Dan Dagget was one of the original members of EarthFirst!, one of the more radical environmental activist organizations of the last 50 years. In his efforts to achieve health for the Earth’s ecosystems, however, he found himself conflicted over environmentalism’s means and the ends those means actually achieved. With that in mind, he began investigating and writing about success stories where active participation by humans in the ecosystems they depended on for livelihoods made the environment healthier than if they were not there. Two of his books, "Beyond the Rangeland Conflict" and "Gardeners of Eden - Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature" have thus been influential for many of us concerned about the serious environmental problems confronting the contemporary American West.
The Art of Range Podcast is supported by the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission; Vence, a subsidiary of Merck Animal Health; and the Western Extension Risk Management Education Center.
Transcript
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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at www.artofrange.com.
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Welcome back to the Art of Range. My guest today is Dan Daggett. I have been a fan of Dan's work since his book, Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, was a required reading for one of Karen Launchbaugh's range classes that I took in the late 90s. And over the last couple of years, I've read his newer book, Gardeners of Eden, twice. In the introduction to the book, he mentions that he was an anti-grazing environmental activist up through the early 90s and then had some shifts in thinking in response to healthy environments that he saw on well-managed ranches. But I don't know any more of his story than that, and I thought it would be good to visit about his book. So Dan's on today. Dan, welcome to the show.
>> Well, thanks. Howdy. Glad to be here and glad to talk about this stuff. It's an important topic. As I said, the American West and the East, too, well, experiencing a whole bunch of serious environmental problems. I live here in the West, moved here in 1980 from Ohio. And, you know, now, we're reading all about wildfires and all that, you know, up in the home that I used to live in, in Flagstaff, ended up with after one wildfire and the flooding that it caused because there was no vegetation to slow down the water as it fell on the slopes and moved down. The home I used to live in had three feet of water inside of it. And now, we hear all about climate change and the desert of, you know, loss of -- I've worked with all these things, which I tried to go and fix. But I helped start a number of environmental groups and just had a conversation the other day with someone back in Ohio, is still sustaining Save Our Rural Environment, which we helped to start back in the late 70s.
>> Yeah, it's interesting. It feels like active land management is having a bit of a resurgence right now. And I wanted to offer a little bit of a setup before we jump into this. The first thing is I love the subtitle for your book, The Gardeners of Eden. The subtitle is People's Contributions to Nature.
>> Yes.
>> The Society for Range Management just published a pretty significant report regarding nature's contributions to people, just to try to spell some of these things out and to highlight the importance of rangelands in particular, which, for many people, is just flyover country or wastelands or the leftovers from the homestead era. But I feel like that title straddles Richard Knight's Radical Middle, capital R, capital M. It offers, you know, sort of a subtle counter to the Aldo Leopold assertion that man is only a plain member and citizen of nature because it seems clear to me that we're not. If we were, we wouldn't have widespread calls for naming the current Earth epoch the Anthropocene. You know, this is not the millennium of the echidna or the elephant because they've dominated the Earth. And, you know, some people believe the Earth might eventually experience the epoch of the cockroach or the crow because man went extinct from ruining the planet. But I'm actually inclined to believe that, maybe like the cockroach, we're a little bit more adaptable than that. And so, your title speaks against, you know, these ideas that are dominant, at least among the intelligentsia, that humans are only a blight on the planet.
>> Right.
>> But I think it also counters, you know, this post-enlightenment pragmatism that says man is the measure of all things and that we can impose our will on the earth and everything in it as if we have omniscience about these multiscale ecological processes that are at work and have the intelligence to run the planet. I think we do have a responsibility to tend the garden well, and, maybe to your point, as humans, not tending it is not one of the options like it is for the echidna and the prairie chicken. You know, their interactions with their physical context are not influenced by what's going on in Iran or by the philosophies of forest management or restoration ecology that are in vogue at Cornell. So whether it's a blessing or a curse, you know, man's ability to think abstractly and to exert significant influence on the earth's living skin has to be dealt with because we will have influence, and we have an outsized influence relative to the other creatures. You know, so that begs the question, how do we do that? And I think you've been wrestling with that for some time. So I'm really interested, maybe if you're willing, tell a little bit of the story of how you came around to promoting ranching done well as a way of taking care of the earth.
>> Well, the way I started is, you know, once we moved to the West, we really loved the West and we were really impressed by how beautiful the land is out here, and that's why we moved here. And so, we became active out here in the West as we were back in Ohio environmentally. And one of the things that we learned as we became involved in environmental groups, actually one thing is kind of interesting, while we were first getting involved in all this, we had a meeting of a local Sierra Club up in Flagstaff in our house that we had just moved and bought, too, moved into in Flagstaff. And someone had come to the meeting and said, how many of you want to start a really effective environmental group? We've got some friends that are starting to put one together right now and we're going to call it Earth First.
