Grazing Goats

Weather: Some rain yesterday and today.

Last rain: 2/23. Week’s low: 21 degrees F. Week’s high: 62 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Leaves on junipers, yuccas, and other evergreens, grape hyacinths, vinca, coral bell, blue flax, Mexican hat, and cheat grass. Hollyhock seedlings coming up. Pink evening primrose leaves beginning to green.

What’s turned red or purple: Sandbar willow and some rose branches; alfilerillo and coral beards tongue leaves

What’ turned brown or yellow: Weeping willow, arborvitae and some other evergreen leaves

Tasks: I worked outside for the first time last Sunday in an exposed area. I had a block path that had been taken over by a rose bush, and I wanted to reroute the blocks around the canes. The ground was damp and warm enough to be comfortable to handle.

Monday I continued the work, but hit frozen ground as soon as I got near the shadow of the garage. Perhaps coincidentally, I was working in the area where the rose that had dropped its leaves.

When I had problems with frozen ground last spring, I removed dirt to expose the iced area to the sun. The next day, I was able to work that area, and prepare another. This time, I removed dead rose leaves that were mulching the ground on Monday. Saturday, when I went back to work on the path, the surface was thawed enough to work a few feet.

Animal sightings: Three robins, a male and two females were in the drive Saturday morning, but didn’t stay long.

Weekly update: Longfellow wrote of the "forest primeval" in Evangeline. He was speaking of a world bereft of the French who had settled in Acadia.

Today the term refers to woodlands that haven’t been logged, and thus are called "old growth" to distinguish them from the second growth trees that returned after logging.

It carries Edenic connotations of land before the existence of human beings. Like the old-new growth terminology, it assumes a binary classification: self-perpetuating ecosystems that existed before Europeans and the managed forests of today.

What is missing from this view are all the variations in human contacts with trees that have existed for centuries. The problems of forest fires are recent, not part of the historic landscape. The solutions for preventing conflagrations may exist in those historic patterns.

In Portugal, officials recognized part of their problem was that people who maintained remote forests had left isolated villages for more comfortable lives with such amenities as indoor plumbing and electricity.

This summer the nation began reintroducing the goats that had fed on the underbrush, especially on steep slopes.

The problem was finding enough men to tend the animals. Shepherding is tedious work in isolated conditions.

In this country, the Reagan library imports hundreds of goats each year to clear vegetation around the facility. Of course, the other thing that saved the building from flames this summer was the paved parking lot, which acted as a firebreak.

The problems with using animals as tools in fire prevention go beyond the difficulties of finding enough goatherds. Many forest historians blame overgrazing for the destruction of woodlands in places like northern New Mexico. They can’t conceive of grazing as a solution. It’s rather like convincing people the way to prevent smallpox is to give them a small dose of the disease.

More critical is the question of scale. Overgrazing in Rio Arribe county occurred when businessmen turned one part of Spanish agrarian life into an industry, and put more animals on the land than the vegetation could support. A predictable Malthusian catastrophe ensued.

It would be difficult to manage a grazing program in today’s political environment. One assumes, if enough money was involved, entrepreneurs would appear but then would lobby for more access than forest managers were willing to give.

It’s easier to avoid political pressure from wealthy campaign contributors than it is to confront Malthusian constraints, and so the possible becomes the unthinkable. The Reagan library could act because it was on private land.

Notes on photographs: All taken 22 February 2020.
1. Cheat grass (Bromus tectorum) coming up within a clump of buffalo grass (Buchloe dactyloides).

2. New growth on a hollyhock (Alcea rosea).

3. The nearly completed reroute of a path by a rose bush.

End notes:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Evangeline. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1847.

Audrey McNamara. "New Southern California Blaze Is ‘Encircling’ Reagan Library." Daily Beast website. 30 October 2019.

Raphael Minder. "Scorched Portugal Turns to the Goat as a Low-Cost Firefighter." The New York Times website. 17 August 2019.