
in degraded and unsustainable conditions. "Similar changes,"
they write, "have occurred throughout much of the Southwest."
Specifically, soils in Bandelier are "eroding at net
rates of about one-half inch per decade. Given soil
depths averaging only one to two feet in many areas,
there will be loss of entire soil bodies across extensive
areas." This is bad because the loss of topsoil, and
the resulting loss of water available for plants, impedes
the growth of all-important grass cover, thus reducing
the incidence of natural and ecologically necessary
fires.
Eliminating grazing is no panacea for Bandelier's functionality
crisis, however. Herbivore exclosures established in
1975 show that protection from grazing, by itself, "fails
to promote vegetative recovery," they write. Without
management intervention, they argue, this human-caused
case of accelerated soil erosion will become irreversible.
They warn, "To a significant degree the park's biological
productivity and cultural resources are literally washing
away."
Their summation is provocative: "We have a choice when
we know land is 'sick.' We can 'make believe,' to quote
Aldo Leopold, that everything will turn out alright
if Nature is left to take its course in our unhealthy
wildernesses, or we can intervene – adaptively
and with humility – to facilitate the healing
process."
This turns a great deal of conservation thinking on
its head.
Wallace Stegner once wrote "Wildlife sanctuaries, national
seashores and lakeshores, wild and scenic rivers, wilderness
areas created under the 1964 Wilderness Act, all represent
a strengthening of the decision to hold onto land and
manage large sections of the public domain rather than
dispose of them or let them deteriorate." [emphasis
added]
But we have let them deteriorate – as the Buenos
Aires, Chaco, and Bandelier examples demonstrate. Whether
their deteriorated condition is a result of historical
overuse or some more recent activity is not as important
as another question: what are we going to do to heal
land we know to be 'sick'?
Clearly it's not 1964, or 1946, anymore. The harmony
between 'value' and 'function' in the landscape, including
our 'protected' places, has deteriorated along with
the topsoil.
This 'functionality' crisis raises important questions
for the conservation community. What, for instance,
are the long-term prospects for wildlife populations
in the West, including keystone predator species, if
the ecological integrity of these special places is
being compromised at the level of soil, grass, and water?
Can land be truly "wild" if
it is not functioning properly?
Also, does 'protection' from human activity preclude
intervention, and if so, at what cost to ecosystem health?
And on a larger scale, how do we 'protect' our parks
and wildernesses from the effects of global warming,
acid rain, and noxious weed invasion?
And what about private land? Half of the American West
is privately owned. What does a newly sprouted housing
subdivision indicate about the long-term prospects for
the health of the land as a whole?
Healing
The arguments and conditions that paved the way for
a national wilderness system, as well as for the expansion
of other 'protected' areas, including new national parks
and wildlife refuges, seem anachronistic today.
It should be clear by now that drawing lines on a map
in order to shield chunks of land from threats posed
by certain types of human activity without simultaneously
confronting the source of those threats in the first
place – the way we live as a society – is
"fixing the pump without fixing the well," as Leopold
put it.
Additionally, the whole concept of 'preserving' some
places while 'sacrificing' others creates a stratification
of land quality and land use that is harmful to land
health because it doesn't treat land holistically.
As conservationist Charles Little has written, "Leopold
insisted on dealing with land whole: the system of soils,
waters, animals, and plants that make up a community
called 'the land.' But we insist on discriminating.
We apply our money and our energy in behalf of protection
on a selective basis."
He goes on to say "The idea of a hierarchy in land
quality is the tenet of the conservation and environmental
movement."
Since John Muir's day, the conservation movement has
based this hierarchy on the concept of 'pristineness'
– the degree to which an area of land remains
untrammeled by humans. As late as 1964, before the maturation
of ecology as a discipline, it was still possible to
believe in the 'pristine' quality of wilderness as an
ecological fact, as Leopold did. Today, however, 'pristineness'
must be acknowledged to be a value, something that exists
mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Biologist Peter Raven puts it in blunt ecological terms:
"There is not a square centimeter anywhere on earth,
whether it is in the middle of the Amazon basin or the
center of the Greenland ice cap, that does not receive
every minute some molecules of a substance made by human
beings."