>> Wow.
>> So one of the most radical of environmental groups, Earth First, started in our living room.
>> Yeah.
>> And we went up, and I have a picture of me holding a sign saying dump Watt, James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, as we put a plastic crack down the front of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River and recommended, you know, removing all these bad things humans had done. Including some of the stuff we were talking about is stopping ranchers from overgrazing or grazing period because they were, you know, un-naturing the environment. And when word got out that we were going to start trying to get ranchers off, I had a few ranchers get in touch with me and say, you know, we're concerned as you are about all the things you talk about, about, you know, wildfire and climate change and global warming, and we're doing something. Why don't you come down and take a look? And so, you know, we put together an outing of enviros and anybody who wanted to come along. And we went down and started to look at places where the two types of management had been applied, and one being the ranchers who were trying to ranch in a way that sustained environmental function. So a couple of the first places we went to, one of the first was a ranch owned and managed by an environmental group. And right next to it was a ranch. And the environmental group, of course, had stopped grazing on the land that it owned and acquired. And right next to it was one of the more active at the time of the ranchers applying this new way of ranching, the sustainable ranching. It was called holistic because it took into consideration all the different things that are important on rangeland in the West and tried to sustain them. And so, we went down and looked and we -- First of all, it's kind of an interesting story. The guy who was managing the environmental ranch at the time said we don't need to go look at the land. I've got a fist full of studies here that all show that Dan Daggett's a liar. And then somebody said oh my God, let's go look at the land. So we were standing. We went out onto the rangeland on the protected ranch. And you could -- I have a picture of it. You could see our shoe soles from the side. The grass was about that high. In other words, maybe part of an inch. Then we crossed the fence onto the land that was managed in the other way, and the grass was up to our chest. And where you could see bare dirt on the protected ranch, on the other ranch, there were very few places where you could see the dirt at all because it was so covered with plants, with grass plants.
>> Yeah, same soil type.
>> So also, you know, we got to go look at some more of this kind of stuff. So I went to -- I found out about a place not too far from where I live in Sedona, or near Sedona these days, and then those days too. And it had been protected from grazing since 1946. It was a Forest Service study area. So we went to look at that, too. And what I was really surprised to find out was inside this exclosed fence that protected it from grazing, which happened around the study area, there was about as much grass as there is in my living room right now. In other words, there were some trees and bushes, a few weeds.
>> Yeah.
>> But there was a 100-foot tape. Well, there were two stakes. I left out three. One at zero, one at 50 foot, and the other, the 100-footer, was gone. But they had stretched a 100-foot tape in order the Forest Service monitors to be able to, or anyone else that wanted to monitor, count the number of plants that grew in a 100-foot inside the protected area. And they quit monitoring it because they got tired of going and writing zero.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, the rancher outside, at this point, had just started applying this new way of ranching. And I took pictures of the very first visit. And there's a little bit of grass outside the fence. You can see the sign on the fence. But he started inviting people to come and measure the results that he was getting by applying this new method. And I just talked to him today, actually. He's still doing it. But this was back in -- Well, the first one is 2005, [inaudible] right up into the 10s, 2000. And he started inviting people to come every October. And we stretched a 100-foot tape. And when you stretch the tape on his ranch, in most areas, you couldn't even see the tape. There was so many grasses. You couldn't count them. There was too many. So as an environmentalist, I'm thinking, wait a minute. What really works? How is this possible that this is working? And so, I started researching it, you know? And a man named Alan Savory had done research over in Africa and seen how humans and predators over there had moved the wildebeest, kept them in herds and moved them around. And the grass was doing well, so he brought that method to the U.S. and started encouraging ranchers to apply it to keep their cows in herds and move them around. And, you know, what it harked back to me is the book about Gaia that James Lovelock had written about how -- And he said in it that the Earth is a synergistic, self-regulating living system. That is life on Earth. That is the ecosystem. So life has managed to find a way to interact on Earth in order to sustain itself and keep on. And so, you know, here, I'm looking at ranches that are kind of doing that. One of the things that Lovelock said, that if an animal benefits from a plant, in other words, by eating it or something of that sort, then you can be pretty sure the plant benefits from the animal. So that doesn't just work with it. I started thinking about other ways in which that works. And well, one is hummingbirds and flowers. You know, the hummingbirds pollinate the flowers, which causes the flowers to produce seeds, and the seeds fall on the ground and grow and there's more flowers for more hummingbirds. Another favorite example of mine. And I started looking up -- There's lots of examples, including, you know, I wrote an article recently called Mutualism about how sea cows, in