EAT MEAT AND SAVE THE PLANET

Every time some overinflated Hollywood celeb or irrelevant British royal says we all have to become vegetarians to save the planet, I think about how rarely I’ve seen wildlife in a vegetable field. No elk, no pronghorn, certainly no mountain lions. And if I do happen to see a rabbit or a prairie dog among the veggies, I know whoever planted them is doing everything they can to get those uninvited guests out of there to keep them from eating up the produce or polluting it with e coli.

And wildflowers? In a field of vegetables wildflowers are considered “weeds” and treated as such.

On the other hand, visit a cattle ranch here in the West and you have a good chance of seeing deer, elk, pronghorn, coyote, black bear, bobcat, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, road runners, Gambles quail.... the list is too long to print here. Get lucky and you might see a mountain lion. I know a rancher who has seen a couple of jaguars on ranchland here in Arizona.

As for wildflowers, as I write this, I’m looking at a ranch out the window of my camper, and I can see giant saguaros, cholla cactus, palo verde and creosote bush. The Arizona poppies, brittlebush, and desert marigolds were spectacular this spring, and the native grasses are providing plenty of forage for wild and domesticated animals alike.

An activist vegetarian responding to what I just said would point out that growing vegetables requires a lot less land than raising meat. This enables us to protect more land and allow it to return to nature so it can be home to even more wildlife and wildflowers. 

That would be an effective counter-argument if it weren’t true that raising meat on the land can benefit it ecologically even more than protecting it. 

How’s that? 

Scientists who’ve studied the matter tell us that grasslands and grazing animals evolved together and developed an interdependence similar to so many other mutually beneficial relationships in nature: bees and flowers, beavers and meadows, reef fish and coral. When cattle are managed so that they act like natural grazers, i. e., when they are kept in herds and moved across the landscape in response to conditions of moisture, season, and other natural factors, they create this same kind of interdependence. 

That’s why cattle have been successfully used to restore ecological health to land that has been damaged by mining, by raising crops in ways that exhaust the land’s fertility, and even by the environmentalists’ panacea “protection.” For instance, in Arizona and Nevada, cattle have been used to return native vegetation to denuded mine sites and piles of mine waste on which other forms of reclamation had failed. How do they do it? By stomping in seeds and mulch and nourishing the mixture with their own natural fertilizer. Sheep and goats have been used to create firebreaks and remove nonnative plants at various locations from East to West, and sheep, goats, and cows have been used to revegetate land damaged by catastrophic wildfire. 

I haven’t heard of a single case of soybeans or broccoli being used to achieve any of that.

As for all that cow flattulence and belching the anti-meat folks tout as a cause of global warming, properly grazed grasslands have been shown to be so effective at sequestering carbon in green and growing grass that some ranchers have been able to supplement their income by marketing carbon offsets created by their naturally-managed cattle. 

That works even if you don't believe in global warming

Acknowledging the effectiveness of these techniques the state of Florida has come up with a plan to contract with ranchers to use their livestock to improve that state’s rangelands’ ability to absorb, clean, and sequester water. One of the aims of this program is to raise the water level in the Everglades. That’s right. Florida is using cows to rewater the Everglades.

On the other hand, when grazers are removed from the land the ecological results can be disastrous.

In Central California, when cattle grazing was removed from seasonal wetlands called vernal pools, the native plants and animals that live there, some of which are endangered, were displaced by nonnative weeds in as few as three years. When grazing was resumed the rare plants and animals returned.

Also in California, the threatened bay checkerspot butterfly has disappeared from lands from which cattle grazing was eliminated -- to protect the butterfly. On lands that continue to be grazed the butterfly has managed to persist.    

Because of this and similar instances “cessation of grazing” has been recognized as one of the main threats to some of California’s most sensitive ecosystems by the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition. That organization includes The Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife, and Audubon, among others.

And, for those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, you may remember (and want to link back to) the story of the native fish in Arizona (the spikedace) that was sustained by grazing for more than a century and exterminated  in less than a decade by “cessation of grazing,” or the Drake exclosure that’s been protected for more than 60 years and is as bare as a parking lot while the grazed land right next to it is covered with native grasses.

There’s more:

Meat is the only human food that can be raised on land that is officially designated wilderness. Not so with vegetables. 

