The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 13

The question of whether to use persuasion or coercion to save the mountain divides Carr's staff sharply. Franziska Steinbruch, the park's manager of science, told me that she had been studying the deforestation of the Gorongosa water catchment in satellite photographs taken annually since 1972 and that the damage had been increasing exponentially. Her att.i.tude was: the law is the law, no excuses, and the government has to uphold it to defend the rainforest. "If that's not coming as a force from the top, the forest will be gone in two years maximum," she said, and she added, "I'm actually losing hope."

Carr himself takes a hard line when he talks about the mountain, but, as we returned from the falls to the helicopter, we found a young man waiting for us, whom Cruz identified as another illegal tree cutter. He wore a ragged s.h.i.+rt decorated with images of subway stations in Brooklyn, and he bowed his head coyly as Carr lectured him about leaving the trees alone. Then the young man asked for money to buy salt. Carr's anger evaporated. "It's all about poverty," he said, and he told Cruz, "The next time you hire people to work in your nurseries, you should hire this guya"that's a twofer, one less tree cutter and one more tree planter."

From the helicopter, it was easy to see what the worry was. Terrain that appeared from a distance, or even from a slight angle, to be a dense tangle of unbroken rainforest looked from directly overhead like moth-eaten fabric, where small and medium-sized clearings opened up to reveal a field of charred tree stumps interspersed with crops or, at least as often, simply abandoned.

"We need Regina to have a hundred nurseries," Carr had said when we took off. "Because we can do it. We've proved the con cept." But as we buzzed over smoldering fires in fresh cuts, and fields of rocks laid bare by the was.h.i.+ng away of topsoil, he said, "Another hundred nurseriesa"that's not enough." To be sure, large swaths of the forest stood solid and inviolate, but these areas only made the despoliation elsewhere more obvious. The damage ran all the way to the cloud-shrouded summit, a wild place of craggy rock pillars and low, tangled vegetation, and as we crossed from Canda to the Sadjunjira side the tras.h.i.+ng of the forest only got worse.

On several nights at Chitengo, we had watched Ken Burns's recent doc.u.mentary miniseries on the history of America's national parks. After the screening of one episode, a visiting safari guide said, "It's interesting seeing those American national parksa"how they were set aside in the name of the many for the many. Here it's really the national land being set aside in the name of the people for the very few, to be honest. The ma.s.ses here aren't going to come see these animals, because really they're afraid of them, and they'd rather have the land to farm." But, the guide said, the land would be useless without the mountain to feed it. So, he said of the park, "why save all this land for a couple of thousand whities if it's just going to disappear? That's why, if you ask Greg, he'll tell you the mountain is the first priority."

Carr rarely expresses discouragement directly; instead, he betrays the feeling by proposing ever more extravagant solutions to the dilemma that's bothering him. By the end of our helicopter survey of the mountain, he had begun talking about planting "enormous avocado orchards" at the foot of the mountain to lure the tree cutters down from their backbreaking a.s.sault on the forest. But Cruz didn't see any reason to believe that people wanted to abandon the mountain.

"They say, 'Noa"it's the white people coming to take our land,'" she said. "'Where will we go? Where will we live? What will we eat?'"

"We'll give them jobs," Carr said. "We can give a lot of them jobs."

Cruz remained unconvinced. She had no difficulty expressing her discouragement. When we landed back in Vila Gorongosa to drop her off, she told Carr, "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. Really, I never realized that the situation was as bad as that. It's really worse this year."

"We can fight it," Carr told her.

'Yeah," she said. "Maybe."

The mountain was a problem. "It has to be a national park above seven hundred meters," Carr told me. "We have to get to the point where you don't live up there." He said as much on nearly every day of my stay. And nearly every day he flew one or another important visitor over the mountain to make his case. Carr was in the process of trying to sign up the first three safari-lodge operators to run concessions in the park, and he wanted them to understand, as well, the potential value that the mountain could add to Gorongosa tourism. He was encouraged that the minister of the interior had described the harm to the mountain as "an environmental catastrophe." But Carr placed his highest hopes for the mountain in a South African named Dave Law, whose company, Barra Resorts, runs a string of Indian Ocean lodges in Mozambique. Carr wanted Law to build a lodge at Murombodze Falls, and when he took Law to see the spot, he invited a young woman, a Portuguese graduate student who was doing research in the park, to ride along in the helicopter and to visit the swimming hole beneath the spilling water. "A girl in a bikinia"who doesn't like that?" he said. Law loved the falls; he loved the whole mountain. Over drinks on the evening after his visit, he spoke of running horseback trips over the summit, of stringing zip lines through the rainforest canopy, of building a spa that looked out from his lodge onto the falls.