other words, these mammals that live in the ocean graze the bottom, seagrass on the bottom of the ocean and they have an interaction with that. Dugongs, that's the name of them. They actually -- Where the dugongs are reducing, they are finding the seagrass on the bottom of the ocean is reducing. So wait a minute. So how do humans fit into this? It strikes, well, Alan Savory was watching humans doing it in Africa, and then it occurred to me. And that's why I started referring to people who are applying this as the lost tribe. Remember, because the Indians and actually interacted with bison in the same way, and that seemed to be was the reason there existed the Great Plains. And there were prairies all over the place that were doing well. I think of that every time I drive around here in the middle of Arizona now and look at all of these huge areas that are either not being grazed effectively or not being grazed at all, in many cases, even protected like the place protected since 1946. I've got another one not too far from my house that's been protected since the 80s, and it looks even worse because it's eroding. And where the ground used to be when it was being grazed by deer and other animals as well, as well as cows, now, the gullies are so deep I can't even reach the top. So what I do as an environmentalist, I think, wait a minute. We've got to find out what works and what doesn't work. And the way to find that out is we go look at the results. And that's why we formed one group called Eco Results. And whatever forms, that's the group that we should be advocating the application of. So we went out and we're looking at, well, a number of ranches, like I said, that are applying this. [Inaudible] one was along a riparian area not too far from the 1946 exclosure and another environmental group that doesn't, well, doesn't believe the kinds of things that I would say. They didn't believe what I was discovering, I will put it that way. And they had sued to get the cattle taken off from along the riparian area along the Upper Verde River, here in Arizona, in order to save native fish and some other native animals that were living along the river or and the fish in the river, of course, because they said that the cattle grazing was damaging it. So in the 1994, they removed grazing from along the river. And, well, the river started to change in such a way that the scientists said, hey, wait a minute, this isn't working. We've got to put them back on, put the cows back on, and find out what's really going on here so we know how to really fix it, how to sustain the native fish. And their bosses in the government said to the Forest Service, said shut up. We've been sued. The animals are gone. We're protecting the river. Well, the river, I have pictures of it changing. They're really changing it, all except for one part of the river that was private land that continued to be grazed. So the scientists for the government, the Forest Service scientists, started calling that the little slice of heaven because it looked as healthy as the river had ever looked before, even though the other parts that were protected were now eroding terribly. And by three years later, they did a fish count on the river to see how the spike days were reacting to this change in the river and found out there weren't any. And that was '97. I ran into a guy that works on the river for the Forest Service here not too long ago, a couple months. I said, well, the spike day's coming back, because I've been going down there and taking photos because, now, what's happened is they have also removed grazing from the private land because there was some problems with some of the owners. And they decided, one of them decided to sell their interest to the Forest Service. And the other one said, okay, go ahead, you can sell mine, too. So now, I said, well, the spike day's come back because it's been protected since 1994. Protection's supposed to help them. How well are they doing? He said, well, there are now no native fish of any kind in the Upper Verde River. So we've got to -- You know, that's why -- Well, as I'm learning this, you know, and seeing all the other things that I'm going to describe to you coming up, too, is [inaudible]. We heard about other people who had said wait a minute, this works, this interaction, this synergy between animals and plants. And in the case of rangelands and grasses, grazing animals and plants work. So we should be applying this in areas where we need it. And one of the most important areas and amazing areas that I found out about, because up near Flagstaff, we were having similar problems, was there was a mine. Well, there was one near a mine in Nevada that I heard about that a family called the Tipton's had applied this to, and there was also a mine here in Arizona, a huge copper mine, a thousand acres or more of copper waste that is rock crushed to talcum powder and treated with cyanide in order to remove the copper. And they were having trouble getting anything to grow on it. And even the mine had been there for about 100 years. And even where it had been left, this waste pile had been, nature had been trying to restore it, you know, by getting weed seeds to blow onto it, nothing had pretty much grown there. But a fellow that I came to know named Terry Wheeler went to the mining company and said, you know, he had been learning about all this interaction, this synergy between plants and animals, and he says I can get something to grow on it. And they said, oh, no, you can't, but go ahead and try. We'll let you try. So he -- And I sent you some photos of this, and they're on my website. He put some cows on it. Well, the first time, they slid. Their slope is really steep. The first time the cows went onto the slope, they slid down the side and sunk into the waste, up to their chest in some cases. So he put hay with lots of seeds in it on the side of this and put cows on it and fenced them in. So they stomped in the hay and fertilized it and stomped in the seeds with it. And not too long, a year, I