Meat can be raised on land that can also be used for recreation such as hiking, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, horseback riding, orving, downhill skiing, and birdwatching. Vegetable fields are off limits to most of those. Just try riding your orv or your horse through someone’s field of bok choy.

So, the next time you chow down on a big juicy steak or leg of lamb, give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back for saving the planet, and remember that you are enjoying the only food that can be raised within a diverse, native, openspace ecosystem in such a way that it restores, sustains, and even enhances that ecosystem.

On second thought, maybe you ought to order two steaks. It’s going to take a lot of cows to remedy all the ecological damage perpetrated by vegetarian environmentalists.

IS NATURE LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE?

Why does Nature respond so much more positively to Conservative Environmentalism than to Liberal Environmentalism?

Because Nature has so much more in common with conservatism. 

How so?

Nature operates according to conservative principles. The systems by which Nature functions — ecosystems, habitats, Gaia — can be most accurately described as laissez faire agricultural economies.

For instance: 

Bees, bats, quite a few bird species, and certain varieties of moths pollinate the individuals of certain species plants by feeding on the nectar and pollen within the flowers of those plants and trasnporting some of that pollen to the next flower. This enables those plants to reproduce, which makes for more plants, which makes for more flowers, which makes for more food for bees, bats, birds and moths.

Sounds like an agricultural operation to me. Frankly, it’s not all that different than when we humans raise corn or apples or roses. The only difference is, in the case of bees, flowers, it’s hard to tell which is the user and which is the usee. The plants are using the bees as much as the bees are using the plants. 

Here’s another example.

Beavers create dams which form ponds that provide the beavers with a refuge from predators and a place to build their lodges. At the same time, those ponds create meadows which provide more habitat for more willows and cottonwoods which means more food for more beavers. incidentally, these same ponds form habitat for trout and frogs and a variety of other plants and animals that all play roles as producers and consumers in this pond/meadow agricultural operation.

One more: (one I’m most familiar with.)

Grazing animals, such as wildebeeste, bison, and cattle, feed on grasses, and as they do they shake seeds from the plants and stomp those seeds into the ground along with the fertilizer they (the animals) provide. As the grazers graze, they also remove standing, shade-producing material from last season’s growth (by eating and trampling). This makes sunlight available to new sprouts (from all those seeds) and regrowing plants as well. As the hooved animals scuff around they break up the naturally-occurring ing crust that develops on soil from the impact of wind and falling raindrops and causes the soil to shed some water and absorb less. Hooved animals also pock the soil surface with hoofprints that create small catchments and enhance the soil’s ability to absorb water. 

All of this makes for more grass, which makes for more grazers, which, in turn, makes for more of the predators (lions, Indians, and cowboys) that depend on the grazers for food.  Predators do their part within this natural agricultural system by keeping the grazers moving so they spread their benefits over the largest area possible producing more grass for more grazers which, in turn, produces more food for more predators.  

You don’t believe grazers can produce grasses? Check these posts.

What all this means, as I see it, is Nature is a web of production and consumption relationships. Within Nature, living things work to produce what they need in order to live. Flowers don’t just “happen”. Bees cultivate and produce them. Willows don’t just grow by accident. Beavers create conditions for more of them to grow. Wildebeeste don’t just wander around eating grass, they are herded by predators so they cultivate, plant, and fertilize the grass which they harvest it as they are, in turn, harvested by predators. 

Most, if not all, of these interactions are more complicated than I have just described. For instance, in the case of grazers, grasses, and predators, a variety of creatures perform a number of jobs in this natural agricultural operation. Insects, such as dung beetles, and various microbes break down the manure of the grazers turning it into a form that plants can use as fertilizers. While all this is happening specialized fungi (mycorrhizae) interact with plant roots to enable the roots to take up nutrients from the soil. In each case each participant is producing food for itself as it is used to produce for something else.

Ecologists call this an “ecological community,” a network of interacting species, a food web. Within this community everything plays an essential role in producing what it uses. Want to know what sustains a certain plant or animal. Check what uses it.

There’s another reason Nature can be decribed as conservative (in addition to the fact that it bases the way it functions on the principles of conservatism). Nature can also be called conservative because it has absolutely nothing in common with liberalism. 

In Nature there is no “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” No welfare. No unemployment benefits or food stamps. No minimum or living wage. No bailouts. No income redistribution and no progressive taxation.  