It sounded nice. But while Law and Carr were up on the mountain, I had paid a visit to Eugnio Almeida, the rgulo of Canda, and he had told me that although he wanted more tourists to visit the waterfall, he didn't want anybody going there, or even taking pictures of it, without first coming to see him at his compound to pay a fee, have a certificate stamped, and conduct a ceremony in honor of a spirit whom he called the Owner. Never mind that the rgulo's compound lay nearly two hours' drive away from the falls: the same went for the rest of the mountain, he said. "No one should go on the mountain without my consenta"I, the rgulo," he said. He was particularly concerned about anyone tampering with the waterfall. "It is a holy place," he said. "Long ago, no one lived very close to that place. In the evening, the Owner would move around the place. Even here we would hear him walking. He made a lot of noise. And he climbed from the waterfall high up in the mountain. Now many people have built their houses around the waterfall. By settling their houses around the waterfall, these people closed the way the Owner would use. He doesn't have any path to move from the waterfall into the mountain."

The rgulo, a slender man in his sixties, wore an orange polo s.h.i.+rt and s.h.i.+mmering green trousers, and periodically he tapped a bit of snuff from a plastic vial into his palm, then raised it carefully to his nose and snorted it. "Long ago, things weren't like this chaos we experience these days," he said. The rgulo wanted his office to be respected. The problem, he said, was that there were too many people trying to lead the community. "Everyone leads and no one listens to the other," he told me. He blamed the war. If there was lawlessness and destruction on the mountain, it was because people had been addled by what he called "the gun effects." I took that to mean sh.e.l.l shock. "These people inhaled a lot of gunpowder from guns and bombs during the war," he said. "This gunpowder affected people's brains and mixed them up. Good sense was replaced by war-related ideas."

He told me that Greg Carr was his frienda""We are like brothers"a"and that the people of Canda were dependent on the Carr Foundation for jobs. In fact, he said, the thirty-six people whom Regina Cruz employed on her forestry team were the only people in all of Canda, an area of some four hundred square miles, who had regular salaried jobs. The rest lived by the hoe; they were subsistence farmers. "Here, in my area, people suffer a lot," he said. So they were also grateful to Carr for building them a school. But none of that made them ready to accept the upper mountain's being turned into a park.

In colonial times, the rgulo reminded me, many people had lived in the area that is now the park, and when it became the park the Portuguese burned their homes and scattered them. These were the a.s.sociations that the word "park" carried, he said. In fact, a number of people had resettled in the park during and after the civil war, and Carr was now working on getting them out. He has budgeted $1 million to resettle some seventy families from the sh.o.r.es of Lake Urema, and he said that there would be no coercion, only enticement: better homes, better social services, better economic opportunities. The rgulo saw it differently. He thought it was bad enough that locals could no longer hunt for meat in the buffer zone as everyone used to do in the past. "Now you claim all that area to be yours," he told me. By "you" he meant the muzungua"the white man. He explained, "Muzungu means tomorrow he cheats us and then he takes our property."

The rgulo said that park workers had held a meeting at his house "to persuade people to leave the top of the mountain." When the people up the mountain heard that, he said, they came and protested in his yard. Three times they camea"two hundred people, then ninety people, then seventy-five people. "All of them refused to leave those areas on top of the mountain where they live," he said. These "complainers," as he called them, had even accused the rgulo personally of selling out to the park, and he didn't like that. He told me that Mozambique's land law was clear, and everyone knew that it said people cannot be removed from where they livea"they have to agree to move voluntarily. "This was the only disagreement we have ever had with Mr. Greg Carr," he said, and he added, 'We don't want foreigners to control our area. We want to control our land ourselves." He took credit for the recent arrests of illegal tree cutters. "The two men were beaten, then jailed," the rgulo told me. After all, he said, "we know that this mountain and its trees attract rain. You see, rain is becoming scarce now, and later no rain will fall at all."