think. Well, anyway, shortly there, a few growing seasons after that, the area that was 300 feet high and sloped, you know, at the angle of repose that he had applied this to was covered with grass. And that was back in the late 80s, early 90s. And it's still. You have to sustain it. The interactions, you know, synergistic interactions have to be sustained. But when you sustain them, the ecosystem health is also sustained. So a couple of years ago, I drove by this same area because it's an area I go by and just amaze myself at how this waste pile next to other waste piles, some of which I can see almost from my window here in Sedona, that they're not using this to, it was still green. But all of a sudden, I looked and it was starting to erode. There were no cows on it. I called the mining company. I said wait a minute. Terry Wheeler, the guy who had been managing that, had died. And I said, when Terry died, did you take the cows off? They said yeah. And I said, well, don't you see what it's doing? And he said, actually, you don't need to worry. We're smart enough that we know that if something works, you better not stop doing it. So we're putting them back on. And they are back on as far as I know now. Looked at them about a year ago, and it is re-sustaining. And so, the photos of that are absolutely mind-blowing. We've used it to -- So actually, I and a friend of mine, Norm Lowe, we said there was a place up by Flagstaff that removed 13 million tons of rock from to crush and make pavement for a road up to Lake Powell, where we'd had our demonstration, and repave it. And they were unable to get things to grow. The reclamation had failed. So we said, well, we'll try the Terry Wheeler technique on it and the Tipton technique. So they said go ahead. We don't think it'll work. And we'll only accept your results if you grow only native grasses, no weeds, no non-native plants. And they have to be a certain density or we will call it a failure. So we put 456 cows on it, moved them back and forth from one side to the other with a fence in the middle to make it into two pastures, so we could let one side rest while we grazed the other. Then we put hay and seeds on it. We used native grass seeds. One growing season, one year later, the Forest Service came back to look at it and said, wait a minute, what the hell did you plant this grass here for? It's a native grass. We can't get it to grow anywhere. I said you told us we had to. Oh. They said, well, we got to make sure you got as many as we said you were going to have to have in order to call this a success and get the mining company back its deposit that it had to make. And so, we had five times as much grass, dense. It was five times as dense as it had to be. So, you know, as I hear all this and see all this -- And, well, Karen Launchbaugh, whom you just mentioned, has sent me photos of areas that have been grazed next to areas that have not been grazed, and the not grazed areas burned, and the effectively grazed, obviously, areas didn't burn. And it was separated by a fence. And in some places, the fences are real crooked. And where the fire stopped is on that real crooked line. It's amazing. So I'm thinking, why aren't we doing this? As I drive around, I hear about more and more wildfires. I've given a bunch of talks about it in a bunch of different places, including in California and one in Nevada City, talked about using grazing and goat grazing in order to prevent wildfire. Shortly after my talk, they put a GoFundMe page on the web calling GoatFundMe Nevada City. And then I did a talk in East Sacramento, California. Same thing happened. GoFundMe page to fund grazing goats to prevent wildfire. I've called them, and they say it's working pretty good. So when I hear all the wildfires that are still happening, I'm thinking, why aren't we replying this effective remedy more and more? And the only thing -- Well, one thing I've come up with is our definition of nature is everything but us.
>> Yeah.
>> If humans made it, it's not natural. But wait a minute. Humans evolved in nature. We evolved to play roles in nature the same way hummingbirds do and squirrels do. They plant nuts. They bury nuts to save for later, and then they don't eat some of the nuts, and it grows more trees to make. Well, you know, nature is a functioning, a synergistic, a working-together system. So when we define ourselves as different from it and we remove ourselves from nature, then the functions that we used to perform, that we were effective at, aren't being performed in some cases, in some places, and the world is starting to deteriorate. Recently, I went back to that area, the 1946 exclosure, with a thermometer that takes the temperature of the land surface. And I took the temperature inside the protected area because, you know, been hearing, well, there's huge concern about climate change and global warming and all the effects it's having. So I took the temperature of the protected land. And that day, it was a fall day, as I recollect, but it wasn't a terribly hot day, but it was sunny and it wasn't terribly cool. The temperature of the soil in the protected area was 122 degrees. I stepped across the fence and took the temperature. Just a few minutes later, it was 78 where there was grass growing. So effectively, I'm thinking, hey, if we're -- You know, and I go on the web and look and say we're protecting more and more land every year. Well, that means to me that if it's -- And I've measured other areas too, and that was a, let's see, 44 degrees difference. It was 44 degrees hotter, the protected areas. I found other areas where it's been 35, and I found one back in Ohio that was a mine waste pile that I was trying to convince them to use animals to restore, and they didn't like the idea, but it was 50 degrees hotter than the grassland next to it. So how much of these bad effects, environmental effects, are we causing? It seems to me I can show you where we've caused a number of them and then a number of really, really impressive ones, and I can also show you areas where we heal them.
