Dear HCN,
The story of Sid
Goodloe’s success in rehabilitating degraded Western rangelands is
encouraging. If there were more land stewards with his kind of
passion, land ethic, and patience, there would be less controversy
in the West and elsewhere. But this is not, nor will it ever be the
case, for as Ed Marston points out, his efforts cannot be emulated.
Public-land managers too often seek overnight restoration instead
of long-term rehabilitation. The rush to judgment on success vs.
failure is too often made in the interest of garnering more funds
for more projects, and this tendency can easily lead to
self-fulfilling prophecies. No matter what the results, the final
conclusion will be a “more healthy forest” or
rangeland.
There is also danger in this story.
The simplistic notion that “presettlement” (I prefer
“preindustrial’) trees are good and postsettlement trees are bad is
gripping the Southwest. This notion is alluring to many land
managers because it allows them to “do something.” But how
different is it from even-aged management, in which old trees are
bad and young are good? Why is a tree which germinated in 1865
“good” but a tree which germinated in 1875 “bad’? Is this
stewardship or nostalgia? And as we move further from the advent of
an industrial landscape, implementation of nostalgic visions will
only result in the omission of entire age classes of woody
vegetation from future landscapes.
The idea that
today’s piûon-juniper woodlands were all savannahs and
grasslands is also deceiving. For example, early travelers passing
through the Flagstaff area along the 35th parallel described
thickets of brush. The 1850 Beale expedition described country “so
heavily covered with cedar and piûon that our progress was
constantly retarded.” In other words, piûon-juniper coverage
may very well be, in some areas, within the recent range of
historical variability. Sid Goodloe may have options for a few
areas, but there is no basis to pursue those options at the scale
he proposes. We don’t need to embrace the other side of the coin;
we need to use all the spare change at
hand.
Don
Moniak
Happy Jack,
Arizona
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Encouraging, but no panacea.
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