Saving the land---With Cows???

Dan Dagget recently visited Grass Valley and Chico.  I went to both events and had a phenomenal time!  Dan is a great guy to get to know, and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations on his recent trip.  Dan's most recent book Gardeners of Eden Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature, challenges the common leave-it-alone philosophy of land preserves.  He argues that humans play a healthy role in many eco-systems and our management practices and connection to the land is vital to keeping lands healthy.  Dan talks about groups that have been involved with creating nature since the dawn of time, including Native Americans as well as the tribal groups who created the Amazon.

 

                Dan draws a connection between the ancient cultures and the modern groups of folks who have a similar connection to the land to be ranchers.  Dan started out as an Earth Firster as well as active recruiter for the Sierra Club.  In his many journeys he began to find that many ranchers had much healthier lands than neighboring preserves, and he wondered why.  He began to study the use of grazing as a management tool and the relationship that most ranchers have with the land.  He cites cases of overgrazing, but shows that most ranches that used to fall into those categories of management style are changing.  Dagget also speaks of the Tipton family in Nevada who ride a around in a bus called the Pink Panther, which a picture of the cartoon character mooning any unsuspecting passengers behind it.  The Tiptons have dedicated themselves to land restoration through grazing.  They have restored many lands thought to be irreversible waste lands.  Many of their projects have included mine tailings in which they use the cows to build up a layer of top-soil.  The successes have been absolutely amazing!

 

                Dan Dagget states that one way to protect nature is to appropriately use it.   Grassland no matter how it is use it always healthier and better for the environment than pavement.  Ranchers and environmentalists have a common enemy…encroachment and urban sprawl.  Dan also points out that an acre of grassland utilized more carbon dioxide than an acre or rainforest, which makes grasslands irreplaceable in the face of global warming.

 

When I asked Dan what a small rancher could do to get involved he told me to invite an enviro as he calls them, or environmental group to my property.  It could be perceived as a huge risk to ranchers to have such an open door policy with their perceived adversaries, however taking such risks is the key to trust and open communication.  The reality seems to be that regardless of differences, ranchers and environmentalists are going to have to band together if they want to see healthy open spaces remain.

 

 

If you want more information I highly recommend both of Dan’s books

 

 

www.ecoresults.org  

 

This is the article that appeared in the March 22, 2007 issue of Chico News and Review

http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=300689 

Saving the land --with cows?

By Robert Speer
roberts@newsreview.com
more stories by this author

www.ecoresults.org
The title of Dan Dagget's latest book is Gardeners of Eden, but the subtitle does a better job of saying what it's about: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature.

Our importance to nature? Isn't the best thing we can do for nature to leave it alone?

Well, no, Dagget argues, and he's got the environmental creds to make the case: For years he was a leader in Earth First!--that monkey-wrenching gang of eco-radicals that was the bane of loggers and developers in the West--and later he worked for the Sierra Club.

At one point Dagget found himself working on environmental projects with Arizona cattle ranchers, and he learned that some were such excellent stewards that they actually improved their land over time. From that experience and others, he came to believe that environmental groups of the "leave-it-alone" school had it all wrong.

Human beings belong in nature and are a part of it, he realized, and until recently have always had a positive impact on the natural environment. It's wrong to think that early tribal peoples didn't manipulate the land. In California, for example, the native Indians regularly used fire as a way to clear out underbrush and create more grassland for deer and antelope.

It's only lately, actually, that we have become "aliens," as he puts it, whose idea of authentic nature is of big parks--called wilderness areas--with no people in them other than our fellow urbanized aliens who've come to visit.

Dan Dagget  

Last Thursday (March 15) Dagget, a stocky man with gray hair and goatee who lives in Santa Barbara, was at Chico State University spreading the word. His talk in Holt Hall was the final presentation in Chico Performances' delightfully provocative On the Creek lecture series on sustainability and ecology.

Using a series of the excellent photos (by Tom Bean) from his book, he presented examples of ranchers and others who have had far more success at restoring abused land than could be obtained by leaving it alone. At the U Bar Ranch, in New Mexico, the ranch manager created an environment in which the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher thrived, while on a nearby preserve they numbered zero. The birds and the cows, it turned out, had a mutual relationship that worked for both.

He mentioned a couple, Tony and Jerrie Tipton, who live in a purple bus in central Nevada. Working with little support and less money, they have developed a revolutionary way of restoring blasted land. In one case, done as a trial, they tackled a former heap leach pad, the relic of a gold-mining operation, a 300-foot-high pile of crushed rock leached with cyanide and encrusted with salt.

Their method? They put down a layer of straw and native plant seeds, covered it with hay and straw, and set loose a herd of cows on the site for several days. As Dagget describes it in his book, "The cows ate most of the hay and a little of the straw, and what they didn't eat they trampled into the rocks along with the seeds and the microbe-rich organic fertilizer they provided from their guts."

Six months later, a community of native plants had grown there. Three years later, it had become home to a diverse community of wildlife, and birds' nests, rodent burrows and lizards, along with coyote and deer scat, were present.

Should anyone doubt the importance of having healthy rangeland, Dagget pointed out that an acre of good grassland eats up more carbon dioxide than an acre of rainforest.

It's OK to use the land, he said in Holt Hall: "Nature can be protected by using it." Besides, he added, "the use relationship is at the heart of nature"--in the food chain, in the process of decay, everywhere one looks, in fact. Human beings are part of that process and always have been.

He's talking of course about positive engagement with nature. Most of our use of nature these days is exploitive and done by big corporations with negative consequences, he said. That must change. The more we engage positively with nature, understanding that the relationship must be mutually beneficial, Dagget said, the more we will understand our importance to nature.

"We've got to face it, guys," he told the Holt audience. "We're natives. We've got to start acting that way."