>> I think that's the -- You say in the book that that's the radical question. You know, can humans make any contributions to so-called natural ecosystem processes that make things better? And we're willing to accept those synergistic relationships with something like beaver, you know, which is an obvious example. In the book, you say beavers eat willows and use them to construct dams, which create ponds and enlarge meadows, and that creates more habitat for more willows and fish and more beavers. But we can't accept it's kind of an odd world view where we think humans are by nature good, but everything we do is bad, and we can't have any positive effects on the environment around us. And of course, there's lots of examples of ways that we have not taken good care of the environment.
>> Absolutely.
>> But I think you provide a lot of examples where that's not the case. And should we not pay attention to those and try to mimic some of that? And I think that's what you're -- I sense that's what you're advocating for.
>> Absolutely. I think that we need to have more rewards going out. The one thing that really impressed me -- And I have a handout that whenever I give a talk or around in a meeting, where it's appropriate, I have a handout that lists all the number of environmental groups that are now supporting this way of dealing with environmental problems, you know, Audubon, the Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and some other ones, the Quivira Coalition that I helped start. Some of the groups, including What's Left of Earth First that I helped start, aren't doing this, but some of them are. And, you know, the other thing we need to learn is don't do away with what works. One fellow I know, I just called him the other day to make sure it's still going because, you know, we've had a lot of drought. I live on a place called Dry Creek, and I'm thinking about changing the name of it to No Creek because we've only had water flow down it once in the last two or three years.
>> Yeah.
>> And it is totally barren. And we did have 13 feet of water go down it one year, about three years ago, just for a couple of days. But then, the next thing you know, it was dry again. But one rancher I know -- You know, like I said, there are no spike days in the Verde River. In the Gila River, on a ranch that is managed by a rancher I know, and is doing obviously a good job because the largest, so far as what I've been able to find out, the largest known population of spike days anywhere is in the Gila River on land as it flows through his ranch. And I've checked into it some more and found out that the largest known population of an endangered bird, the southwestern willow flycatcher, he has a significant population of them surviving on his ranch, too. And I know that there are some environmental groups that are trying to put him out of business, to get him off the land. And one of the things that gets us into trouble here is with regard to the spike days in the Verde River. Even though the ranchers were sued because they were supposedly damaging the spike days, and we found out later that must not have been the case, but now we know that someone did damage the spike days, and they have never been held accountable for it. I think it's time that we start recognizing failures and successes. Instead of just defining them according to definition, we need to define them according to condition, instead of definition. So, yes.
>> Yeah. When you get people out on the land and have them describe their vision for landscape health in that location, you know, right where they're standing, usually, the environmentalist and the rancher have pretty similar ideas. They just differ on the methods. Describe a little bit some of the methods that you have seen that have gotten these results. And the book just gives one example after another, after another, after another of positive results. You mentioned with the mine tailings pile a little bit of how they did that, but what are some other examples of the methods that were used to create these environments where you have abundance, where previously in the preserved areas there was bare ground and hot soil?
>> Well, you know, one of the things that we're harking back to is, well, the discoveries that were made in Africa, and also realizations about the Indigenous people here and the animals that they coexisted with, bison and elk and so on. You herd them and keep them moving. You don't let them sit there. You don't put them in a pasture or leave them there so that when the grass starts to grow again, they eat it again because that damages the grass. They have to be able to keep moving. You have to have a synergistic interaction between animals, plants, and the ecosystem, soil, et cetera. And so, I was just talking to one of the ranchers I know, the one fellow who takes out the monitoring outing every October, right next to the 1946 exclosure, so we can count and list the species of grasses that are saying yes to the way he manages the land. And what he's working on, and other people are doing, too, is coming up with electronic ways to herd their animals so they don't have to use fences quite so much. But the main thing is, keep them moving and keep them bunched in terms of grazing and that sort of thing. So the main thing, too, is to watch and see what your results are. If it isn't working, then change the way you're doing it to try to make it more like the ways that are working, and you check around and see. And as I said, you know, those mine piles, the big waste pile, Terry Wheeler had developed a way that he would just have friends, people who work for him, go down and move the fence. And it's not only interesting as to learning, people learning how to apply this. Well, one of the ranches where we were where this was being applied very successfully, there was a fellow, by the way, that said, Dan Daggett's a liar, the studies show. He was fired. And I have a picture of his replacement taking a picture of his ranch and being across the fence on the ranch next to it. And at this point, the grass is taller than his head, so. But anyway, you have to be able to learn to move them around and not leave them. Don't do what doesn't work. Do what does work. So yeah. That way we preserve biodiversity. We become part of Earth again by doing the things that work with it and learning to sustain the functions that we really evolved. And we may even be able to start, and we can't actually. There's this fellow, as I said about the guy who's next to the 1946 disclosure, trying to use collars on his cows and a radio thing to send them signals to move them around and herd them electronically. So we can start using our -- You know, at one point, I read and said, well, it makes sense to say that it is unnatural if humans are involved in an area and using machinery, but we can use machinery to be natural, too. And that's really encouraging to me, and it makes me feel like there is a positive way to go, and we can have positive environmentalism, which I'm all for.