Carr, however, said it was untrue that anybody from his project had told people on the mountain that they would have to move: that was not his policy, and it never would be. In fact, he said, he had insisted, in his agreement with the government, that "traditional people" be allowed to dwell in the park, and he told me that that would apply to the mountain, too, if it was given park status. He placed the blame for the rgulo's troubles on agents provocateurs from RENAMO, who had gone around accusing him of being a rich American muzungu land grabber in order to make some political hay at a time of munic.i.p.al elections in the Gorongosa District two years ago. I heard the same thing from people in Maputo who had nothing to do with Carr's project, and Carr provided me with a local newspaper clipping describing the smear campaign.

Carr was much more interested to hear that the rgulo had said he wanted to see more tourists on the mountain, and to control deforestation. The logistical details didn't trouble him. "Basically, what you do is, you introduce Dave Law to Eugnio the Chief, and they sort it out," Carr said. "Eugnio wants jobs and he wants tour ism money, and Dave Law wants the same thing." Frequently, when Carr sought to explain his mission, he would recite facts and figures about the global threat to biodiversity and about the glorious past of the Gorongosa ecosystem. But when he talked about the how, rather than the why, he could sound more like a ward heeler. He said, "Economics will solve the problem faster than any public policy." He said, "Every private-sector entrepreneur has this incredible bias toward letting enlightened self-interest pull things forward, and I fully believe that will happen." And he said, "It's all about jobs. It's all about jobs. It's all about jobs."

Carr's disarming faith in the power of his own good intentions to render confrontation insignificant has served him well in Mozambique. Following his initial catastrophic red-helicopter-and-blind-skink encounter with the samatenje of Sadjunjira, Carr issued the shaman an invitation to visit Chitengo, gave him a grand welcome and free use of the bar, and sent him home a buddy. In fact, he posted a photograph of the two of them together as his head shot on his Facebook page. The samatenje, however, had never come around to cooperating with the Gorongosa team, so I went to see him, too.

Unlike the rgulo of Canda, the samatenje of Sadjunjira lived well up the mountain, far from the last paved road, a four-and-a-half-hour journey from Chitengo. Along the way I learned from Incio Jlio Toms, a member of the Gorongosa forestry crew, who had agreed to drive and translate for me, that the samatenje I thought I was going to meeta"the Facebook samatenjea"had died in the past year, and that I was going to meet the new samatenje, his brother. Toms wanted me to comprehend the incredible powers that this new samatenje and his other brother, the witch doctor of Sadjunjira, were believed to possess. There was even a local legend, he said, that the brothers had killed the Facebook samatenje by working some fratricidal magic on him. It sounded far-fetched to me, and Toms allowed that the dead samatenje had spent a lot of time drinking at the tavern in Vila Gorongosa and fooling around with the ladies there, which was a more routine cause of death in the area. "But people here don't believe in AIDS," he told me, and Toms himself was not prepared to discount the powers of the two surviving brothers: their father, he said, had had awesome powers.

Not long ago, Toms had had recourse to a witch doctor on account of a lame foot. He still wore the dark green fetish thread the healer had fitted his ankle with as he cast his spells, and Toms had no complaints about the treatment: he had been up and walking again in no time. It seemed everyone had such stories, even the science-minded. Carr told me that every year at the end of the flood season, in mid-April, Gorongosa Park officially reopens, and all the local shamans convene under a hallowed "miracle tree" at Chitengo to call on the park's lions to show their favor to the park. Lo and behold, after one such ceremony Carr saw a lion stroll by the Chitengo restauranta"an unheard-of sighting in the fenced compounda"and he found that five more lions had gathered by the camp gate.

The day before my trip to Sadjunjira, I had made another long drive to visit a network of underground bat caves that were known to be guarded by spirits, one of whom took the form of a leopard. Shortly before we reached our destination, my guide had stopped so that we could stretch our legs and eat a sandwich. It was a stupefyingly hot, still day, but as we stood with our lunch by the tailgate of the car, the trees around us began to rattle in a burst of extreme wind that gathered suddenly into a slender twister, blackened with dust, and ripped between us, s.n.a.t.c.hing a sandwich wrapper, which sailed a good seventy feet into the air and was gone forever. Later, in the caves, I stood on a ledge overlooking a deep black pool of water and a snake rose to the surfacea"some kind of cobra, at least five feet longa"and stared straight at me until I turned away and it sank from sight. My guide had no doubt that both twister and snake were visitations. But as Toms regaled me with similar stories of the powers of the samatenje and his brothera"the brother, he said, was a very good doctor, who could give you medicine that would make you so rich that "you'll go to America and buy a helicopter"a"he mentioned in pa.s.sing that the samatenje had nevertheless lost two children the year before to cholera, by modern medical standards one of the most preventable, and treatable, maladies.

