The L and Report A publication of The Land Institute / Number 81 / Spring 2005 Contents Three Simple Questions Jerry Glover ..................................................................... 3 Working Wilderness: A Call for a Land Health Movement Courtney White ................................................................ 6 Warning: This Diet is Not for Everyone Marty Bender and Stan Cox .......................................... 10 The Fountain of Experience .......................................... 13 Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview Wes Jackson ................................................................... 14 At the Land .................................................................... 18 Our Mission Statement All-American, All-Organic Deborah Rich When people, land and community are as one, all ................................................................. 20 three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are Thanks to Our Contributors ........................................... 21 exploited. By consulting nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute Prairie Festival Audio Tapes ......................................... 24 seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a The Writers and Photographers ..................................... 26 community life at once prosperous and enduring. Cover: Judd Patterson. Peregrine falcon. The Land Report is published three times a year. Above: Judd Patterson. Editor: Scott Bontz Snowy plover eggs. Associate editor and production: Darlene Wolf Graphic design: Arrow Printing Arts associate: Terry Evans Printed by Arrow Printing Co. 2440 E. Water Well Rd. Staff: Ron Armstrong, Salina, KS 67401 Marty Bender, Scott Bontz, Cindy Cox, Stan Cox, (785) 823-5376, phone Lee DeHaan, Jerry Glover, (785) 823-8728, fax Stephanie Hutchinson, Joan Jackson, Wes Jackson, [email protected] Patricia Johnson, Steven Lancaster, www.landinstitute.org Grant Mallett, Patty Melander, Bob Pinkall, Harris Rayl, ISSN 1093-1171 Steve Renich, John Schmidt, Tiffany Stucky, David Van Tassel, Ken Warren, Darlene Wolf Board of Directors: Strachan Donnelley, Terry Evans, Pete Ferrell, Jan Flora, Dan Glickman, Wes Jackson, Eulah Laucks (emeritus), Mary Laucks, Conn Nugent, Victoria Ranney, John Simpson, Donald Worster, Angus Wright The Land Report 2 Three Simple Questions Jerry Glover It’s an awful thing to lose a river. It’s worse to lose hill overlooking the Arkansas River. Most of the catalpa several. trees growing in Holly are offspring of those planted in In 1897, my great-great grandfather, Thomas the early 1900s by Uncle Roy and his father at the Jordan, retired from farming and bought the Champion Champion Mill. Flour Mill, powered by the waters of Frenchman Creek The mill’s stone foundation and wooden structure, in Champion, Chase County, Nebraska. The mill’s foun - with its many cranks, pulleys and sieves, remain sound. dation was laid in 1886 with stone salvaged from an But the mill, now a state historical site, runs only for abandoned cattle corral. That foundation nicely symbol - brief times each year, to grind souvenir-size bags of izes the region’s transition from a sustainable economy flour for tourists—I’ve bought several myself. The rest based on native grass to a doomed one based on extrac - of the year Frenchman Creek lacks enough water to tion. A few rainy years in the early 1880s, which settlers power the mill. mistook as the norm, plus the nutrient riches of freshly Frequent drought and the temptation of federal, pro - plowed prairie, yielded bumper crops that sparked fur - duction-based subsidies drove many of the area’s farm - ther sod busting. Ranches were displaced, corrals aban - ers away from dryland production to irrigation. That irri - doned and flour mills built to accommodate wheat. gation water is pumped from the High Plains aquifer, The Willises, a farm family, were neighbors to the upon which Frenchman Creek flowed for millennia. The Jordans. Maude Jordan, my great-grandmother, married aquifer’s level largely sets the creek’s, and when the her brother’s best friend, John Willis. My great-grand - aquifer falls below a certain point, the creek goes dry. parents and Maude’s brother, Roy, eventually ended up So within a few generations of the first plowing of in Holly, Colorado, near the Kansas border, where I the prairie, local residents find themselves in possession grew up in their midst. All three are buried in Holly on a of a fine looking but largely inoperable flour mill. The Champion Flour Mill’s foundation came from a corral, symbolic of the shift from a sus - tainable economy based on native grass to a doomed one based on extraction. The Land Report 3 Meanwhile they provide grist for the current economy, reduce the growing of annual crops to gambling in a also built on a seemingly rock solid foundation, but also rigged game. ultimately inoperable. From family conversations, photos and