>> I think I heard Joel Salatin say a while back that the keys to managing grazing in a way that is usually positive are mobbing, mowing, and moving.
>> That's it.
>> And then adjust that to get the results you want.
>> Yeah, the three M.
>> You know, I think one common criticism is that this is all fine, but cows don't need to be everywhere. Like, are there places where using livestock as a means of, you know, setting up these synergistic reactions are not appropriate?
>> Well, there's other ways of doing it. It's funny that you mention that because just in the last few days and yesterday, last night, what I've been doing is I've been "grazing" all the grass across Dry Creek from our house because it's along a walkway where people smoke and flip cigarettes down into the grass occasionally. And if the cigarette hits at the right time, it'll burn my house down. So I'm over there with a weed whacker, essentially, doing the grazing function. So there are other ways to do this, and you don't need to be cows. Well, and, you know, another way that people are -- Trish, while I was doing that weed whacking, Trish looked up on the web to see what are good ways to prevent fire. And even here in Arizona, it said, well, you could use goats to graze it, which really surprises me because one of the things I do research on is to find out how much these methods are being used. And I hear about all the wildfires in California. I've Googled using goats to prevent wildfire, and I got what looked like about 100 positive mentions of it in California. And then I added the word "Arizona" and got zero. So we've got some learning to do. And there are, as I was starting to say with the weed whacker, there's other ways to do it. And I've seen people have dragged things around that punches little holes in the ground so that -- Well, one of the things is, you know, what animals do, grazing animals do, they evolve to do all. And nature is an evolutionary system. When they walk around with their hooves, their hooves work to punch little holes in the soil crust so that when it rains, water goes down in there and soaks in more effectively. We've been in areas where the grazing has been removed and saw that when it does rain, the water all washes off. So what this points out, is if you don't use animals to do what the functions have to be done in order to keep the system sustainably functional, you have to come up with another way to do it. And humans are probably the most adaptable at doing that sort of thing. So there we are with a responsibility to learn to be animal-like with our machinery and make it work more functionally. We did a test once on an area that had been protected next to a graze area. We wanted to see how effectively the soil was in absorbing water. So we got two soil biscuits, we called them, little clumps of soil, about as big as a biscuit, from one side of the fence, the protected side, and one side of the fence, the effectively grazed side of the fence. We got an eyedropper. We had a government agent there with it, and we had a stopwatch. And we wanted to see how long it took the soil biscuits to absorb a drop of water. So we put a drop of water -- We got the grazed biscuit ready to go. We got the eyedropper. And somebody said go, and clicked to put a drop of water on it. I said how long did that take for it to absorb? He said, well, it sucked it up so fast I didn't even get a chance to hit the stopwatch. So it did it immediately. It seemed to suck it out of the drip. So then we went to the protected biscuit. Okay, go, put the drop on it. Waited, waited, waited, waited. Finally gave up. It never did absorb it. So these learnings, that had to be an extreme case, but it actually did happen. And so, that explained to me why, when I go out onto areas from which the interaction with the soil and the animals had been removed, we're seeing huge erosion. And then I see efforts, too. They put little clumps of grass or hay out there, rolled up into rolls, to try to keep it from eroding, and eventually they all wash away too, and then the trees fall into the gully. So we need to have accountability for failure instead of just having accountability that is dished out in terms of who the person is. We're learning a lot about that in a number of areas in our society right now, as we're becoming more sensitive to the whole idea that you don't blame people because of who they are or what they do. You know, you blame what the results they cause, is what you hold them accountable for. There you go. So yeah, I think it would be a good idea. It would be a great idea. I'd love to get it going, to have indigenous people start applying some of these techniques around. And I've done a few mentions of it to some of the tribes here locally, and there's been some interest. One thing a lady came up with that was really interesting to me, she said, well, they say that natural is land that's not managed by man, by humans. Wilderness is a type of human management. That's not natural either.