Protection, the core principle of liberal environmentalism, is totally foreign to nature. Nature protects nothing. It uses everything from the waste produced by single-celled creatures, to the oxygen released during photosynthesis in the most gigantic redwood. In Nature to live is to participate in the web of use relationships — to use and be used. There are no exceptions.

Again, if you want to know what sustains some part of Nature, notice what uses it. 

For millenia humans have fit into this economy of natural production and consumption relationships. Much, if not all, of the actions we have used (and continue to use) to produce the food, fiber, and other items we need are as much a part of this ancient web as the actions of any other of its elements — bees, beavers, dung beetles, and mycorrhizae. Obviously, our role within this web has changed drastically because of our development of technology. But we still plant plants and herd animals, and as we play new versions of our ancient roles we still help hold the web together in much the same way that we always have.  

That is why removing humans from Nature a la the Drake Exclosure, the Verde River etc. can have results that can be so ecologically damaging and so counter to our conventional environmental wisdom — the widely-held misconception that removing human impacts from ecosystems always leaves them more “Natural” and better off.

Environmentalists who are also conservative can make use of the huge irony revealed in all of this, an irony that invalidates, contradicts, blows to smithereens the core principle of contemporary liberal environmentalism. The irony consists in this: When liberal environmentalists say “the way to heal any Earthly environment is to ‘return it to Nature’,” what they’re really saying is, the way to solve our environmental problems is to put them into the hands of a competent and dedicated conservative.

That's the right way to be green.

TWO QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD BE ASKING ABOUT LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

After reading in this blog about Liberal Environmentalist policies that: 

1. Exterminated a “Threatened” fish those policies were alleged to save.

2. Attempted to cover up mistake #1 by poisoning an entire stream killing all living things in it, including any other “threatened species” that might live there. On top of all this the poison has been shown to pose a threat of causing onset of Parkinson’s Disease in humans. 

3. Advocate a “restoration” policy that actually has been shown to have made things worse in 60+ years of a trial created to demonstrate the policy's effectiveness.

And... 

After seeing dramatic evidence in comparison photographs revealing that Conservative Environmental policies succeeded in the same cases where liberal methods failed so miserably. (See (name posts))

You should be asking yourself at least two questions.

First:

What are Liberal Environmentalists really trying to do? (Because saving fish, restoring ecosystem health, and the like are obviously not their main goal. In fact they don’t seem to be their goal at all) 

And the second question, which I find much more interesting: 

Why does Nature respond so much more positively to Conservative Environmentalism than to Liberal Environmentalism? 

The quick answer to the second question is: Because Nature is a conservative..., but we’ll get to that in a minute. First I’d like to tackle question #1...

What are Liberal Environmentalists really trying to do?

I’ve spent the last 10 years of my 35+ year career as an environmental activist puzzling over how people who profess to be absolutely dedicated to the environment and its health could harm it in ways such as those I have described in this blog and act as if nothing was wrong.

How could they keep working and fighting so hard to do what they do even though in many cases their actions achieve the exact opposite of what they claim is their life’s purpose? 

FOLLOW THE MONEY?
Some have explained this disconnect by suggesting that environmentalists really don’t care about the environment; that they do what they do because it brings them political power and money, and because it enables them to feel holier than the rest of us, or smarter, or smugger, or greener. Some say environmentalists do what they do because they are socialists or marxists and claiming to defend the environment from capitalism justifies their efforts to destroy it.

All of the above is true, but not in the way most of us think. Actually it is true in a way that even liberal environmentalists are not aware of. Most of the environmentalists I know say that money and power really don’t matter to them. That they are activists purely and solely because of their concern for the health and future of the environment. And I believe they mean that, but consider the following...

All environmentalists I know say they want to “protect” the environment. Nearly every environmental group I know of has the word “protection” either in their name or in their mission statement. (There’s even a group named “Republicans for Environmental Protection.”)

In our society the institution responsible for protecting things is the government. For that reason, whether intentional or not, “protecting the environment” inevitably happens via the government. This puts contemporary environmentalism inescapably in the big government/liberal camp because liberals are the ones who try to solve everything via the government and regulation. 

IF IT MOVES REGULATE IT

For instance: When the banking system almost collapsed in 2008 all we heard from liberals is: The banks need to be more regulated.

When the BP Deep Water Horizon oil well blew up and started spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico the only solution liberals could conceive of was more regulation.

