Incendiary Rhetoric

Daniel Patterson, that inflammatory critic of those who would threaten endangered species, was on the radio today talking and in the San Bernadino Sun writing about the wildfires that have started (early) this summer in the deserts of the American Southwest. The plants of the drylands, says this desert ecologist, "are just not adapted to fire, so unlike chaparral and forest where fires can actually be beneficial," wildfires in the desert, like the one in the Mojave National Preserve over the weekend that burned more than 67,000 acres, may be part of a process that will eventually turn our national heritage of unique, beautiful ecosystems into just another Wal-Mart of boring, invasive weeds. The cactus, says Patterson, don't benefit from wildfires, they "just boil in their own juice," and may be replaced with a rancher's mix of cattle-friendly grasses--which make it easier for the fire to spread next time.

And the welfare queens of Big Cow are already whining, blaming the Park Service for taking cows and burros out of the Park, livestock which is responsible for bringing the weeds in the first place; however, astute ecologists and some ranchers recognize this tactic by its smell, which is remarkably similar to the odor of that vector of exotic invasion, the substance that brought the seeds in from Washington and Texas:


Harry Frankfurt has written a fine philosophical treatise on the subject. The vector, that is.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West has selected chapters and pictures from this very beautifully-done book for the coffee tables of the environmentally-inclined.