Tracing Time by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press

Kristen and Matt Redd live with a constant diet of changing climate. The ranch has been transferred into Nature Conservancy hands, and they’ve turned the property into a research center focusing on climate, restoration practices, and the carrying capacity of the land. The place doubles as an experimental station and a working ranch where Matt believes they are running a healthy outfit of irrigation, crops, and desert-adapted cattle breeds. Meanwhile, scientists come and go studying cottonwood and sagebrush, riparian restoration, lizard community responses to climate change, and how long crusty desert soils take to regrow in the wake of cattle tracks, tire prints, or waffle-stomping hiking boots. Experiments are laid out in plots on the ground, lichens and blue-green algae taking three years, maybe five to start to reappear after disturbance. It may be ten or twenty, sometimes fifty years before the living crust of the ground fully recovers.

Working with the US Geological Survey and the US Department of Agriculture, researchers are put up on cots and tents at the ranch. Over the years, they are learning the repeat lessons of prosperity and collapse, and how we can help create one and stave off the other. Study areas are being tested for cottonwood tree genotypes from Arizona to see what grows best in a drying climate. Patches of land are sheltered from rain to simulate a projected 30 percent reduction in precipitation, seeing how soils and plant communities react to what is likely coming.

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” Matt said. “Where is that line for what is sustainable, and are we trying to extend ourselves beyond what the landscape can really support?”

Matt believes that people who made rock art would have had a wealth of knowledge similar to the papers and studies coming out of the research center. They would have had similar questions, concerns, and observations. Troops of scientists, he thinks, can produce similarly useful information if you’re not coming from centuries of living directly off the land.

“I’m of the bias that they had this kind of knowledge,” he said.

Kristen said that the knowledge may be comparable, but what we do with it is not the same. “They didn’t have technology to buffer themselves,” she said. “They knew exactly the carrying capacity. We’re so padded by technology that we can’t see what’s right in front of us.”

Matt is the scientist-rancher, Kristen the eternal activist. The combination of the two, and the researchers they attract, is helping define what a healthy, dynamic ecosystem looks like in this desert, and how easily it can turn into a stagnant and dying one. Evidence from tree rings, soil records, and woodrat middens shows decades of prehistoric drought lined up with malnutrition in human bones, dwindling crops, a lack of game animals, and ultimately people migrating elsewhere. Kristen and Matt want to know how we can stay.

The rock art we hiked through came from times of thriving. The hunting it described was legendary, game animals portrayed in abundance. Images were made with accurate, thoughtful, and numerous strokes.

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