'Pristineness' can no longer be the bottom line of
the conservation movement. In fact, the word should
be deleted from the movement's vocabulary.
Many conservation professionals understand this, which
is one reason why in recent years there has been a strong
movement toward biodiversity as a more appropriate bottom
line. This is an important and hopeful development,
especially since it is strongly science-based. Unfortunately,
much of this work still rests on the preservation/protection
model, which means it is still hierarchical and exclusionary.
For example, a recent major land acquisition campaign
by The Nature Conservancy, the largest conservation
organization in the nation, urged its members to help
it save "The Last Best Places" in the country (provoking
the iconoclast in me to want to direct a campaign titled
"What About the Rest of the West?")
When money and time are short, as they chronically
are, this discriminatory approach is pragmatic, especially
if biodiversity is under imminent threat. Ultimately,
however, it strikes me as still doing more for the pump
than for the well.
I believe the new bottom line must be land health.
By assessing all types of land equally, a land health
paradigm enforces an egalitarian approach to land quality,
thereby reducing conflicts caused by clashing cultural
values. By giving us a target of ecological functionality,
it also enables land owners and managers to prioritize
their restoration work, if restoration work is required.
And by employing a common set of indicators, it creates
a road map for living sustainably on the land—starting
at the level of soil, grass, and water.
For example, there is a chunk of Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) land west of Taos, N.M., that
will never be a wilderness area, national park, or wildlife
refuge. It is modest land, mostly flat, covered with
sage, and very dry. In its modesty, however, it is typical
of millions of acres of public land across the West.
It is typical in another way too – it exists
in a degraded ecological condition, the result of historic
overgrazing and modern neglect. A recent qualitative
land health assessment revealed its poor condition in
stark terms, confronting the BLM with the knowledge
that more than forty years of total rest from livestock
grazing had not healed the land. Some of it, in fact,
teetered on an ecological threshold, threatening to
transition to a deeper degraded state.
Fortunately, as humble and unhealthy as this land is,
it is not unloved. The wildlife like it, of course,
but so do the owners of the private land intermingled
with the BLM land, some of whom built homes there. The
area's two new ranchers also have great affection for
this unassuming land and want to see it healed.
These ranchers are using cattle as agents of ecological
restoration. Through the effect of carefully controlled
herding, they intend to trample the sage and bare soil,
much of which is capped solid, so that native grasses
can get reestablished again. The ranchers are calling
this act of restoration a "Poop-and-Stomp" and its effects
are being carefully monitored using the new land health
protocols.
"There is not a square centimeter
anywhere on earth,
– Peter Ravin,
biologist
Using cattle to restore rangelands is not as crazy
as it sounds. In fact, in his 1933 classic book Game
Management, Aldo Leopold wrote that wildlife "can be
restored with the same tools that have hithertofore
destroyed it: fire, ax, cow, gun, and plow." The difference,
of course, is the management of the tool, as well as
the goals of the tool user.
Another example of 'using nature to heal nature' is
the work of Bill Zeedyk, who uses the power of small
flood events to restore degraded streams to health.
Called "Induced Meandering," Bill's approach is to place
simple wood-and-rock structures at carefully calibrated
points in incised stream channels so when the flood
event comes the water is diverted into the opposite
stream bank thus 'remeandering' the channel, which dissipates
energy and encourages riparian vegetation to take hold
and grow. Bill calls this innovative, yet humble, restoration
strategy "thinking like a creek."
Both the Taos project and Bill Zeedyk's efforts are
emblematic of a new conservation approach in the West.
In fact, I am convinced that land health and restoration,
not wilderness and protection, will become the principle
paradigms of a new conservation movement in the not-so-distant
future. Our goal will be a thousand acts of restoration,
which I define as achieving full ecological functionality
at the level of soil, grass, and water.