After leaving the last graded road on the way to Sadjunjira, we spent the next hour climbing the mountain in four-wheel drive on a road that was properly a footpath, and a badly washed-out one, too. On either side, large patches of the mountain were stripped bare of trees, and ragged fringes of flame licked up the gra.s.sy slopes. Then for long stretches there was no gra.s.s to burn: the topsoil was entirely gone, and all that remained was a waste of boulder fields. The last few miles of our approach was made on foot, and for the final hundred yards we had to remove our shoes and socks, as we had entered hallowed ground.

Toms had been anxious that we were arriving around noon, for fear that we might not find the samatenje at home or sober so late in the day. But he was botha"a slight, bearded man, clad in the ragged remains of several denim s.h.i.+rts and matching pants. He squatted at the sight of us, cupped his hands, and clapped them rhythmicallya"pock, pock, pock, pock, pock, pock, pocka"finis.h.i.+ng with a half-beat flourish. This was a ritual that he repeated frequently throughout our visit, and which we returned in kind each time. He gave us straw mats to sit on in the shade of a vast, fruit-laden mango tree and left us there for well over an hour before he commenced our audience. By then he had a.s.sembled an entourage of local elders to join usa"because, Toms explained, such a leader cannot meet alone with a white man lest he later be accused of having betrayed the interests of his community.

Throughout our visit, fires crackled through the surrounding bush, and fine ribbons of sooty ash drifted down around us. A steep flank of the mountain rose behind the samatenje, bare and burning, and I asked him if it had been forest when he was a boy. He said, "Now it's worse, because people are destroying and cutting the trees." The ancestors felt the same way, he said: "They feel that something's going wrong. They're warning the people, but the people don't take care."

So would it be a good idea to plant new trees?

"No," the Samatenje said.

Why?

"Tradition."

What about jobs?

"No."

So no more trees?

"The trees will grow themselves."

What if the police come and arrest tree cutters?

"No problem."

What if tourists come?

"No."

That was what the samatenje had to say. His power, it seemed, lay entirely in refusal. There was more clapping: pock, pock, pock, pock. Then we left. As soon as we were outside the shaman's sanctuary and had put our shoes back on, Toms, who had spoken so admiringly of traditional ways on the journey in, erupted in a tirade against the samatenje's stonewalling of the modern world: his people needed trees, his people needed jobsa"to deprive his people of trees and jobs was murder! "They're killing a lot of people," Toms said.

Back at Chitengo, I found Carr drinking gin and tonics with a new group of safari operators. "I don't think I would ever sort out the micropoliticsa"or that it really needs it," he told me when I described my excursion, and he said, "I see it more as just a we-give-them-opportunity, we-give-them-jobs, we-may-end-up-saving-Canda-and-losing-Sadjunjira sort of thing." It was the closest I ever heard him come to resignation.

The novelist Mia Couto told me a story when we met in Maputo. During Mozambique's first national elections in 1994, he attended a campaign rally in a small village, where a politician from the city gave a speech. The politician said, "I'm here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools"a"the usual boilerplate. When he got to the end of it, a villager stood up and said, "We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish." The villager didn't say anything more, and Couto realized that he and the politician were the only people there who didn't know the story. Finally, the politician confessed his ignorance, so the man told him the story, and it went like this: A monkey was walking along a river and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look, that animal is under water, he'll drown, I'll save him. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh, what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

"Anyway," Couto said, "this is the traditional point of view. But you cannot just say, This is wonderful and don't touch it. Because it is being touched. You can't avoid bringing modernity. It's happening."

