Why leaving ãnatureä alone means destruction of the wilderness. By Steven H. Rich

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Brave Daniel Boone, the famous bear hunter, warrior and frontiersman, described some wilderness areas of the Southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror." Why? Because the frontier of Daniel Boone's experience was not a wilderness. Though made up of native organisms, it was a human-created landscape full of food and useful plants. 

     Native Americans had managed the woodlands and grasslands to produce native game animals, native birds and fish, native seeds, berries, nuts, greens, fruits, bulbs, corms, mushrooms, roots, basketry and cordage materials, firewood, weapon-making and building materials, medicines and ceremonially important plants by processes collectively called "proto-agriculture." They burned the brush to prevent catastrophic wildfire and to increase wildlife and visibility for military reasons. 

     The very soils were changed by their activities. Many "wild" native plants that exist today are in fact the products of ancient Native American genetic selection and propagation projects

     The sight of a wild, trackless, impenetrable, dense forest or barren, brushy tangle (both subject to huge devastating wildfires) with little animal life and nothing to eat repulsed Boone, as it did the Native Americans of his time. He was used to productive, gentled native landscapes --humanized landscapes full of bears, deer, rabbits and squirrels. 

     Advocates for a return to ãpristineänature demand an end to ranching, claiming that ranchers ãalterä what activists imagine to be ãnaturalä ecosystems. Water holes, water troughs, erosion controls, irrigation, seeding, grazing, clearing brush, making a living on the land, hunting and fishing are all castigated as wrong and bad. 

     These angry activists want to ãrestoreäwhat they suppose was the ãpre-Columbianä or ãpre-contactä condition where, they say, humans ãhad little influenceä on ecosystems. Health and biodiversity with human assistance, in their minds, seems to be a distortion of the natural order.

     Anything that happens in nature without humans is sold by them as desirable and good, no matter how destructive of ecosystem values, no matter how many species of native plants and animals are lost. This odd, irresponsible position has been adopted because after years of ãridding the land of human influencesä the health and biodiversity they promised from ãreturning things to natureä never happened. They fundamentally misunderstood the causes of ecosystem health. 

      Very positive ecological effects of well-managed livestock --so valuable that experts recommend paying skilled, responsible ranchers for the ecosystem services they provide --are contemptuously rejected by doctrinaire ãenvironmentalistsä as more ãalteration.ä Stranger still, ranchers' so-called ãchangesä generally cause the landscape to look much more like the West their ancestors encountered in the early 1800s,with a mix of successional communities in a mosaic pattern.

and use vastly less water than the woody species now dominating most of the West. The problems are due to policies corrupted by "pristine" mythology. 

     Consider these statements about shrinking biodiversity under politically correct management by environmentalist Bill Bryson, author of "A Walk in the Woods": 

     "The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is the most striking example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century...lost seven species of mammal --the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog [grassland species], pronghorn antelope, flying [Abert] squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk....Altogether 42 species of mammals have disappeared from America's National Parks this[20th] Century." 

     All of these animals mentioned as extinct in Bryce Canyon National Park still live on nearby ranches. Why have the park habitats lost species? The answer lies in how hard, raw, random nature functions. 

      Contrary to popular belief, rangeland ecosystems do not self-organize into biodiverse, productive, stable communities without appropriate disturbance. Ecosystems can go on collapsing for hundreds of years. Below certain thresholds, recovery is not possible without human intervention. "Survival of the fittest" left to itself, works out in practice to mean landscapes under the pitiless rule of the aggressive bullies among adapted species and abiotic (nonliving) forces such as wildfire, drought and floods. After a few decades, rangelands end up with a very few plant species covering vast areas (each valuable as apart of a broader community), sad remnants of a possible hundred or more. These survivors are the tallest, meanest, and often most toxic plants that can live there. The ground between them is bare. The soil erodes. Soils also degrade in place (lose nutrients and water-holding capacity) as soil organics are used up faster than the roots of woody plants can replace them. Soils are dried by rapid drainage of resulting rills and gullies and the heavier water uses of trees and shrubs. Springs and streams dry up. Often, insects like ants make up the bulk of animal biomass. All these factors would be obvious to any organic gardening expert. 

     Sagebrush, pi–on and juniper, chaparral species and salt desert shrub species force out the grass and flower understories over time causing serious degradation. So do many other conifers and woody plants. 

      Biodiverse communities of aspen trees with nontoxic, nourishing leaves and bark, nurturing nontoxic grasses and flowers have declined by 60to 90 percent since European settlement, according to research quoted by Charles Kay in "Is Aspen Doomed?"

conifers that use bullying tactics like overshading, competition for water and nutrients, and exuding root and leaf toxins to kill other plants or prevent their germination. 

     The loss of these vast human-created aspen areas is a huge blow to wildlife and

leaves fall. 

     Native Americans created very large areas of pine savannah in places such as Arizona's Mogollon Rim country. Ponderosa pines and other conifers now number in the hundreds and thousands per acre where once 25 trees per acre stood. These very productive, biodiverse, high-altitude grasslands were a paradise for many species and produced deep, rich, water-absorbent soils. These human-created pine savannah conditions were found from California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico to Idaho, Montana and the Pacific Northwest in ponderosa forests. They were the result of low-severity, prescribed-fire frequencies as often as three years between fires, according to Dr. Wallace Covington's studies at Northern Arizona University. Native Americans who still retain ancient knowledge about fire use are very critical of modern prescribed-fire practices which often damage soils and plant communities and cause erosion and floods.

     "My great aunt and mother talked about how the land was burned," said Nellie Williams, a North Creek Mono tribal elder. "If there was brush they'd burn the ponderosa pine and sugar pine areas. I remember there wasn't the tall brush there is now. It's hopeless now the [government] let it go so long. So when it does burn it goes and kills the big trees. When they'd [Native Americans] burn, it wouldn't hurt the trees." Tree numbers were kept low by burning seedlings and saplings. "They would burn in the fall after rains...but it wouldn't burn way down through the duff like it does with the controlled burning today."

      Researchers now realize that most "dry" (without saturated soils) mountain meadowlands which recreationists so enjoy were created and maintained or enlarged by Native Americans in late prehistory or before. Native Americans created large biodiverse forb and grasslands in the West both in mountain and valley locations for roots and greens, seed harvest, to attract game, and for shelter, basketry and cordage materials which they required in tremendous amounts. A 40-foot deer net made by the Sierra Miwok

would require 7,000 feet of string or35,000 plant stalks. 

     Managed lands were more productive by orders of magnitude. It took an average10 to 20 times as many unmanaged plants to serve a cultural need as it did managed ones. 

      In the prehistoric and late-historic West, researchers are certain that very large areas were burned regularly for fire protection and wildlife management. Grazing and the required management practices these days do much of what Native Americans accomplished with prescribed fire, and connect ranchers' land stewardship with their predecessors. Also, fire is almost always a "fire and animal impact treatment." Wild grazers are strongly attracted to ashes and regrowth after fire. Their hoofprints, dung, urine, bacterial and fungal inoculations are important to recovery after fires. 

      To modify plant growth and for other productive purposes, broad additional lands were burned, irrigated, pruned, selectively harvested, sowed