“No sooner had we removed the hunting/drum beating people from the land intended for national parks, and the land began to deteriorate.”

That’s Allan Savory – the human face of environmentalism.

What the federal lands bureaucracy and environmental error produce. . .Photo Credit: Dan Dagget

What the federal lands bureaucracy and environmental error produce. . .
Photo Credit: Dan Dagget

This is also Allan Savory from the video link below:  Desertification is causing climate change as much as – maybe more – than fossil fuel use,but worse than that it is causing hunger, poverty and violence for millions of men, women and children. 

I thought I knew his work and was slow to watch this video.  You shouldn’t be.  It’s the most hopeful thing that I have seen in ages . . .

Here is what you will learn:

  • “Where cattle have been removed to stop desertification, the opposite happened.”
  • Two thirds of the world is turning to desert; this is not about arid and semi-arid lands; it is about seasonal grasslands.
  • Resting is NOT the solution; fire is NOT the solution.  Managed grazing is.  Livestock, bunched and moving, is a proxy for the former herds that roamed the grasslands and with which herds those grasslands evolved.  (17 minutes into tape see the staggering results in Mexico and other places).
  • It is happening in the U.S. on National Parks and other public lands where we removed cattle .  It is happening in Australia; it is happening in the Horn of Africa where 95 percent of the land can produce food only from grazing animals
  • If we can restore ½ of world’s grasslands, it takes us back to the pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon

Those of us who know this work, those of us who watch the puritanical, paternalism of the environmental movement, those of us who believe that the human condition is as important to the environment as the environment is to the human condition – are angry at the high-handed ideological rigidity — the colonialism, the hubris — of the liberal environmental community

Montana in April – random thoughts on place

 John Moore, award-winning author of “the breaking of ezra riley” and other books, sent me this photo on tax day, Montana in April

As I drove down 9W from Orange County in New York State, where my stable is located, to my home, I looked down from the Palisades and out over the suddenly blooming Hudson River Valley. This is the widest part of our historic river, where the estuarial tide begins to diminish and ocean and mountain waters reach conciliance. I felt myself settle into that view with more affection than I have for any other place.

People often ask why I don’t go west since I love ranching so much. They always get that wrong: I consider ranching an impossibly difficult and hard choice, one to which you must be born. What I love are ranching’s people. How they meet their hard places: the resilience, toughness, square-deal, fair-minded decency. And, then, I love their horses.