He was right that the story took the fish's point of view. But, I wondered, how could it be told to make the monkey look good? I got my answer the next day, when I met Terezinha da Silva, who runs a women's rights organization in Maputo. Nine years ago, da Silva was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and later, when Carr told her that he was going to invest in Gorongosa Park, she said, she urged him to please be sensitive to the rights of the peasants. But this past summer she went to Gorongosa District to lead seminars, and she had to call into question all her a.s.sumptions about the sanct.i.ty of traditional culture. "I was so shocked and depressed with what I heard during the course," she told me. Specifically, she was appalled to hear about a practice that was called "early marriage," but which she properly called "forced unions": impoverished parents in remote rural areas would give their five- or six- or seven-year-old daughters to middle-aged men in exchange for a monthly stipend. She said that she was told of schools that had no girls at all, because they were all married. Mozambique had good laws against such things, but they were often not enforced, out of respect for culture and tradition. And the thing was, da Silva said, she later learned that in the past in these same areas, the cultural tradition was for women not to marry until eighteen.

The traditional positiona"the fish's positiona"was: don't save us from ourselves. But what if the tradition itself was corrupt, or if the culture had already been lost? Carlos Pereira, Carr's director of conservation in the park, said of Gorongosa District, "This is a terrible place psychologically. To keep alive, in the morning they had to help RENAMO, in the afternoon they had to help FRELIMO. That was every day. Now imagine this person that had to collaborate with one side and the other side. What does he do in life? That's what he tries to do in life. He says yes on this side, but says yes on that side. He goes in the middle, talks a lot, says nothing. You can never be entirely loyal, you never entirely trust."

"So what are my choices?" Greg Carr said. "Absolutely do nothing, never go anywhere near the mountain in twenty years? OK, fine, what do you have then? A bare, stripped mountain washed away. We lose half of the perennial water system of the park. But I respected them and didn't go there, because there's old RENAMO-FRELIMO wounds and old colonial wounds, so I didn't go there. OK, so that's Plan A. That's just really bold on my part. What's Plan B? Go there and start talking to them. Gosh, can we put up some nurseries? OK, let's do it. Gosh, can we do tourism? No, we don't want you on the Sadjunjira side doing tourism. OK, we won't. What else am I supposed to do?"

After all, he said, "that Gorongosi culture is gone when the last tree gets cut down up there. And furthermore, you've got people up therea"the kids don't have schools, the women are basically slaves, and the rgulos are not looking out for their people a lot of the time. We all know that traditional societies look out for themselves. What are my choices? I'm a human-rights guy and a conservation guy trying to do both at the same time. The best idea I've come up with is those nurseries. I like it, I think it was a good thing, I'm proud of myself and my team for doing it."

Carr hasn't given up hope that the mountain will become part of the park, but he told me recently that it might be just as well if the mountain were designated a "forest reserve"a"a status that insures higher conservation status but makes greater allowances for human habitation. "That's a change in tactic, not a change in goal," he said, and he added, "But if 'forest reserve' is still so politically sensitive, look, I can keep my goal and continue to change my tactics." At the same time, he has asked the park's conservationists to draw up contingency plans to insure that water keeps coming in even if the mountain is lost. His staff talks about diverting the flow of nearby rivers to feed Lake Urema or drilling wells to supply watering holes for animals. Carr didn't like the prospect, but he liked grappling with the problem. "It makes it interesting for mea"a person who could be anywhere in the whole world," he said.

One afternoon at Chitengo, as we sat by the pool, where tourists were splas.h.i.+ng, Carr told me that he has made provisions for the park in his will. He had said repeatedly that before he found Gorongosa he had lived in dread of becoming "a dabbler." Now he told me, "The way I see it is this: I may not be a serious person, but Gorongosa is a serious project." When his friends speak of his hunger for purpose, they always tend to mention that he was once a Mormon, although they generally can't say how or why this is significant. But Larry Hardesty took a stab at it. "When you've been that committed to a religious ideal when you're young, I think that that kind of gives you a taste for what it's like to have some big thing in your life that organizes it and gives it meaning," he said. "I think he was looking for that thing again, trying to replace that monolithic thing at the center of his life."

I told Carr what Hardesty had said, and he said, "I think that's right." Sometimes when he felt that everything was going well in Gorongosa, Carr said to me that he might have to find something else to do with himself in a few years. But then he said, "I have a lot of these weird things in my life where I've gone headlong into something and later I look at it and just go, That was strange. But I get the fever, right? You know, I like getting older and calmer. I don't really want a lot more of those fevers. It's just too much. This is my last fever."

Part Six.

The Environment: Big Blessings.

RICHARD MANNING Graze Anatomy.

