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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A new conflict out of an old one,
By Peter Donovan "managingwholesdotcom" (Enterprise, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature (Paperback)
In his new book Dan Dagget describes a new conflict over management of western resources. Instead of the tired old set-piece of preservation versus extraction, we now have a fresh, new struggle between Leave-It-Aloners--as Dagget terms those who believe that the best thing for humans to do with land is to leave it alone and let nature take its course--and the Lost Tribe, who are busy reversing land degradation through use.
Conflict, writes Dagget, is one of the major economic sectors to emerge from America's public lands. And Dagget himself is definitely a player. In the 1990s, he broke ranks with the advocacy-oriented Sierra Club on the grounds that results on the land counted more than prescriptions or beliefs. He began to follow the experiments of people such as Tony and Jerrie Tipton in Nevada, who were restoring grasslands on sterile, salt-encrusted mine tailings with cattle and hay where conventional prescriptions of technology and rest from grazing had failed utterly. Using cattle to restore land, Dagget found, collided with what people "knew": that cattle could not restore land, they invariably degraded it. Therefore the grassland atop the mine tailings was invisible or irrelevant. It was, he says, like showing pictures of dog tricks to a cat fanatic. The book is a wide-ranging and rapid survey of the remarkable achievements of some the Lost Tribers, which will be engaging and hopeful news to most. The theme running through is that human management has been crucial factor in creating many of the environments that we mostly now regard as natural. By ignoring or denying our participation in the landscape, we have become aliens--but in following the examples of the Lost Tribe, there are substantial opportunities to change our attitudes and behaviors, and become more native to our landscapes. These are powerful and deep issues. Dagget's Lost Tribers are practicing a kind of interdependence that offers tremendous opportunities to regenerate degraded lands and communities--opportunities that didn't exist in the old set-piece between extraction and preservation. An understanding of basic ecosystem processes underlies much of what the Lost Tribers have accomplished, and many of Dagget's readers might benefit from a basic description of the water cycle, for example, or how the biological carbon cycle operates differently in moist environments than in seasonally arid ones. But his book, outlining as it does this new conflict emerging from the old, stale one, will be a powerful creative force for change.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Discovering Our Importance TO Nature,
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This review is from: Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature (Paperback)
Dagget's first book, "Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Toward a West That Works," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His latest work, "Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature" ($24.95 in large-size paperback from The Thatcher Charitable Trust and EcoResults!) expands on his alternative view to the "leave it alone" philosophy that has governed much thinking about the environment in the last few decades. According to a press release, EcoResults!, of which Dagget is CEO, is "a nonprofit foundation that finds funding for land managers seeking to turn their operations into a means to restore and sustain environmental values."
Just what that means is the subject of "Gardeners of Eden," a lively and personal exploration of how a new kind of environmentalism is being born among those who see themselves, and their skills, as part of the ecosystem, part of nature. The huge mistake we modern humans have made, Dagget insists, is in thinking that "the only way we can really heal the land is to protect it from impacts created by humans: to 'leave it alone.' This widely held assumption is why, when we talk of healing the land, we invariably talk of protecting it, of preserving it. ... That's why articles that deal with land issues treat the word 'protecting' as having the same meaning as 'healing' or 'restoring.' It is why those articles never explain how protecting the land will heal it." The assumption that healthy land is land humans leave alone is based, he writes, on another assumption: "that all environmental problems are caused by humans. ... We don't think of butterflies or deer or wolves as creating environmental problems." But, says Dagget, there is a group of what he fondly calls "Lost Tribe gardeners" whose actions have benefited the land, have made it "outperform the Leave-It-Alone approach." To these people, such as Tony and Jerrie Tipton, who solved an "eco disaster" in the Nevada desert, the word "protection" is another name for "abandonment." A Nevada mining operation had left a 300-foot pile of crushed rock "polluted with cyanide and covered with salt." The Tiptons "dragged a length of railroad rail over the part of the pile they intended to treat, breaking up the salt crust. ... Then they scattered the seed, spread the hay and straw, and released the cattle. The cows ate most of the hay and a little of the straw, and what they didn't eat, they trampled into the rocks along with the seeds and the microbe-rich organic fertilizer they provided from their guts." Years later native plants are still growing there, in an area with less an inch of rain. Early in Dagget's career he demonstrated for Earth First! and in 1992 was named to a list of top grass-roots activists by the Sierra Club. But since then Dagget has come to realize that an environmentalism that insisted on defining healthy land as that least touched by human hands -- even if those land tracts were devoid of life -- simply made no sense. His book cites many examples of human intervention helping ecosystems thrive by their being used to grow food or raise cattle. Careful management is needed, but that's the point of gardening. Copyright 2007 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of those rare books...,
By
This review is from: Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature (Paperback)
There a few books that conjure a simultaneously bizarre reaction within a soul: like a biblical epiphany, Dagget stirs new paradigms that made me so excited that I could barely put down the book to complete my daily tasks. Yet, I could not turn the page to the next chapter because the elegant revelations of our place in nature evoked so much thought and "wow", that muddying the gift of a previous chapter with another would do it no justice.
Tom Bean's photography is enlightening and beautiful; a great match for a great book. Environmentalists take heed--if you think we don't belong here, you'll find that you are more alien than those who put their soul's work into the land. This book is in my life's top ten list! Rev. D.M. North Dakota
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