journals, it is On the day my great-great-grandfather bought that clear that Thomas Jordan loved the region, its communi - flour mill, the High Plains aquifer supported not only ties and its people, and expected a long stay for his Frenchman Creek but also the Arkansas and Smoky Hill descendants. But today, only a few generations after the rivers in western Kansas. Little more than a century “great plow-up,” few of them remain, and none, as far as later, the Arkansas and Smoky Hill rivers no longer flow I know, are farmers or millers. Like millions of others, there for much of the year. Ecologists reported in the they largely fled the increasingly industrial landscape March 2004 issue of BioScience that the sewage effluent and left their communities to fade. from Great Bend, Kansas, 180 miles from the Colorado When not occupied by milling, Thomas Jordan border, now serves as the headwaters of the Arkansas. served as the first secretary of the Chase County Irrigation wells, each often pumping 1,000 gallons Telephone Co. Were it possible, I would ring up my per minute, account for more than 90 percent of takings great-great-grandfather and, after reporting that “No, from the aquifer. More than 80 percent of western electric trains never made it to Chase County,” ask that Kansas homes depend on the rest removed. But there he and his neighbors consider three questions in seeking and in parts of Nebraska and eastern Colorado, the a long-term strategy for living on the High Plains: What aquifer has fallen 50 to 100 feet, faster than the natural was here? What is required of us here? And what will recharge rate of a few inches per year can fill it. The Nature help us do here? Kansas Geological Survey estimates that pumping These three seemingly simple questions drive our would have to decrease by more than 80 percent to be work at The Land Institute. Nature’s ecosystems, nearly sustainable. This would allow water for homes and live - everywhere we look, feature perennial vegetation grow - stock but for little else. We now know that the rainy ing in mixtures—the prairie of Chase County, Nebraska, years of the early 1880s were the exception, and that, is but one example. With that answer serving always as without irrigation, the long dry spells of the High Plains our reference point, we can take corrective action when The Jordan family about 1890, from left: Fannie, Maude, Thomas, Roy and Emma. Thomas expected his descen - dants to stay on the High Plains, but, like others, most have fled the increasingly industrialized landscape. The Land Report 4 we get the second question wrong. When dryland farm - The Champion Flour Mill dam ing of short-rooted, short-lived annual crops repeatedly as it appeared in 1900. failed the High Plains, we should have looked back to the prairie for solutions rather than digging ourselves deeper into the extractive economy. The prairie would have instructed that from the region’s dry, hot winds we protect most of its wealth below ground, as perennial roots. Deep and long-lived, the roots can support the aboveground harvest on which we rely, even during most dry years, whether the harvest is beef, bison or, eventually, grains harvested from the perennial crops being developed by Land Institute plant breeders. We aren’t entirely sure what will be required of future Jordans of the High Plains: Will they primarily be ranchers, farmers of perennial grains or a combination of both? We do know, though, that without a High Plains aquifer and without rivers, Nature won’t help them do much. To save that aquifer and those rivers and to devel - op a strategy for living anywhere, it is critical that the current Jordans—whether on the High Plains or else - where—begin asking and answering those three seem - ingly simple questions. The Land Report 5 Working Wilderness A Call for a Land Health Movement Courtney White During a tour of a well-managed ranch in New Mexico, Ethics vs. Knowledge we were taking a break under a large pinon tree when I This thought received a boost a few weeks later around was asked to say a few words about a new map. I rose a a campfire at the CS Ranch. bit reluctantly—the shade being deep—to explain that I believed, as many conservationists still do, that to the map was important for how it showed rangeland end overgrazing would take getting ranchers to adopt health. something like Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” in which The map had been commissioned by an alliance of he argued that we are obligated to be good stewards of ranchers concerned about urban sprawl into the nature. The question for this lofty goal was how. 500,000-acre Altar Valley south of Tucson, Arizona. It I decided to ask my host, Julia Davis-Stafford. Years expressed the intersection of three variables: soil stabili - ago, Julia and her sister talked their family into switch - ty, biotic integrity and hydrological function—soil, grass ing to progressive ranch management on the magnifi - and water.