When Dems declared our health care system didn’t work, the solution, they said, was — more regulation

Global warming — more regulation

Global cooling — more regulation
Severe weather — more regulation

Unemployment too high — more regulation

Economy in crisis — more regulation

Too much oil from overseas— more regulation

Some people have more money than others— more regulation

Endangered species — more regulation

You name it — more regulation, or, in other words, more protection, which means more government.

And in every case, the programs created to administer these regulations — Affirmative Action, Planned Parenthood, Public Health Care, Environmental Protection, Wilderness Designation — extend the authority of government into areas of our lives that range from the most momentous (having or not having children) to the most trivial (what light bulbs we can use.) This, in turn, expands the power over our lives of liberals who advocate and administer these programs.

In other words programs that protect and regulate actually pump political power into the hands of the protectors.

THIS WILL GET YOUR ATTENTION!

Here’s an illustration...

The illustration starts with a question: What modern government passed the first wilderness law, the first endangered species act, the first animal rights laws, the first antivivisection law, was the first to protect wolves, and the first to ban DDT? (Hint: This government was not in the U. S.)

Answer: Nazi Germany passed The Reichsnaturschutzgesetz law (Reich Nature Protection Act) in 1935. The purpose of the act, according to Duncan Bayne in How To Spot a Nazi, was to enable the Nazis to use their purported desire for “preventing harm to the environment" as a justification for increasing control over the German populace. One way in which that worked was by requiring that decisions on how a person could use their property had to be first approved by the Reich. (Sound familiar?)

Nazis considered themselves protectors of the animals as per this cartoon of
rabbits and other animals giving the Nazi salute to Hermann Goering.

Knowing what we know about Nazis, which criterion do you believe German fascists used to judge the success of this law: Whether it protected the environment? or, Whether it expanded their political power?

I’d bet on the latter.

In the same way that the Reich Nature Protection Act expanded the political power of the Nazis in early twentieth century Germany, environmental laws are expanding the political power of the left in the contemporary USA and extending it into all corners of our lives. 

Please note that I’m not saying liberal environmentalists are Nazis or that they hate Jews or want to start a World War. However, there are striking similarities between the two political movements. Both allege that they are the one and only true friend of Nature. Both believe that they are mankind’s only hope to avoid destruction, that they are destined, no, required to lead, and that they are the only ones with the answers and the remedy to heal what ails the world. 

With that as a basis, the Nazis believed and contemporary liberal environmentalists believe that there is no aspect of your life so personal, so private, or so trivial that they should not control it. (In this regard enviros may even be outdoing the Nazis. I know of no attempt by the Third Reich to control the number of sheets of toilet paper you should use or to dictate how much salt you put on your food.)

(See note below for something too outrageous to include here.)

I also believe that this provides us with the answer to question # 1: What are Liberal Environmentalists really trying to do? (Because saving fish, restoring ecosystem health, and the like are obviously not their main goal.), 

Environmentalists didn’t admit failure when their removal of cattle from along the Verde River apparently caused the demise of the Verde River spikedace for the simple reason that, for them, it wasn’t a failure. They succeeded in forcing the U. S. Forest Service to remove cattle and private management from public lands along the river, which is what they intended to do. Concern for the spikedace merely provided the cover and the means to do the job. In other words, they achieved their goal. They increased their political power.

Dead spikedace or no, the program was a success.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BLOG (BECAUSE IT PROVIDES EVIDENCE OF LIBERALISM’S FAILURES FROM A NEW SOURCE: NATURE HERSELF)

Last, but not least, consider this footnote. Conservative pundits have been telling us for years that liberal programs such as the War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, etc. are a failure, but the evidence they provide is at least open to interpretation. The case of the Verde River spikedace, the Drake Exclosure, the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and others yet to come on this blog give us concrete evidence that liberal programs don’t work — evidence in the form of dead fish, barren landscapes, and birdless habitats. Better yet, that evidence is provided by none other than Nature itself.

Environmentalists have a saying: “Nature bats last.” On this blog, she bats next when we consider question #2: 

Why does Nature respond so much more positively to Conservative Environmentalism than to Liberal Environmentalism?

Stay tuned.

NOTE:

(I include this here, because if I had added it earlier, it would have overshadowed this post to the point that you might not have been able to read the rest of it, let alone remember it.)

