We took the preserve’s “Magma to Magpies” van tour, in which a guide drove us along a pre-determined trail and narrated the history of the preserve and the agency’s management plans for it. There were several interesting rhetorical aspects of the tour that our group noticed and later discussed. The first was the emphasis on both natural and human history in the area: the tour guide first established the geological construction of the area and then overlaid it with the area’s history of land ownership, grazing, and industry. The second was the political aspect of the tour: the guide affirmed the U.S. Government’s respect for Spanish land grants (the official government line, as Heather pointed out, whether true or not) and emphasized scientific management, which may have been an assurance to taxpayers that the government was managing the land much better than previous single or group owners. The third notable feature of the tour, which I’d like to elaborate, was the preserve management’s focus on restoration rather than preservation.
The Caldera, the tour guide noted as we drove along, is not pristine land. The Abrigo dome is striped with ruler-straight replanting lines hinting that the area had once been clear-cut. Only a 1.5-mile-long tract of old growth forest remains on the entire Caldera. Much of the new-growth forest is sick.
The overly-dense, fire-suppressed new-growth forest, the guide commented, is prone to bud worm attacks and high-intensity fires. The old-growth forest is too spaced-out for bud worms to infest nearly as easily, she said, and old-growth fires are low-intensity, burning mostly grass and generally not affecting trees. Bud worms and fires are natural and native, but in the unnatural habitat of a new-growth forest, they proliferate out of control.
According to the guide, the Caldera’s grasslands were overgrazed from the early 1900s on by as many as 100,000 sheep at one time and countless horses and cattle. The animals eroded the ground around the Caldera’s streams, making them wider and shallower and affecting the water systems the streams fed into. Under owner Federico Otero, sulfur mines were opened; under Frank Bond, logging rights were sold off in 99-year lots; and under Patrick Dunigan, geothermal exploration was undertaken (although logging was greatly reduced during the same era).
Now, the guide said, the area hosts sustainable grazing only, using cages to mark off ungrazed areas to compare to the grazed ones. Under the new regime of “adaptive management,” science is a guide. Hunting permits are issued, but in limited numbers (only 20 turkey permits per year, for instance); grazing rights are given preferentially to neighbors (like Jemez Pueblo) and research projects (such as breeding high-altitude-tolerant steers). Cattle are fed from livestock ponds, not headwaters.
All of these changes were put in place to prevent further degradation. No longer will cattle erode the streams; no longer will loggers clear-cut the forests; no longer will grazing destroy the grasses. But the preserve’s management is going one step further than preventing decline: it’s actually trying to restore the Caldera.
What the management means by restore isn’t really clear, but it seems to involve re-establishing wildlife as it existed pre-1900s. It means looking at the oldest available photographs, noticing that the streams were narrower then, and so undertaking to narrow them again through engineering. It means thinning the forests and, with the help of the Forest Service, undertaking prescribed burns.
Restoration also means that Santana wasn’t permitted to chuck an apple core out of the window because it might be carrying nonnative seeds that could take root in the area (although some nonnative trees that were already in the area seem to have been left alone). Restoration means banning the construction of most new buildings beyond what was already on the land when it was purchased by the government. It means, most of all, that the land is being changed into a new form as decided by the management.
The idea of restoration is important to environmental politics but it isn’t something we’ve talked about much in class. Hot Flat and Crowded discusses the need to build “arcs” out of existing biodiversity hotspots; Silent Spring pleads with readers to stop flooding the planet with pesticides; Sand County Almanac and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and even Crossing Open Ground seemed to focus on appreciating existing spots of wilderness. All of these books emphasize stopping harm and letting nature recover. As a class we’ve talked about preservation a bit, and sustainable use a lot—allowing humans to coexist with the land without destroying it. But what if the land is already destroyed?
The first video in the Ken Burns National Parks series notes that the first national parks were set aside to prevent them from being developed. They were held in stasis, in a way, on the assumption that the land was worth keeping the way it was found. Valles Caldera is a different beast. There’s a different underlying assumption here: that the current terrain is damaged and needs to be fixed.
The questions that arise are myriad. Who decides what the “ideal” state of the land should be? What sorts of measures should be undertaken to get there? Should nonnative species be uprooted and removed? Should humans be barred from the area or controlled in number? Does restoration ever “end”? And can restoration ever actually be achieved, when the world is in flux and species, whether we want them to or not, are perpetually evolving, dying out, and moving?
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