Our job as conservationists will be to transform 'red'
to 'green' on maps such as that of the Altar Valley,
and to do so collaboratively – for without local
support (and maintenance) most restoration work will
be jeopardized in the long run.
Social Health
If I could wave a magic wand across the American West
and instantaneously produce a land health map for the
whole region, I think all of us – rancher, conservationist,
scientist, private land owner, public land manager,
and public land owner (you) – would be shocked
by what we would see.
I have little doubt that we would see a map dominated
by reds and oranges across wide stretches, with isolated
stretches of deep and pale greens. The reasons for the
dominance of reds and oranges across this map would
be multiple, widely varied, and often site specific
– as would potential restoration strategies.
However, this "land sickness," as Leopold called it,
is not the only illness afflicting the rural West. Depressed
economies, governmental gridlock, cultural clashes,
demographic pressures, political disenfranchisement,
and a host of other maladies have descended in force
on rural counties contributing in large measure to the
frustration and anger that characterize so much of the
region today.
In other words, social health in the West is in as
much need of restoration as the physical landscape.
A big step toward restoring both would
be creating an economic incentive to restoring land
to functionality. The other parts of the puzzle are
in place – the restoration toolbox is well developed,
as is the scientific understanding of ecological processes
that can guide restoration work. We certainly don't
know everything, but as ecologist and restoration advocate
Craig Allen likes to say "we know enough now to get
started."
And who better to do the job than people with local
knowledge and great affection for local land? Long-term,
meaningful restoration cannot be accomplished long-distance
by well-meaning urban volunteers – the job is
too big and too complex. 'Curing' what ails western
land will require local doctors, local remedies, local
elbow grease – and local paychecks.
The good news is the labor pool is already in place.
Ranch families are spread out across the West –
at least for the time being.
Additionally, the compensation of ranchers and other
rural landowners for producing ecological services to
society, in the form of cleaner and more abundant water
in these dry times for instance, will become an increasingly
important economic engine in the not-so-distant future.
But that's another topic. The issue here is how the
conservation movement will adjust to meet, and support,
these emerging trends. The adoption of a land health
paradigm is the first step, but the concomitant question
of who does the restoration, and how they get paid,
requires another major realignment of the movement's
philosophy.
If going back to school means reexamining the concept
of 'pristineness,' it also means reexamining its historical
antithesis – work.
Under the old wilderness paradigm, conservationists
traditionally segregated work from nature, thereby creating,
according to historian Richard White, "a set of dualisms
where work can only mean the absence of nature and nature
can only mean human leisure."
White argues that conservationists need to reexamine
work or else condemn ourselves to spending most of our
lives outside of nature. "Having demonized those whose
very lives recognize the tangled complexity of a planet
in which we kill, destroy and alter as a condition of
living and working," he writes, "we can claim an innocence
that in the end is merely irresponsibility."
If the conservation movement could instead focus on
work rather than on leisure, White says, then a whole
new approach is possible. Focusing on work "links us
to each other, and it links us to nature," he writes.
"It unites issues as diverse as workplace safety and
grazing on public lands; it unites toxic sites and wilderness
areas. In taking responsibility for our own lives and
work, in unmasking the connections of our labor and
nature, in giving up our hopeless fixation on purity,
we may ultimately find a way to break the borders that
imprison nature as much as ourselves. Work, then, is
where we should begin."
Again, we must start with a land health paradigm. Not
only does it address the 'functionality' crisis confronting
the West, but it also can help chart a path through
the region's 'value' crisis as well. Qualitative and
quantitative assessments of land health can create a
baseline of fact that can guide our fancy, potentially
helping us to resolve some of the destructive cultural
clashes and dualisms that plague the region –
jobs vs. the environment, urban vs. rural, work vs.
play – clashes that are undermining our common
goal of creating "a society to match its scenery," as
Wallace Stegner once lamented.