FROM OnEarth.

WILL WINTER AND TODD CHURCHILL have a plan. It's simple, it's workable, and if enough people do it, it will shrink our carbon footprint, expand biodiversity and wildlife habitat, promote human health, humanize farming, control rampant flooding, radically decrease the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, anda"for those of us who still eat the stuffa"produce a first-cla.s.s, guilt-free steak. Their plan: let cows eat gra.s.s.

The two men share a background in conventional farming. Winter came of age in the heart of the Midwest, starting his veterinary practice in the 1970s when industrial-strength livestock operations were gaining a full head of steam. "I had a syringe of antibiotics in this hand and a syringe of steroids in the other hand and I thought I was going to go cure the world," he says. "But I left conventional farming practice because it was so crude and so cruel. The cruelty drove me nuts." In the feedlots where cattle are stuffed with corn to produce almost all the beef Americans eat, he explains, "we were weaning [the calves], hot-iron branding them, vaccinating them, castrating them, dehorning them, and s.h.i.+pping them in one day. These are vets doing this, shooting them with ten-way vaccines, giving them ten different diseases in one day."

For Churchill the epiphany was less dramatic but no less wound up in the realities of industrial-scale farming. He grew up on a large, efficient corn and soybean farm near Moline, Illinois. "I spent all my summers as a child ripping out the fences, and we'd bulldoze all the trees and make one big cornfield. And then I thought: where do the birds live? The birds' job is to eat the aphids, but since we don't have trees anymore, we don't have birds, so we have to spray the aphids. Does that really make sense in the long run?"

Winter left his veterinary practice and became a foodie, promoting and distributing raw milk products in Minnesota and working as a consultant for graziers. He is the sort of fellow to have several irons in the fire at all times, and he offered up some free-range pork, his latest venture, when I met him at his Minneapolis home for breakfast.

Churchill became an accountant, also in southeast Minnesota. He had heard the heretical claims of a few contrarian farmers who were finis.h.i.+ng beef on gra.s.s pastures instead of feedlots. It seemed an anachronism, defying the conventional wisdom that only the feedlot system can yield the economic efficiencies that leave Americans amply supplied with cheap beef and milk. But criticism of that system has escalated exponentially and for a host of different reasons: rapidly rising energy prices, concerns about global warming, and feed costs that leave poor people begging for the grain that Americans use to fatten livestock.

After sampling some gra.s.s-fed beefa"some of it excellent, some inediblea"Churchill decided to go into the business himself. He started the Thousand Hills Cattle Company in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in 2003. A year later he met Winter, and the boots-and-jeans cattleman wannabe invited the jovial, generation-older vet-foodie to join him. Thousand Hills is now a substantial business, buying, slaughtering, and selling about 1,000 gra.s.s-fed cows a year to whole food stores, co-ops, restaurants, and three colleges in the Twin Cities area. Churchill buys his cattle from a small network of regional farmers able to meet his standards for quality.

Thousand Hills is part of an evolving nationwide web. The Denver-based American Gra.s.sfed a.s.sociation was founded by just 8 members in 2003 but now claims 380. Carrie Balkcom, the group's executive director, says companies like Thousand Hills have sprung up throughout the country. At one end of the spectrum are large operations like White Oak Pastures in Georgia, which sells to the Whole Foods Market chain throughout the Southeast and Publix Supermarkets in the Atlanta area. At the other end are hundreds of small farms that sell directly to consumers, says Balkcom. Theo Weening, global meat coordinator for Whole Foods, says gra.s.s-fed beef is available in virtually all of his company's stores, and demand is growing.

Gra.s.s-fed beef, in other words, is poised to move out of the niche market and into the mainstreama"as long as farmers can make it profitable.

Winter points out that for agriculture to be "sustainable," it must have a sustainable business model. "Todd says you have to earn the right to be here next year," he says. This was hard at first for operations like Thousand Springs, but the gra.s.s-fed system has matured to the point where significant chunks of the nation's corn-ravaged landscape can be converted into far more sustainable permanent pasturesa"without a loss in production.

At the heart of this s.h.i.+ft lies a humble leap in technology, a fencing material called polywire, which you are sure to notice when you walk into a field with Churchill. A polywire fence is short and flimsy, composed of a single strand that resembles yellow-braided fis.h.i.+ng line. This makes cheap, easily movable, and effective electric fences, and it is the key to the whole operation.

