Beyond clean air and water
A friend who makes his living cultivating beef asked me a
question a few days ago. Coincidentally, it was a question I’d been
pondering quite a bit lately. The question came up just a few days
earlier among a group of farmers, ranchers and land stewards, and
it came up again a few days later, as a Southside Valley resident
and I watched a pair of Red-tailed Hawks turn loops and dives in an
aerial love dance.
A friend who makes his living cultivating beef asked me a question a few days ago. Coincidentally, it was a question I’d been pondering quite a bit lately. The question came up just a few days earlier among a group of farmers, ranchers and land stewards, and it came up again a few days later, as a Southside Valley resident and I watched a pair of Red-tailed Hawks turn loops and dives in an aerial love dance.
What does constitute a healthy natural system?
It’s a question he’s been asking state parks officials for several years. They can’t seem to come up with a comprehensive answer, either. And neither can any of the resource managers I run into in the Central Coast.
It’s relatively easy to manage an area for a particular species. If you want to protect Spotted Owls, there’s a course of action. Pronghorn antelope — here’s the plan. But that’s a lot like traditional cattle ranching. Take a target species, domesticated or wild, and farm it. If you want quail, there’s a plan. But how different is raising game birds under this scenario than raising chickens?
My ranching friend is part of a growing cattlemen’s vanguard, a group of people who understand that raising beef can be part of a much larger process, one that involves improving water quality, cultivating a healthy mix of plants and wildlife, and raising better quality beef. He leases some public lands for grazing under an agreement that his grazing practices lead to improvement of the landscape. And there lies the question — what’s better?
Certainly we can agree upon some things. There’s consensus that clean water and clean air are good things.
But what comes next?
More and more ranchers are discussing grazing strategies that mimic what once occurred naturally. When vast herds of elk, deer and antelope — or bison on the Great Plains — roamed across the landscape, plants were thoroughly mown, then left as the herd moved on. The grasses and plants evolved, not only to recover, but to thrive thanks to their seasonal pruning. It’s called the herd effect. Think about how you imagine the African savanna to be, and you have a pretty good understanding of it.
One resource manager recently recounted his observations of what happened when the Nature Conservancy acquired some land on the Carrizo Plain in San Luis Obispo County. The area is important for a host of animals that thrive in its open, arid landscape. Cattle had been part of that landscape for more than a century. But the Nature Conservancy staff moved the cattle off their property — not natural. The plants quickly grew thick and shrubby and the wildlife that managers were seeking to protect moved on.
The cattle were returned.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought with them their plants, animals, insects and traditions, and it’s too late to put things back where they came from, unless you’d like to volunteer to sweep the prairies clean of wheat and soybeans, or the fields free of honeybees. Some of us are fond of the sight of a wild mustang, or a flock of Wild Turkey. Some of us even like to catch the occasional German Brown Trout or Striped Bass.
Some resource managers do think that a healthy landscape must only contain native plants and animals, but that ignores the fact that everything arrived in a place somehow, at some time. It’s likely that the first Native Americans brought with them some of their own pet plant species. So defining a healthy landscape as one that mimics what existed before some arbitrary point is just that – arbitrary. Picking a point in time and building a landscape to mimic it turns resource managers into museum curators.
Many of the “experts” are inclined to focus on one thing – whatever the headliner species may be. So if you’re trying to protect the San Joaquin Kit Fox, you focus on the fox.
That may work for the fox, but at a time when public agencies control far more land than they can begin to hope to manage adequately, I worry that we expend too much money on too few worries.
So what is the definition of a healthy landscape?
Extending the clean air and clean water agreement a little further, I think we can agree that it’s a clean landscape, nearly free of pollution and litter. I’d also say that it’s got to be free of noxious biological pollution. There are some plants and animals that are so aggressive that they displace nearly everything else. The South has its kudzu and fire ants, and we have our pampas grass, yellow star thistle and red foxes. Because of their inclination to displace a host of organisms around them, species in this category have to be considered to be pollution.
As each of these recent discussions ran its course, a shared idea began to emerge. After dealing with the pollution issues and putting the natural house in order, the best measure of the health of a place may be one of the simplest – species diversity.
Certainly our own oak woodlands have much greater species diversity than the same sized slice of the Mojave Desert, but a comparison of one tract of oak woodlands to another might prove most enlightening. We know without even thinking that the more desirable of the two would be the landscape with a more vivid mix of plants and animals.
All of this assumes that we can manage a landscape in the first place, and that’s an assumption that I’m less inclined to accept as the years pass.
Thankfully, the land has an almost boundless capacity for healing. The Dust Bowl has returned to the Bread Basket. Clear-cut forests return. Rivers choked with silt even clean themselves, given the right combination of time and events.
That’s not to say we should do nothing in support of nature. It just argues for accepting that what we do amounts to triage, little more.
It’s a big planet, and we should remember to approach it with humility.
