The Shaw Story - How an Amateur Did it Right the First Time

[“Professionals” nearly always start with a nursery and botch the whole thing.  To do it right, start (and finish) with a machete, or a match, or a cow . . .

The tools:  a machete and a mind, both sharp.  No computers, no reports, no meetings, no committees, no hi-tech frills, no restoration plan, no EIR, no hardware, no nurseries, no contracts, no specs, no bureaucratic stamp of approval, not even any planting or seeding.  Only common sense, consistency, perseverance, and knowledge accumulated through experience and through consultation with others who have knowledge and experience (and opinions) of their own.  An open mind, a modest investment, and confidence—that it is not too late to reverse the deadly trend toward environmental degradation.

All around us, all the time, the living world is shutting down.  Exotic weeds are on the ascendancy, native diversity is blinking out, the rich getting ever richer, the poor poorer.  Every spring is more silent than the last, and the botany is more boring.

Oddly enough, or ironically enough, all this has little to do with more and more people in the landscape doing the wrong things; it has everything to do with fewer and fewer people in the landscape doing the right things.  Ever since the ownership of California shifted from Indians to Europeans, the land has been gradually depopulated.  Before we arrived, there was no such thing as “wild” land, no such thing as wilderness, no such thing as “pristine”.  Every acre of grassland, chaparral, forest, beach , and wetland was part of somebody’s “back yard” and was cared for accordingly.  It was made to produce—not only food but also natural diversity and, by almost anybody’s standards, beauty.  And, just as it provided food for body and soul, it was also known, intimately known, and loved.  Every bit of it, every landmark in it, had a name and a story.

Along came the newcomers, and practically overnight, all the old names, stories, and connections were swept away along with the people who for ten-thousand years had embodied those connections.

The new system evolved a completely different way of inhabiting (and seeing) land.  It allowed for three main kinds of relationships:  1)  huge, dense concentrations of people in cities, with no direct relationship with land; 2)  agriculture, in which large but sparsely populated tracts of land are totally “de-natured” and intensively managed for specialized crop production; and 3) “wilderness” or “open space” tracts that are exploited for lumber, grazing, or recreation, but are scarcely or not inhabited, and certainly not managed for the kinds of productivity, diversity, and beauty that once governed the actions of everyday people.  In fact, with our recent history of human neglect of the natural landscape, it has even become an article of faith—even explicit policy on the part of some agencies—that humans do not belong in a “natural” system at all.  The result has been accelerated erosion of biological diversity, and “wild” lands almost everywhere in California more boring, more uniform, less interesting, less productive, and certainly less beautiful than at any time in its history.  Most tragically of all, many of the richest, most extraordinary and beautiful of our natural landscapes, the ones we have fought so long and so hard to “protect” from the extreme forms of exploitation, have fallen victim to the current “hands-off” philosophy and are showing the inevitable consequences.  We are literally protecting these places to death [e.g. Todd Rd. Preserve]

Examples are legion.  The effect is most dramatic in the rarest and richest kind of California naturescape, i.e. the “flower-fields” associated with certain native grassland habitats.  These ankle-high “crazy quilts of color” once dominated much of California including the floor of the great Central Valley; now they are all but gone:  some gone to agriculture but most gone to weeds.  And in most cases, the more strictly “protected” they are from all forms of disturbance, the more quickly the weeds take over, turning them into drab monocultures of sock-eating stickers.   

But even less-threatened environments, like many of our “protected” conifer forests, would recover their former glory far more rapidly with a little help from their friends.

Most people are not aware that the majority of Callifornia’s “neo-endemics” evolved under the hooves and teeth of the African-like Pleistocene megafauna.  And, no sooner were these huge herds gone, about  ten-thousand years ago, than their ecological function was taken over by people (Indians), who kept the whole glorious system alive and vibrant by using fire and other forms of  “disturbance” in just the right ways.  They lived in their land and off it, in the most direct possible way.  We 21st Century Californians live off our land every bit as much as the Indians did, but in such an indirect, out-of-sight-out-of-mind way as to be scarcely at all aware of our effect on the myriad other animals and plants we share the place with.

Unlike our predecessors, we live off the land but not with it.  Only a small minority of us are lucky enough to have any real connection with “nature” at all—little wonder most of us don’t even consider ourselves part of nature.  Little wonder that these are dark days for the native flora and fauna, darker in fact than at any time since the last global mass-extinction event.  We are cut off, alienated from our source; and our actions and inactions are driven by a mixture of preconception and pseudo-environmentalist doctrine rather than by solid, first-hand practical knowledge.

Michael Shaw owns a 60-acre piece of land in Santa Cruz County, a place, like most places in lowland California, where up until fairly recently most land that wasn’t either built over or plowed under was subject to a kind of “benign disturbance” by livestock belonging to small ranchers and farmers.  The kind of grazing that prevailed then was adequate to kep the worst weeds at bay, even though it may have been the original source of the weed seeds to begin with.  Over the last few decades, however, economic pressures have closed down nearly all of the small farms and dairies in the region; many tracts of land that could—and should—still be grazed and now too small and isolated by “development” or too encumbered by liability problems to make small-scale livestock operations economically viable.  And along with the disappearance of these roving, weed-control squads, there has been a dramatic and devastating upsurge in smothering, noxious vegetation throughout the whole coastal region.

Those farmers may have been far from politically correct in their philosophies or intentions, but in general their self-interested actions resulted in more environmental benefit than harm.  Today most of us are more pro-environment in our sympathies and intentions, but less knowledgeable about cause and effect, and less effective in the real world.  We debate and dither and write EIRs, but Farmer John did a lot more actual good by the end of the day than most of us ever will.