>> Yes. A couple of years ago I interviewed Charles Mann about his book 1491, which you reference. You wrote this before he wrote that book. But some of the sources in the book were people like William Denevan, who was one of the anthropologists that documented some of the stuff in the Amazon about, you know, what we think of as pristine rainforests are almost certainly secondary growth on top of places that were likely polyculture agriculture for thousands of years before they were, you know, abandoned by the people dying out and then overgrowing in forests. But we have this assumption that indigenous peoples didn't have much influence on the land. And Charles Mann's book really countered that, not just in places like Central and South America, where we, you know, can believe that there were larger civilizations, but even across most of North America, where indigenous practices likely maintained, you know, much more open land and probably more fertile than what we see now.
>> Exactly. Exactly. And I think of that a lot, as I have said, as I drive around and look at all the barren -- You know, we camped out at a campground not too far from here just the other day. And I was looking at all of the barren ground around that hadn't been stomped on. You know, in other words, I'm not talking about trails. I'm just talking about how nature's natural function is shrinking in those areas. But we look at them and we think, oh, why, they're undisturbed. And we're wrong. They are disturbed. And we just need to be able to recognize that. And if we want to keep it that way, that's okay. But we have to realize what all that results in.
>> If I'm recalling correctly, Gardeners of Eden was published in about 2005. Is that right?
>> Yes.
>> Okay.
>> Gosh, that's a long time ago. I better write another book.
>> That's right. Must be time. In the book, you lament the fact that many of these people who are doing amazing work in maintaining and improving really abundant, diverse, complex ecosystems were not being recognized for what they had actually done. Has any of that changed?
>> Well, it has changed, as I said. You know, I mentioned that the environmental groups are now doing this as well, well, have become aware of it, and are now crediting the techniques. But I just called the guy that has, you know, a significant population of fish and birds, extremely significant, on his ranch. And he has not been contacted by the groups that are supposedly supporting that sort of stuff. And I'm thinking, well, maybe I should be trying to help that happen. But I'm not sure, you know, do the rancher want this? Who knows?
>> Yeah.
>> Working together, we've had our working together get-togethers. The fellow that I mentioned earlier, Norm Lowe, he is really working at getting working-together groups going too. We need to, well, maybe get more trips like out onto the Barnhart Ranch to look at how this is successful so that people start enjoying more field trips, things of that sort, more accreditation. That's what we need. But it is moving in the right direction, but there's plenty of more room to move. Another thing is, too, I think that we should be -- Well, Audubon now, they do Audubon certified bird-friendly beef. So that's one way that ranchers who are applying these techniques are getting rewarded for it. And I'm sure that some goat grazers, well, I know they are, being rewarded for reducing fire danger. But we need to come up with a more effective reward system for sustaining ecosystem function. We need to come up with a better -- I mean, there are groups that make lots of money by supposedly sustaining ecosystem function by lawsuit, even though, in many cases, the lawsuits they're filing are making it worse instead of better. We need a more effective reward system. And that's one thing I would love to help create.
>> And I do think it's a long game. You know, these results speak for themselves, but it takes a while for people to see it and then mimic it. I think books are like that. You know, you publish something, and even if it's good, it might be 20 years before somebody picks up the book and tries something different on their own place. And then 10 years after that, someone sees the results and it affects their thinking, and so on. And those things eventually multiply, but it doesn't happen overnight.
>> Right, right. Well, not too far from our house, we have someone who is applying this to some degree, but it could be done. And I'm just thinking, well, that's pretty good, but it could be a lot better. And I think, you know, a reward system would help make it a lot better. Because what they're trying to do is they're trying to actuate the reward system they use. In other words, they sell beef for meat. And that's how they keep functioning. And they want to do it in a way that doesn't get them sued for getting the animals off. But it could be done better if they were doing it in order to make the grass, you know, too many plants to count in your 100-foot monitoring stretch. In other words, the reward system could be worked even better than just, you know, paying more money for beef that is pasture-fed, like we buy pasture-fed eggs these days as well. But yeah, there's plenty of room to go here.
>> Yeah. What are you working on next? You've mentioned that you're interested in working on helping improve some of these incentive systems that reward good management. What else is next for you? Well, the two things I'm working on now is asking the question in a book that we've been asking right along in this talk, is why aren't we -- We're rewarding more and applying more the things that work. Why are we doing so much that doesn't work when we could be doing what works if we consider these problems to be as serious as we seem to consider them to be? You know, when you listen to the media, oh, my God, wildfire is that big. Look at all the problems it's got. Why aren't we doing more to it? Why don't we even hear more about ways to make the problems not happen? I mean, we hear a lot about wildfire and the damage it causes, but we hear very little about using methods like goat grazing in order to keep it from happening. And one of the things that has occurred to me and that I want to write about, too, is that problems are more profitable than solutions.
