Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman by Miriam Horn
Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman by Miriam Horn
Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman by Miriam Horn
Thomas Jefferson implored his friend and fellow farmer James Monroe to join them, to secure our rights and interest in the Mississippi
River and surrounding territories. On the event of this mission, the
president wrote in January 1803, depends the future destinies of this
Republic.
Jeffersons imminent concern was possible war with France, but
his words would prove prophetic across centuries. The Mississippi
River watershedan immense funnel spun of 7,000 tributaries reaching from the Rockies to the Appalachians and draining 40 percent of
the continental United Statesis central to the American story. The
third largest in the world (behind only the Amazon and the Congo),
this basin holds most of the nations natural wealth and produces
most of its minerals and food: metals and coal from its mountains,
meat from its northern grasslands, grains and beans from its central
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plains, fish and black oil from its delta. The connectivity provided
by its thousands of miles of waterwayslinking the heartland to the
rest of the nation and the worldhas been critical to Americas rise
and reign as a global economic power. The nations politics, too, have
been crucially shaped in these middle reaches, for two hundred years
the place to sort out such fundamental questions of democracy as the
proper balance between federal and local authority. Most important
have been the values born here: on this iconic terrainthese mountain majesties, fruited plains, shining seasexplorers and cowboys,
pioneers and riverboat captains, forged the American identity. It is not
by chance that the Mississippi provided the setting for two of Americas founding journeys: Lewis and Clarks up from St. Louis to the
Missouri headwaters and across the whole of the Louisiana Purchase
Jefferson sent them to explore, and Huck Finns down the river, to
freedom and an understanding of the common human purpose.
America depends on these grand working landscapes, and they in
turn depend on a small number of people: the families who live by harvesting their bounty. Farmers and ranchers make up just 1 percent of
the U.S. population but manage two-thirds of the nations land; agriculture has greater impacts on water, land and terrestrial biodiversity
than any other human enterprise. Thats true everywhere, making this
region a model for the world. Half of Earths ice-free land is in pasture
or farms. Crops now cover an area the size of South America and livestock graze an expanse as big as Africa; together they use 70 percent
of all fresh water. Fishermen have an equally enormous impact, harvesting 90 million metric tons of fish annuallyequivalent, as author
Paul Greenberg calculates to pulling the human weight of China out
of the sea every year.
As these productive landscapes grow increasingly precarious
overgrazed, overtilled, overfished; threatened by invasive species, development, ill-conceived feats of engineering, and extreme weatherit
is the families who run the tractors and barges and fishing boats who
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are stepping up to save them. Theirs are the most consequential efforts
to restore Americas grasslands, wildlife, soils, rivers, wetlands and
fisheriesthe vast, rich bounty that shaped our national character
and sustains our way of life.
In the still half-wild frontier of the northern Rockies, near the
headwaters of the Missouri 4,000 miles upstream from the Miss
issippis mouth, Montana cowboy Dusty Crary has gathered an
improbable band of longtime enemiescattlemen, fishermen, federal
land managers, outfitters, hikers, hunters, environmentaliststo protect the epic ranches and untamed wilderness and elk and grizzlies
and trout they all love. On the Kansas prairie, Justin Knopf is using
industrial-scale farming to restore depleted soils cultivated by his
family since homestead days. On the Mississippi itself and its sultry
delta, Canal Barge CEO Merritt Lanescion of an old aristocratic
Southern familyhas joined an unprecedentedly ambitious effort to
reestablish the rivers natural land-building functions, to protect his
mariners and New Orleans. On the Louisiana bayou, Sandy Nguyen
is fighting to rescue the estuaries that harbor the shrimp and oysters
and crabs her community relies on. And in the deep blue waters of
the Gulf of Mexico, beyond the rivers mouth, commercial fisherman
Wayne Werner is tangling with fisheries regulators to bring back red
snapper and keep his and his buddies small businesses afloat. The
challenges they face are nearly as daunting as those met by their forebears when they settled the frontier, founded companies in the depths
of the Depression, or fled war and Communism in tiny fishing boats
adrift on vast seas. But like those ancestors, they draw on deep reservoirs of courage, ingenuity, optimism and resolve.
All are conservationists because their livelihoods and communities will live or die with these ecosystems, but also because they love
these land- and river- and seascapes where natures elemental forces
remain vivid in their beauty and danger; where lives of self-creation,
self-reliance and liberty remain possible; where the ideas of home and
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In that work, and their view of the world, they turn out to have
little in common with the cartoon versions of heartland citizens regularly trotted out to serve this or that political end. Dusty, Justin, Merritt, Sandy, Wayne and their many partners tell a far more interesting
story about what real Americans care about and believe.