HOLISTIC COWBOYS AND CARBON FARMERS - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 232

trample dead vegetation and seed into the aerated surface, like a rotary harrow. By contrast,
a herd of sheep or cows left to their own devices in a fenced field with sufficient grass for
a season and no fear of predators, will spread out, graze in a haphazard fashion, and scatter
their dung here, there and everywhere.
Migratory mob-stocking works for wildebeest (as the rise in their numbers in Serengeti
demonstrates); could it work for cattle? Savory began to put his theories into practice
in Zimbabwe but his outspoken opposition to Ian Smith's regime forced him to leave.
He moved to the United States in 1978, set up a Centre for Holistic Management in Al-
buquerque, and began to spread the gospel that 'western rangelands are understocked and
overgrazed'.
Savory collected his observations into a lengthy volume now entitled Holistic Manage-
ment , which, though it never mentions the word 'permaculture' could justly be subtitled
'a permaculture approach to rangeland management'. 17 As his message has spread, it has
raised a storm of controversy between various factions in the western ranges. Conserva-
tionists from the Bureau of Land Management and the Sierra Club have long argued that
there are far too many cattle on the public and private lands of the West; and a good many
agree with the sentiments that the hero of Earth First! , Edward Abbey, voiced at a redneck-
packed public meeting at the University of Montana:
Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the West, and es-
pecially in the Southwest, are what you might call 'cowburnt'. Almost anywhere and
everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stu-
pid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, manure-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They
are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest
our canyons, valleys, meadows and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and
grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down
the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian
thistle and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically
present, you'll see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general
destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of
cattle. 18
Not any more, replies the new breed of holistic cowboy. Cattle have been mismanaged,
not overstocked. Ever since the dust bowl years there has been a widespread view that ex-
tensive grazing lands have been overgrazed, and this perception has led the Bureau of Land
Management in the USA to reduce grazing on 124 million acres of public lands from about
22 million authorized livestock units in 1941 to 12.5 million in 2008 (though not all these
permits are used and in 2008 the actual stocking level was 8.6 million). 19 There were once