The most chilling similarity between Contemporary Liberal Environmentalists and Hitler’s Nazis is: The “solutions” offered by both for the world’s problems, environmental and otherwise, include the elimination of huge numbers of humans. For instance, when the “2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist,” advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola (a viral disease that causes people to bleed to death through their bodily orifices). He was given a standing ovation by the Texas Academy of Science.

Read the post on this topic:

ANOTHER AMAZING ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION!

AND ANOTHER SKELETON 

IN LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM'S CLOSET

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM

READ THE STORY BELOW

The Gila River in New Mexico after a devastating flood

Same place after restoration

WHAT HAPPENED?!

While I’m asking whether Conservative Environmentalism or Liberal Environmentalism works best and revealing the skeletons in Liberal Environmentalism’s closet, the above photos lead us to another skeleton. This one is described in detail in my latest book, Gardeners of Eden, Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature (So were the other failures of Liberal Environmentalism I’ve pointed out so far. If you want more detailed accounts read Gardeners).

But before I get to that other skeleton I’d like to say a few things about my book. Actually, I’d like to tell you a few things others have said about it. 

One reviewer on Amazon.com was almost too enthusastic.

“There are 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.” 

This book is in my life's top ten list!"

A representative of a Native American college on an Indian reservation in North Dakota gave the book a unique compliment while inquiring about my availability to make a presentation at the college. I believe few other environmental books have had this said about them.... 

“I personally read Gardeners of Eden last year and was thrilled to see how similar the philosophies in the book are to the Lakota way of thinking.”  

A pre-publication reviewer (a liberal environmentalist, by the way) called Gardeners of Eden,

“the most important environmental manifesto since Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.”

If you want to do a little more discovering about your importance to the environment you will want to check this book out. It is available at Amazon.

Now, getting back to that skeleton. This one involves an endangered bird — the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher. the following exerpt is directly from the book.

On a working cattle ranch (the U Bar) in southwestern New Mexico, David Ogilvie (the ranch manager) has managed a riparian area along the Gila River to such a state of health that it: 

• is home to the largest known population of one endangered species (the southwestern willow flycatcher) and two threatened species—the common black hawk and spikedace (a fish).

• supports significant populations of several other rare species, some of which are candidates for listing;

• is inhabited by the highest density of nesting songbirds known to exist anywhere in North America; and

• has one of the highest known ratios of native to nonnative fish (99 percent to 1 percent) in the Southwest.

Ogilvie restored an area of riverside habitat that had been severely damaged by flood to a condition known, because of previous experience on the U Bar, to be especially friendly to the southwestern willow flycatcher. As a result, the endangered flycatcher population in that restored stretch of habitat increased from zero in 1997 to twenty-three pairs in 2002. At the time, that was the fifth largest population known. Recently, a population of a species of frogs listed as threatened was discovered on the ranch too.

(HERE'S THE SKELETON!)

The real measure of the environmental value of Ogilvie’s management is best revealed, however, by comparing the flycatcher population of the U Bar’s riparian habitat to two nearby preserves that combine to make up a comparable amount of similar habitat. In 2002, scientists counted 156 pairs of southwestern willow flycatchers on the U Bar. The two preserves had a combined total of zero!

When I mentioned this to a well-known environmental activist and author, he said he didn’t view this as a success at all. He viewed it as equivalent to creating a garbage dump that attracted grizzly bears and calling that dump good bear habitat. (I assure you that the U Bar is no “garbage dump.” To decide for yourself, take a look at the accompanying photos. (shown above)

A few matters of clarification: The "after the flood" picture above is not a picture of the preserves. Actually, the preserves don't look that different than the ranch (except to a Southwestern Willow Flycatcher). 

SELLING SKELETONS

So, are environmentalists studying what Ogilvie is doing to make the ranch he is managing so attractive to so many species?

No! They're trying to remove his management from the habitat along the river where it has proved so exceptional in order to make that area more like the "preserves" which the flycatchers and other species I have mentioned avoid.

This gives rise to two very important questions which are the subject of the next post coming soon.

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM:
THE MOST AMAZING ECOSYSTEM RESTORATIONS EVER

HERE THEY ARE. All achieved by USING THE LAND, not by protecting it.
Click once for a close-up, twice for an extreme close-up.



The photo sequence above was taken at a gold mine in central Nevada. The restoration started with the mine, already unsuccessfully reclaimed (upper left). Then Nevada ranchers Tony and Jerrie Tipton applied seeds, organic material (hay), animals (cows), and allowed the land to gestate over the winter. The results are shown the following spring and at the end of the summer growing season.

