You’ve seen the ads:
Some eco-celebrity urges you to make a donation to save one of the
earth’s last special places. Your generous gift will help
protect this place so it remains healthy and pristine forever. Few
of us bother to think that this pitch contains a huge assumption
— that protecting a piece of land from humans will solve its
problems “forever.”
The problem with this assumption is
its denial that humans have been as important a part of nature as
wolves, butterflies, and salamanders. Scientists tell us that for
at least 10,000 years, humans have functioned as the dominant
predator in North America. And before we learned how to build huge
dams, we made little ones that slowed and spread water and created
meadows, imitating the dams of beavers and muskrats. We’ve
sowed and seeded and fertilized plants, much like bees and birds
and bison.
We’ve done these jobs so well that
scientists now believe that humans were responsible for making the
Amazon rainforest the marvel of biodiversity that it is today. Some
have gone so far as to call the Amazon “a cultural artifact.” The
same goes for the Great Plains of North America and the Everglades
of Florida.
Advocates of total protection tell us that,
when we remove a plant or animal from an ecosystem in which it
plays a functional role, we risk causing an environmental disaster.
They tell us this even when the animal that might be removed is a
tiny bug or rare weed that has no perceptible impact on anything.
When the species being removed is homo sapiens, no such
warning applies. No one, to my knowledge, is studying the effects
of removing humans from the environment, even though we play a more
important role than any species about which truckloads of data have
been collected.
Yet the main strategy of contemporary
environmental policy in the West is removing humans from doing the
things that humans have done here for millenia — burning,
cultivating, irrigating. Rigorous protection has only been applied
to large tracts of land only since the mid-1900s, when the
Wilderness Act was passed. With that short a track record, we
really can’t know what the long-term effects of exclusion
will be. We can get some idea, however, by comparing the recent
results of protecting the land with the results achieved by people
who continue to do those old jobs that humans have done so long for
nature.
Along the Gila River in New Mexico, a rancher has
re-watered some old dirt irrigation ditches and restored a riparian
forest to such a state of health that it supports the largest known
population of an endangered bird, the southwestern willow
flycatcher. An adjacent preserve, where the land is protected,
supports none.
That same ranch also hosts the largest
known population of a threatened fish, the 3-inch spikedace. It
prefers streams that get stirred up now and then and thrives where
cattle regularly shuffle through the water. The Verde River in
Arizona used to support healthy populations of spikedace until the
riverbanks were declared off limits to livestock in 1997. No
spikedace have been seen in the Verde since.
In North
Dakota, ecologists found that, where a family began herding their
cattle across their ranch the way bison once moved across it to
evade Indian hunting parties, this “pulsed” grazing is literally
pumping carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil and combating
global warming in the process. They found it is also restoring the
carbon-rich, black soils that made the Great Plains one of the most
fertile areas on Earth. Nearby lands protected from the pulse of
animal movement show no such effect.
If the only way to
heal nature is to protect it, none of these successes makes any
sense. If humans truly are an integral part of nature, and nature
works better with us than without us, they make perfectly good
sense. They’re also a good indication that those of us who
care about nature ought to be doing whatever we can to keep people
who do this kind of work on the land, not donating our money to get
them off.
Dan Dagget is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, and is the
author of the new book, The Gardeners of Eden,
Rediscovering Our Importance to
Nature.
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