{"id":4103,"date":"2015-01-05T15:08:01","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T20:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4103"},"modified":"2015-01-05T15:08:01","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T20:08:01","slug":"land-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4103","title":{"rendered":"Land Literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Land Literacy<\/a><\/h4>\n

How many people could recognize an ecological wound if they saw one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Could we tell a natural arroyo from an eroding gully? Could we tell if plant pedestaling was a sign of proper land function or a sign of erosion? If we recognized a headcut in a wet meadow, would we be able to deduce why it was there or where it originated? Could we tell if a channel was aggrading or degrading or why we should care?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This issue hit home for me years ago when I heard Dan Dagget, an environmental activist, tell a story about a professor of environmental studies he knew who took a group of students for a walk one day in the woods near Flagstaff, Arizona. Stopping in a meadow, the professor pointed at the ground and asked the students, not so rhetorically, \u201cCan anyone tell me if this land is healthy or not?\u201d After a few moments of awkward silence, one student finally spoke up. \u201cTell us first if it\u2019s grazed by cows or not,\u201d he demanded.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The implication was clear: if cows grazed here, the land had to be unhealthy. If cows did not graze there, then things were \u201cnatural\u201d and therefore fine. Dan\u2019s point was that the actual condition of the land, visible as signs of health or ill-health, had become secondary to the political positions of the observers. The point that stuck with me over the years, however, was this one: we\u2019ve become mostly land illiterate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Land Literacy How many people could recognize an ecological wound if they saw one? Could we tell a natural arroyo from an eroding gully? Could we tell if plant pedestaling was a sign of proper land function or a sign of erosion? If we recognized a headcut in a wet meadow, would we be able […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[234,2433,2432],"class_list":["post-4103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-ecology","tag-land-health","tag-land-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4104,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103\/revisions\/4104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}