The next amazing restoration involves a pile of copper mine tailings in Arizona. Same formula, same results. This was a superfund site on which standard reclamation techniques had failed also. Then Arizona rancher Terry Wheeler applied the technique he was the first to envision. It worked under the most difficult conditions imaginable.. More than ten years later it is still working.

The restoration picture below was achieved by me and my partner Norm Lowe. The challenge was a gravel mine on the Coconino National Forest near Flagstaff, AZ. The first photo (two photos spliced) shows the mine. Next is Norm broadcasting seeds. (Look at how rough that ground is!) Then a cowboy spreading hay, the cows doing their work, and then the results. Click any of the photos once for a close-up, twice for an extreme close-up.

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM vs LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE

This post gives you the opportunity to judge the results of Conservative Environmentalism versus the results of Liberal Environmentalism via compared photographs, Unless otherwise noted, the photos were taken in the same area (in some cases the areas were directly adjacent to one another) at relatively the same time. In cases where the methods used to get the results shown aren't obvious, those methods are illustrated with a simple photo sequence showing the techniques applied.

In other words: We report and give you the opportunity to decide which works best: Conservative Environmentalism or Liberal Environmentalism.

PROTECTED SINCE 1946

This first photo shows an area in Central Arizona on which the land management strategy Liberal Environmentalism says will heal all that ails the land has been applied. This land has been protected from all use by humans since 1946 when a fence was erected around it to create a study plot. What did this plot look like when it was first protected? “Pretty much like it looks now, but the trees were smaller,” said the scientist currently in charge of the study. According to the theory of Liberal Environmentalism this land has been “returned to Nature” and is as healthy as is possible considering what had happened to it up until it was protected.

The second photo shows the land immediately outside the study plot. It has been used mostly for cattle grazing since (and before) it was separated from the land in the study plot. When the fence was built the land outside the fence looked just like the land inside it. Not so today.

THE CONSERVATIVE ALTERNATIVE

The land in the first photo, the one labeled “Liberal Environmentalism” Is the result of a restoration using the bedrock tactic of Liberal Environmentalism — protecting the land from human use (abuse). In view of the results achieved, maybe it would be more accurate to call this “an attempted restoration.” The land in the second photo hasn’t been “restored” it has just been used to produce products for humans — meat. It looks better because it illustrates the most important principle in human use of anything — if something doesn’t work, humans generally do something different. In this case when human management made the land look like it did when the fence was first erected “Pretty much like it (the Liberal Environmentalism restoration) looks now, but the trees were smaller.” Humans did something different — they stopped overgrazing the land, and it recovered.

Just for fun and fairness, because the Liberal Environmentalism project was actually an attempt to restore the land to ecological health, I offer a third photo that shows another restoration, same place (a short distance away), same time. the main difference is this restoration took a few weeks instead of 60 years. The photo below shows the results of a restoration using the principles of Conservative Environmentalism. It illustrates that we can restore ecological health to the land BY using it (Isn’t that what Nature does?) better than we can by protecting it.

(I've included an insert to enable you to compare the results of this Conservative Environmentalist restoration vs Liberal Environmentalist competition.)

WHICH WORKS BEST?

How we did this restoration is illustrated in the next photo. First, we piled rocks in a gully to combat erosion (the reason for the restoration) Next, we broadcast native grass seeds onto the land and spread hay to lure cattle to the site. The cows came (see the rocks) stomped what hay they didn’t eat into the soil turning it into mulch covering the seeds, fertilized the mixture, and moved on. The last photo in the sequence shows the healed gully. The larger photo (above) shows what this method can do to revitalize a piece of rangeland. All the grasses are natives.

HOW WE DID IT: (click and take a closer look.)

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM

vs LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

WHICH WORKS BEST?

Conservatives sustain a threatened fish.

Liberals extirpate it.

WHY DO WE NEED A CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM?

Liberalism doesn’t work to solve environmental problems just as it doesn’t solve problems of poverty, race, the economy, terrorism...

WHAT'S THE RIGHT WAY TO BE GREEN?

The way that works.

A WORLD WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTALISTS

An answer to the book: “The World Without Us”

A LIBERAL SOLUTION TO THE

"OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM"

Why Don't Liberals Walk Their Talk?

PUT UP OR SHUT UP

Time for a Showdown on the Western Range