Modern gra.s.s farmers almost universally rely on something called managed intensive rotational grazing. Polywire fences confine a herd of maybe sixty cows to an area the size of a suburban front lawn, typically for twelve hours. Then the grazier moves the fence, to cycle through a series of such paddocks every month or so. This reflects a basic ecological principle. Left to their own devices in a diverse ecosystem, cows will eat just a few species, grazing again and again on the same plants. As with teenagers at a buffet, cows that eat this way are not acting in their own best nutritional interests. Rotational grazing, which forces them to eat the two-thirds of available forage that they would normally leave untouched, produces much more beef or milk per acre than does laissez-faire grazing.

Quality, of course, is just as important as quant.i.ty. I watch Churchill hop a strand of fence to enter a pasture. He whips out a kitchen garlic press to smush a sample of gra.s.s, then spreads it on a slide and sticks this into what looks like a miniature telescope. The gadget is a refractometer, and he is testing the gra.s.s for sugar content; this varies widely according to a range of conditions, not the least of which is the skill of the grazier. Sugar content is key to quality beef, and it is affected by the mix of gra.s.s species, the matching of species to local climate and soil, the proper selection of complementary forbs (such as clovers), and proper rotation time.

"When we started with gra.s.s-fed, the quality wasn't that great," says Theo Weening of Whole Foods. "It has improved a lot in the last twelve months." And as the quality improves, so does the potential to scale up gra.s.s-fed farming, with all its environmental benefits.

Splendor in the Gra.s.s.

Humans can't eat gra.s.s, an a.s.sertion that sounds odd, considering that something like three-quarters of all human nutrition comes from wheat, rice, and corn, all of which are gra.s.ses. But what we eat is actually their seeds, the dense package of complex carbohydrates that is the specialty of annual gra.s.ses. Perennial gra.s.ses, which are more common, devote a larger proportion of their energy to roots, stems, and leaves, and the building block of these is cellulose.

Humans cannot convert cellulose to protein, but cows can, thanks to their highly specialized stomachsa"rumens, as in ruminants. "The rumen is the most magical chemical factory in the world," Winter says. "It can turn cellulose into meat." It is a highly specialized biodigester; if it didn't exist, biotechnologists would be trying to invent it.

The health of the miniature ecosystem inside the rumen parallels the health of the larger ecosystem of the perennial pasture. The health of that larger system sponsors a rich microbial world beneath the soil, where lowly creatures like dung beetles and earthworms grind away at the task of cycling nutrients. Perennial gra.s.ses build deep roots that can extend more than ten feet below the surface. Shallow-rooted annual crops rapidly deplete trace minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and iodine, but the roots of perennials act like elevators, lifting these minerals back into the system and making them available to plants and everything else on up the food chain.

Winter says almost every grain-fed cow has excessive acid in its body, largely because of the lack of calcium and magnesium in its diet. This acidity allows a whole range of parasites and diseases to gain a foothold. A gra.s.s diet neutralizes the problem and pa.s.ses the benefits to humans, who, because of our narrow diets, are also short on these same trace minerals.

Gra.s.s-fed beef and milk also bring us the benefits of fat. The modern wave of obesity has made us fatophobes, but nutritional research is telling us we are obese and p.r.o.ne to heart disease not because we eat fat but because we eat the wrong kind of fat. Grain-fed beef is especially high in omega-6 fats and cholesterol. Gra.s.s-fed beef and dairy products are lower in both and higher in omega-3 fats and conjugated linoleic acid, which reduce the risk of heart disease and are lacking in our diets.

Unlike the industrial feedlot system, which is designed to channel all inputs into a single producta"meat proteina"gra.s.s-fed livestock operations must focus on a series of complex, interlocking ecosystems. By paying attention to these, gra.s.s farmers are rewarded with their byproduct: beef or milk. Ideally, health resonates throughout these systems, including the human body.

Economists illuminate this idea with the concept of "externalities"a"costs that are invisible to the market. As a former CPA, Churchill knows that being attentive to ecosystem health is a way of bringing externalities into the accounting process. The enterprise has to be profitable, and it is. Churchill and hundreds of farmers like him have found that they can take productive corn and soybean land and convert it to perennial pasture, and in the process make more money than highly subsidized corn and soybean farmers. This flies in the face of the a.s.sumptions of agricultural economists worldwide, who have traditionally believed that the highest and best use of the world's most productive lands is row-crop agriculture.