>> Yeah.
>> If you have a problem, the one thing you can do with a problem, too, is use it to help play the blame game. And if you play the blame game, then it's up to someone else to do something in order to solve the problem, and all you have to do is point the finger at them.
>> Yeah.
>> And then you can point the finger and ask for money to help us make them stop doing what they're doing, like they stopped grazing along the Verde River even though it exterminated the fish it was supposed to save. No one has said, wait a minute, that didn't work. Well, I've said it, but, I mean, we don't hear about it anywhere else except just in a few small meetings.
>> Yeah.
>> But, you know, one thing I talk about, why aren't we doing more work and try to make the case more for doing what works. That's the one thing. And the other thing I want to do is I read something in a book that I was reading the other day about how when people feel they are a part of nature, they're happier. They're more friendly with others. And so, that's why I've started to talk about instead of casting this as a political problem, you know, the us versus them thing, the right versus left and all that sort of stuff, to start talk about how doing these things that I've talked about that actually work in synergistic relationships within nature or with nature is rejoining nature. I'm thinking about writing a book and naming it Rejoining Nature. I'm thinking about changing my website to be Rejoining Nature. Humans, we define ourselves as aliens. And the more we act like aliens, the more we're becoming aliens. We need to start acting more like natives, back to the native, back to rejoining nature, back to being part of nature.
>> Yeah, I would agree. Your comment that problems are more profitable is intriguing. I have a friend who's a pretty good economist, and he likes to make the point that war is big business.
>> Oh, my God, yeah.
>> You know, in terms of how nations run, they can't afford to not be at least in some kind of conflict because there's so much economic output that results from all of the things that we do to support this military industrial complex. And I'm not a very political animal, so I just avoid these things. But the older I get, the more I think. Yeah, we say things like living in harmony, and it sounds so cliche. But again, the older I get, the more I feel like I'm aiming for that. And maybe just a couple of final comments here, and we'll find a way to close this out. But you mention in the book that, you know, one of the options if we're not living as natives, if we're living as aliens, is to set up the world where all the people are in engineered cities where we have food coming in and waste going out, and that all the people are in this engineered environment. And then we have that's juxtaposed with gigantic nature preserves that have no people. But that's not the world that I want to live in.
>> Right.
>> And I think most people don't, and maybe some do. But, you know, maybe that's another one of the radical ideas here, except that I think they're becoming less radical, and I'm encouraged by that.
>> Yes, less radical like the radical group that formed in our living room and more, yes, more -- And you know, we stay in, we watch the media. I do that a little too much, too. And we're kind of like signing out, living in the kind of places that you talk about. So we go outside and we want to be out there by ourselves, walking in "nature," even though it isn't really nature. It is unnatural, but it is a, oh, I don't know, a haven or something of that sort.
>> Yeah.
>> I think realizing that we -- A good way, a positive way to be part of nature and a positive way to view, accept, and support being part of nature is going to make us all feel better, I would think, but perhaps not. And if we don't do that, the one thing we're going to do is we're going to find out we're going to have to solve the environmental problems we create by becoming more and more alien, more mechanical. And I'm not sure where that's -- Maybe someday we'll move to Mars, I don't know, or maybe someday we'll turn this planet into Mars. I'd rather not.
>> No, no, I don't think so. Dan, I thoroughly enjoyed your books, and we will put a link to the book into your website in the show notes where people can see, can go take a look at these time sequence photos of the success stories. And I would encourage people to read the books. I think there is significant hope there. I don't think it's pie in the sky. I think you're tapping into, you know, true stories of real synergy that we do have a responsibility to create and sustain, as you've said.
>> Well, not only responsibility, not only an obligation, but a benefit in creating. It's going to make us able to live better. It's going to make us be able to be healthier and more happy. And that's if we finally get around to. At least I think it does. Maybe we're going to be happy just by fighting wars. I don't know. I looked up the other day, and I think it said there were 101, I don't know, maybe more than that, wars going on, on the planet today.
>> Yeah.
>> It says 101. So I guess humans -- And I think humans are a competitive animal. We are. We like to be able to have some way for us to end up on top and them to end up underneath us. But that's one of the ways that we've used to survive. But another way we've used to survive is humans are a productive, an aware, and a collaborative animal. And it's time to collaborate with, become part of, and work with, and befriend nature again in a real way.
>> That's a good word. And in the book, you say you can't have your cake unless you eat it too. And we need to be responsible about that.
>> That's good. I love it. Yeah. There you go.
>> Dan, thank you so much for your time.
>> Thank you so much for the opportunity.
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