Interesting perspective

landusepbb · 10-23-2005, 01:13 PM

A West that works
Leader of a lost tribe

Dagget's new book "Gardeners of Eden" urges humans abandon their hands-off preservation efforts and put Nature to work
By Courtney White
for Headwaters News

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."

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.

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.

http://www.headwatersnews.org/WhiteDagget101705.html

yettiatcpg · 10-28-2005, 05:02 PM

I have heard many people refere to the damage done by horses & cattle worse then that of ORVs. so how is it the we are treated like invaders when we try and ride legal areas while the Tree huggers are trying to get them closed under our tires?
seems to me we do the exact same things by stiring up the soil and retilling the soils so they can grow seeds better.

LunarWolf · 10-28-2005, 05:51 PM

Daggett is on to something good here, for certain. We are going to use the earth - why can't it be good for all, earth or human or animal? Why keep looking at it with limited perspective, whatver side you are on?

"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."

dead-on!!!!

Electric Sheep · 10-29-2005, 09:34 AM

Wow, that one really made me think...it's gonna take a while for it to all sink in, but the premise makes a LOT of sense.

RedBullJeep · 11-07-2005, 12:56 AM

Awesome post...good one to sleep on.

Rockcrusher · 11-07-2005, 11:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yettiatcpg

I have heard many people refere to the damage done by horses & cattle worse then that of ORVs. so how is it the we are treated like invaders when we try and ride legal areas while the Tree huggers are trying to get them closed under our tires?
seems to me we do the exact same things by stiring up the soil and retilling the soils so they can grow seeds better.

Cattle actually do minimal damage to open range because of the way they disperse.

On the other hand, the west's so-called "wild horses" create moonscapes wherever they congregate which is usually around springs. I know of at least a dozen springs within 15 miles of my house that have been pounded into oblivion by horses. Yet the environmental industry raises holy hell whenever some one suggests that this non-native species be eliminated. Go figure!

MorganM · 11-07-2005, 12:48 PM

you heard the man; unpack your teepees and get to work fix'n this here planet

Seriously though; dudes got a point!

10-23-2005, 01:13 PM	#1
landusepbb Registered User Join Date: Jan 2002 Member # 9328 Location: At the Mountains of Madness Posts: 2,684	Interesting perspective A West that works Leader of a lost tribe Dagget's new book "Gardeners of Eden" urges humans abandon their hands-off preservation efforts and put Nature to work By Courtney White for Headwaters News 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." 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. 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. http://www.headwatersnews.org/WhiteDagget101705.html

10-28-2005, 05:02 PM	#2
yettiatcpg Registered User Join Date: May 2003 Member # 19728 Location: To far from any good trails... Posts: 427	I have heard many people refere to the damage done by horses & cattle worse then that of ORVs. so how is it the we are treated like invaders when we try and ride legal areas while the Tree huggers are trying to get them closed under our tires? seems to me we do the exact same things by stiring up the soil and retilling the soils so they can grow seeds better. __________________ Yetti no matter how much I care, some folks are just assholes... [url]www.atvoffroad.net[/url] [url]www.greatlakes4x4.com[/url] [url]www.wegotmud.org[/url]

10-28-2005, 05:51 PM	#3
LunarWolf Registered User Join Date: Oct 2003 Member # 23538 Location: the Lerdo Highway Posts: 1	Daggett is on to something good here, for certain. We are going to use the earth - why can't it be good for all, earth or human or animal? Why keep looking at it with limited perspective, whatver side you are on? "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." dead-on!!!! __________________ [COLOR=DarkOrange]Non viduri sed esse.[/COLOR]

10-29-2005, 09:34 AM	#4
Electric Sheep Registered User Join Date: Apr 2004 Member # 29588 Location: Dallas Posts: 110	Wow, that one really made me think...it's gonna take a while for it to all sink in, but the premise makes a LOT of sense. __________________ Fighting for Rec. Land Use everyday! [url=http://landuse.blogspot.com/][b]LAND USE.BLOGSPOT.COM[/b][/url]

11-07-2005, 12:56 AM	#5
RedBullJeep Pirate is KING! Join Date: Jun 2002 Member # 12217 Location: San Diego Area Posts: 11,144	Awesome post...good one to sleep on. __________________ . Dustin Webster Red Bull RockCrawling Team www.beccawebster.com free 71PA_Highboy! banning info available now in the place we're not supposed to talk about. University of 4 Wheel Drive - Off Road Training DVD's and Instruction. U4WD.com RockHer 1 and RockHer 2 for sale...makin room to start on something new. PM for details.

11-07-2005, 12:48 PM	#7
MorganM Registered User Join Date: Sep 2003 Member # 22732 Location: Minnesota Posts: 101	you heard the man; unpack your teepees and get to work fix'n this here planet Seriously though; dudes got a point! __________________ [ 1988 Suzuki Samurai ] [SIZE="1"]"Dont drive like my brother!" - Click & Clack[/SIZE]

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