Churchill's balance sheet says otherwise, raising the possibility that entire regions of the globe, including the American heartland, don't need to remain environmental sacrifice zones.

Flat and Flooded.

Pouring rain notwithstanding, Francis Thicke wants to show me his herd of eighty Jersey dairy cows grazing a paddock on a summer day in 2008. Iowa farmers like Thicke became accustomed to rain last year. In June floods worked their way down the Mississippi River Basin, beginning in southern Minnesota and eventually in undating vast areas throughout the Corn Belt. The floods killed twenty-four people and caused damages running into the tens of billions of dollars.

It's not considered Minnesota-nice to say so, but this expensive inundation is simply another cost of corn and soybean agriculture. Iowa, with the best and flattest prairie topsoils in the nation, has the most altered landscape of any state; 65 percent of its land is planted to corn and soybeans. The state has less than 1 percent of its native habitat left, almost all of which was tallgra.s.s prairie and oak savannah before European settlement. That earlier system included sinuous streams and riparian areas full of wetlands and flood-catching vegetation, but the thirsty prairie has been flattened and plowed into fields that shed rainwater almost as fast as parking lots do. Many of the fields have been underlain with drainage tiles that speed up the flow of surface water into rivers, exacerbating flooding. A stretch of pure prairie will absorb five to seven inches of rain an hour, meaning that twelve feet of rain in a twenty-four-hour stretch yields no runoff. Normal absorption on corn and soybean land ranges from a half inch to one and a half inches an hour, meaning that comparable rainfall yields catastrophic floods like those of 2008.

Thicke and I shed our drenched raingear and adjourn to his study, where he points to a framed black-and-white photograph. It shows a hill contoured with alternating strips of tilled and untilled land, with a pond at its base. The photo was featured in the 1957 U.S. Department of Agriculture's Yearbook of Agriculture, at a time when the department was touting this method of farming as the best way to prevent runoff and erosion. In fact, Thicke tells me, the pond in the photo flooded just about every time it rained hard. He knows this because it was his family's farm.

Thicke earned a Ph.D. in soil science and held an executive job at the Department of Agriculture, but he quit to buy a worn-out, eroded, and marginal farm near Fairfield, Iowa, in 1996. He allowed the tilled fields to revert to gra.s.s and started an organic dairy. Erosion stopped almost immediately. In the meantime, Thicke's brother kept the family farm and turned the neat strip plots into permanent pasture for beef and dairy. The pond no longer floods. Converting a significant share of corn and soybean lands to perennial pastures, as the Thickes have done, could go a long way toward eliminating flooding, especially if those pastures are strategically located in areas p.r.o.ne to flooding and erosion.

The traditional argument against farms like the Thickes' is that they cannot match the "efficiency" of industrial-scale grain production. But this argument does not take into account the productivity of managed rotational grazing. Todd Churchill says one reason he can make more money than a subsidized corn farmer is that he can produce about two steers per acre. It takes roughly the same acreage to grow the 3,000 pounds of grain used to finish a single steer in a feedlot.

But can enough land be converted to pasture to make any real difference to the landscape? The swath of destruction that is corn agriculture occupies about 80 million acres, mostly in the Midwest, an area only slightly smaller than California. At least half of that acreage is used to grow corn for livestock. Is it really possible to imagine something so radical as the transformation of 40 million acres of land?

In fact, it's been done before. In the 1970s and 1980s, and at the urging of the federal government, farmers greatly increased the acreage under cultivation, plowing up land that had been idle since the Dust Bowl. This triggered a huge increase in erosion, which in turn triggered the federal Conservation Reserve Program. At present farmers receive about $1.8 billion a year and have converted a total of 34.7 million acres from row crops to gra.s.s. But high grain prices have spurred farmers to begin pulling those acres out of the program at an alarming pace, about 2 million acres in the last two years. The gra.s.s-fed beef and dairy market offers an opportunity to reverse that flow and at the same time insulate the land from plows driven by high grain prices. Moreover, the $1.8 billion subsidy that farmers receive from taxpayers nets them an average of $51 an acre. Gra.s.s farmers can net as much as eight times that amount on converted corn and soybean land.

The Good Earth.