Leader of a lost tribe

When author Dan Dagget gave a talk recently at the annual Bioneers Conference, near San Francisco, he began by asking audience members if they had taken care of their environmental responsibilities that day. Had any of them gone hunting in a pack? Started a grass fire? Piled rocks in a gully? Chased any bison off a cliff? In response, some people jumped to their feet and walked out of the auditorium. This didn't surprise the former Earth First! activist. Dagget has been causing people discomfort ever since the early 1970s when he fought strip mines in his native southeastern Ohio. Over the years, he has become something of a professional provocateur, tilting at sacred windmills right and left. His Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "Beyond the Rangeland Conflict" (1995), for example, challenged the long-standing idea that environmentalists and ranchers in the American West held incompatible goals, earning him a great deal of teeth-gnashing from all sides of the grazing debate as a result. The reaction to his latest book "The Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature" (2005) will likely be no different. In it, Dagget argues that we have become aliens on our own planet. Once upon a time, he argues, humans enjoyed a mutualistic relationship with nature. In much the way that bees depend on flowers, beavers on creeks, and wolves on elk, ecosystems evolved in the presence of humans and began to depend on them, over time, to set fires, apply hunting pressure, and cultivate the soil. We were gardeners in Eden – natives living with, and using, nature symbiotically (despite the occasional mega fauna extinction). No more....

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