You Can’t Swim in the Same River Twice

          An old philosopher, from many years in the past, said something about the same as the title of this blog. No matter how hard we try to eliminate change and the uncomfortable feelings that come along with it that can be as little as the annoying hum of a Mosquito coming for a blood transfusion or as catastrophically embarrassing as being a new senior citizen where bodily functions no longer are as controllable as in our youth. With lips puckered, about to kiss a new person of interest than from the deepest part of your bowels comes this gigantic, out of control, freight train, carrying a FART that passes the cheeks of one’s ass doing 90 and making them rattle like an old car on a washboard road and then it rumbling on and on and on with a ubiquitous smell to match. Now is that life-changing or just another day at the library? The fact remains that the river of change that we swam in yesterday will always be different, from the river we swim in today. I don’t know if the kiss happened or not, did it wither and die in turmoil following the fart? I do know that there are many environmentalists out there that hold on to the idea to right the many wrongs that we humans have committed to our home we call Earth. It’s certainly alarming to me that the way to fix a problem is to just “leave it alone.” The reasoning in much of the environmental community goes like this. If humans made the mess then leaving our forests and rangeland alone they will heal themselves and the end result will be that we fooled Mother Nature into thinking that we were never here. That absolute rest from man’s heavy hand will rejuvenate our forest and grasslands. Well we have tried this by building exclosures to test the “hands-off theory.” The most notable exclosure came from my reading a book by Dan Dagget, Gardeners of Eden. This exclosure by the name of Drake was built by the U.S. dept of agriculture in 1946, a 40-acre piece of rangeland about 100 miles north of Phoenix Arizona that had been overused and abused in the early 20th century like a lot of the west. So it met the Agricultural department’s specifications of use and abuse. These 40 acres were fenced so no livestock and other grazing animals like Deer could enter and people were only allowed in, to look at what Nature was doing to these 40 acres that were allowed to have total rest, I guess in perpetuity. The picture you see here is the result of more than 50 years of total rest. It’s obvious to most rational people that something was missing from this now 50 years and counting trial. There were no grazing livestock or natural grazing animals present in all those years and without them, this picture shows quite clearly what happens when the natural herd effect of grazing herbivores is missing when trying to restore the land to its healthy past. For me the answer is not whether to graze, I know it’s a necessary part of a healthy environment. So the question becomes “not whether to graze but how to graze that contributes to soil health in a beneficial way. 

           At this time I want to acknowledge that mostly European immigrants these past 400 years have abused our U.S.A. dramatically but not everybody out there is a soil miner. There are lots of examples where we farmers and ranchers can live in symbiotic relationships with Nature. We just need more of us who make our living off the land to join the ranks that see Mother Nature as a friend, not the enemy. 

            And just when “we the people” have addressed one problem and the majority agree that changing the way we care for our soil must happen. About the same time there was a forest fire in New Mexico I believe in the early 1940s. Many of the major newspapers showed a picture of a little bear, sitting on a pile of ashes after a forest fire looking forlorn and confused. Thus was born the idea that we must control our wildfires and we needed a leader for this movement.  And where did we look for this new leader? We went to some public relations expert who created Smoky the Bear and we all couldn’t help but love him, with his Brown hat from the WWI era and his rallying cry “only you can prevent forest fires.” Well, it worked pretty well as we kept building up ever-bigger forest fire departments to keep fire from the wild lands and the environmental community kept up its lobbying in the halls of Congress for more and more “leave it alone” strategies.

            I’m going to use the Mississippi River as a dividing line that’s not perfect but it gives you readers a mental picture that to the east there’s more rain, snow, and humidity so much of all the leaves and litter can decompose (rot) and return back to the soil. But west of the Mississippi is what range and forest experts call a brittle environment rainfall and snow in the winter are much less and humidity in most of the west is almost nonexistent and droughts are frequent. This type of climate means that the decomposition of all dying grasses, trees, and brush we call Dry Matter mostly happens by Oxidation, a very slow process so the build-up of very flammable litter keeps building up over the decades waiting for dry lighting, a campfire left unattended, a roadside fire from a discarded cigarette, a down power line. I don’t think it’s important how it got started except to a lawyer. What’s important is that we humans decided to throw common sense out the window and not use forest and rangeland experts and those who live in these fire-prone areas to help our lands. Instead, we choose to follow a cartoon character that has now rallied several generations of people into believing that our forests are okay and that it’s up to “we the people” as the only ones that can prevent forest fires. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. His name is Smoky Bear and his legacy in California alone, in the last decade are millions upon millions of acres up in smoke, plus thousands of homes and a couple of towns gone and some folks who didn’t get out of the way in time. 

        If our elected officials are still afraid of losing votes for not supporting Smoky because they might possibly be thrown out of office for using knowledge and science instead of continuing to support Smoky as our leader then were in deep, deep trouble. 

          I have an idea where we might be able to kill two problems at once. It won’t be nearly as loved as Smoky is, but I think it will be good for the land that our United States of America sits on and it will be a good experience for our youth who need more than spending their lives with a cell phone as their companion and teacher. I look to what President Roosevelt who guided us through the depression years of the 1930s did. The problem then was not enough work for the youth of that era. So President Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Core called the C.C.C. It was a voluntary program that gave men only from 18 to 25 years of age, with the job of repairing some of the tattered places in our country. I would leave this mission pretty much the same as they accomplished many things that were helpful to the land. But I would require it to be a mandatory one-year service to our country for both men and women in the C.C.C. So much could be accomplished in the cleaning of our forest floors and where erosion is a problem slowing the rainfall down with many different types of obstacles would be a huge benefit and I would make this labor force available to all state and federal lands as well as all private property. At the end of a young person’s one year of service, I’m sure most would be proud that the environment is healthier because of their efforts and most will be better able to deal with the good times and the bad because of the most important year in their lives. Remember nobody can swim in the same river twice so this time let’s rally around common sense and knowledge and leave the “warm fuzzies” to lovers. 

                          See Ya,

                          Jack