Equally important, by directing restoration work and
encouraging the economic activity that goes with it,
a land health paradigm can help restore 'social' function
to communities and economies in the West.
By developing a common language to describe the common
ground below our feet, by working collaboratively to
heal land and restore rural economies, by monitoring
our progress scientifically, and by linking 'function'
to 'value' in a constructive manner, a land health paradigm
can steer us toward fulfilling Stegner's dream.
The Working Wilderness
Not long ago I had the privilege of riding
a horse into the West Elks Wilderness, high in the mountains
above Paonia, Colo. I wanted to see an award-winning
cattle herding operation in action and to learn more
about the compatibility between well-managed ranching
and wilderness values.
I also wanted to see some pretty country.
So did Steve Allen, who moved his family to Paonia
in the early 1970s as part of that era's 'back-to-the-land'
movement. Switching from farming to ranching in the
late 1980s, he went back to school to learn the principles
of progressive cattle management. Upon his return he
convinced five other ranchers with permits in the West
Elks to form a 'pool' and begin herding their cattle
as one unit through the mountains. They also convinced
the Forest Service to let them give it a try.
Today, pool riders guide the thousand-head herd of
cattle through a long arc in the mountains with the
aid of border collies and the occasional temporary electric
fence. They move the herd every ten days or so, which
allows the land plenty of time to recover; and since
traditional fences are no longer necessary, the ranchers
voluntarily removed hundreds of miles of barbed wire
fence in the wilderness, a boon to wildlife and backpackers
alike.
In addition, Steve employs a new method of low-stress
livestock handling whose gentleness would make John
Wayne roll his eyes.
The local Forest Service range conservationist, Dave
Bradford, went to school too and came back determined
to quantify the effects of this new thinking. He rides
the range frequently, reads monitoring transects constantly,
and publishes the results. He has also done quite a
bit of historical research, including uncovering 'before'
photographs of the range, in order to gain new knowledge
on the conditions of the land.
Steve and Dave were my hosts for the day, and I was
as eager to see the evidence of their labors as they
were to show it off.
I couldn't resist an act of bridge-building, though,
so I brought along the new director of a Paonia-based
conservation organization. The support of her predecessor
for the West Elks herding 'experiment' had been crucial
to its early success and I was curious what she thought
as an heir to the project. I also knew she had recently
backpacked the very trail we were riding that morning.
What we saw shocked us at first. The herd of cattle
had moved along the trail just days before, beating
it into a muddy pulp. It looked like a tornado had touched
down; shattered brush and trampled grass were ubiquitous,
as was the cow poop. It certainly was not your standard
Sierra Club-calendar image of wilderness.
"This looks great!" yelled Dave as we climbed a steep
hill on horseback. "Look at all this disturbance. Come
back here in a month and you would never know the cattle
went through here, it'll be so lush."
I turned to the director of the conservation organization.
"People call me all the time and complain," she said.
"They're hikers. They don't think there should be cows
in the wilderness."
"What do you tell them?" I asked.
"I tell them it's a working wilderness," she replied,
spurring her horse forward.
Steve led us to a high meadow where we found a small
herd of cattle that had broken off from the main pack.
After lunch we spent the rest of the day driving the
cattle back down the mountain in a chaotic rush of snapping
branches, surging adrenaline, and hard work. It was
Steve's sly way – I realized when we reached the
bottom of the mountain, exhausted and exhilarated –
of teaching us a lesson about values.
Before our education began, however, we all sat in
the green meadow and ate lunch among the blooming wildflowers,
admiring the view. Each of us, rancher, federal manager,
and activist shared the same thought: what a treasure
this land is! Sitting there, I was reminded of why I
became a conservationist – to explore the solace
of open spaces; to look and learn, and teach in turn;
to celebrate cultural diversity alongside biological
diversity; and to revel in nature's model of good health.
And to try to understand, as John Muir
did, that every part of the universe is hitched to everything
else.
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