Review by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Natural History – April 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Nature of Southwestern Colorado: Recognizing Human Legacies and Restoring Natural Places
by Deborah D. Paulson and William L. Baker
Published in 2006 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 087081849X
TO AVOID POSSIBLE CONFUSION about the subject of this volume, the subtitle might have been provided as the main title, because the ambiguous word nature means different things to different people and might mislead casual browsers of booklists.
As clarification, however, authors Paulson and Baker quote Yi Fu Tuan in the preface as using that term to mean “what remains or what can recuperate over time when all humans and their works are removed.”
In the 386 pages of this ambitious book, the focus is on human occupation and utilization of natural resources in southwestern Colorado, their impacts, and solutions to problems caused by those impacts, most of which began in the late 1800s, increased during the 1900s, and now demand critical attention if we’re to keep the “nature” of southwestern Colorado from being irrevocably altered.
The cultural information found here constitutes a comprehensive survey of the region’s prehistory and history, based chiefly on secondary materials that serve well to trace the record of human occupation and utilization. Discussion about natural resources and impacts by human activities on them is based on an impressive array of studies by experts in biology, ecology, geography, and land management. In regard to their own qualifications, the authors are professors of geography and ecology at the University of Wyoming and have performed many field studies.
FOLLOWING A CHAPTER on Native Americans in southwestern Colorado, the majority of the text is divided into six main sections, which cover the desert plateau country, the Uncompahgre Valley, the Uncompahgre Plateau, the Southern San Juan Mountains, the Upper Animas River watershed, and the San Miguel River where old West and new West conjoin. The authors describe in detail how natural resources in these diverse geographic regions have been used and altered by activities such as agriculture, mining, timber harvesting, fire, invasion by non-native species, unwise management programs such as chaining to remove vegetation, cooperative efforts toward restoration, and the negative effects of rural sprawl.
Several maps, scores of black-and-white photographs, a section of four-color illustrations, tables of native and invasive species, hundreds of endnotes, and boxes containing discussions about specific topics supplement the text.
The result is a reference work that should become a standard addition to the bookshelves of researchers, land managers, teachers, environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, and lay residents, although it seems likely that advocates of well-entrenched, differing points of view will rise to argue different opinions, as is typical when land use and management are discussed in the public arena.
The numerous boxes, each with its own endnotes, within the chapters cover related topics, such as cheatgrass or crested wheatgrass, soil crusts or noxious weeds, and many others. These are so informative that users of the book might wish that they had been listed within the table of contents in order to highlight them.
Of special interest to many readers will be a box entitled “Holistic Management,” in which the indicators of land health are discussed. In a statement that may provoke dissent from disciples of Allan Savory, the authors state, among other things: “While some of these indicators of land health are likely to have universal acclaim (e.g., little soil erosion), others, such as rapid nutrient cycling and little bare ground, are based on an assumed history of herds of large herbivores and may be inappropriate in this semiarid region.” With supporting evidence, Paulson and Baker claim that large herbivores were not original components of much of this landscape, and, therefore, the introduction of grazing by livestock has been inappropriate.
In their conclusion the authors state: “[The tragedy of the commons] occurs when access to a resource is so open that if one user forgoes exploitation in an effort to conserve a resource, another user will step in. Conservation behavior is illogical under such circumstances, and resources are degraded as all users compete in a free-for-all. It is easy to look back at the legacies of overexploitation as a part of history, a result of lawless frontier behavior. Yet the single-minded pursuit of fossil fuel energy today is enabled by national laws and policies that encourage maximum production over the near term, and the West’s last wild places and even species, such as the Gunnison sage-grouse, are falling victim to a new energy boom.”
Industries are not the only modern environmental threat that Paulson and Baker see: “Around New West towns, sprawl is a twist on the tragedy of the commons, threatening the public value of undeveloped private lands…. When private land is subdivided, society loses common resources such as wildlife habitat, open space, and other environmental services from undeveloped land. Tragedy-of-the-commons situations require social solutions. In the case of sprawl, the problem is largely cultural.”
The usual blemishes that occur in too many publications are difficult to find in this carefully edited volume, but the inexplicable absence of page numbers in endnotes must be mentioned as a serious fault. Most readers who wish to follow up on sources will be not only astonished but also greatly inconvenienced by this idiosyncratic omission in an otherwise highly admirable publication.
