You're listening to season three of

Future Ecologies.

Hi folks, if you're joining us for the first

time, you've found yourself three episodes deep into a four

part series. If before we get started, you'd prefer a bit more

background, I recommend you scroll back in the Future

Ecologies feed to "Goatwalker:

On Errantry" and part two,

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"Sanctuary". We've got links to both in the show notes. Over

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those two episodes, we met Jim Corbett, a goat erd, philosopher

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and catalyst of the Sanctuary Movement, a modern day

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Underground Railroad, transporting Central American

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refugees into the United States during the 1980s. Throughout his

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years milking goats and smuggling refugees, Corbett had

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drawn together a remarkable community who shared a deep,

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abiding love for the more than human world. This episode begins

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with two of those individuals. My co-host, Adam will take it

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from here.

Up until this point, in this series, we've

discussed the life of Jim Corbett, his philosophy of

errantry, and the start of the Sanctuary Movement. Now though,

I'd like to talk for a few minutes about cacti. Every year,

Nancy Ferguson and Tom Orum trek out to Saguaro National Park to

administer a census for cacti. If you were to ask them why,

this is what they'd say:

We inherited the study –

It was an accident.

The story behind this annual ritual is a study

that dates back to before the Second World War.

In 1939, the Saguaros out at Saguaro National Park

were tall and huge and beautiful. And they had started

to die. And the initial conclusion was it was bacterial

necrosis or bacterial rot.

At the time, the University of Arizona had some

land directly adjacent to the park, which was still a national

monument.

And so they devoted an entire square mile of that area

for Saguaro research. In the fall of '41, they actually

surveyed the area, and they put a wooden stake by every single

Saguaro in the square mile, and there were 15,000 of them. So it

was a huge area, and they divided it into half, and the

northern half was their control, and the southern half every

Saguaro that was showing the black ooze of rot – of bacterial

necrosis – they cut down, chopped into pieces, and buried

in big pits.

After all of this effort, it turned out there

actually wasn't much difference in response between the treated

area in the south and the control area in the north.

So then they said, "Well, we can't keep up

monitoring all 15,000 plants. But what we'll do is we'll pick

six 10 acre plots, and we'll keep following those three in

the north half and three in the south half". And those then were

followed every year.

Tom and Nancy first started helping out with

the study in 1979, under a plant pathologist named Stan Alcorn.

When Alcorn passed away in 1999, they had inherited one of the

longest running Natural History studies in North America. For

the uninitiated, saguaros, species epithet Carnegiea

gigantea, are the iconic columnar cactus of the US

Southwest.

So rather than short and fat, they're a column

that gets taller and taller – 30 feet high eventually. And as

they age, they put out arms, and at the very top of the column

and at the tip of the arms is where they produce the flowers

and the seeds.

So the way they look they look like a person with

their hands up signaling like a –

It's just a feeling

– field goal in football or something like that.

So all of the vocabulary ends up being like anthropomorphized. So

you're talking about the arms rather than the branches, and

you're talking about the ribs.

And it's corrugated so that when it's a

drought, they sort of shrivel in and lose diameter, and those

sections sort of compress a little. And then a good rain

comes and they get rehydrated and it can swell up and become

rather smooth around the outside.

Saguaros are the giant green churros of the

desert. You've almost certainly seen them depicted somewhere in

popular culture, perhaps as the backdrop for Wile E. Coyote's

fruitless pursuit of the Roadrunner in Looney Tunes.

Capable of living over 150 years, they are the

characteristic species of the Sonoran Desert, which spans

southeastern California through much of southern Arizona.

What's special about the Sonoran Desert is we have

two rainy seasons. It's not like the Mojave – winter rain. Not

like the Chihuahua – summer rains. But it's in between and

getting both. And that's rather crucial to Saguaro germination

and establishment and making through the first two or three

years. The first couple of years are really tough because they

don't have that water storage tissue developed.

Over the years, scientists studying saguaros

have learned a lot about their role in ecosystems. They're

considered to be a keystone species. For example, much like

trees in a forest, the Saguaro is a magnet for woodpeckers and

flickers. These industrious birds excavate holes in the

cactus

Then the Saguaro reacts by forming callus

tissues, so that it forms what we call a boot. And all sorts of

birds use those holes for nesting and habitat, and so

forth.

Many desert species pollinate so wild

flowers and eat sawara fruit. But the white winged dove is

among the most important the doves will make their nests in

Palo Verde trees, near Saguaros.

And then when they lay their eggs and the chicks come

out, just about the time the Saguaro fruit is ripe. And so

the white winged does eat this Saguaro fruit with the seeds,

and then they regurgitate and feed their squabs the seed, but

they're sloppy feeders.

Those regurgitated seeds of the Saguaro fruit, land

in the soil around the Palo Verde, and find an ideal habitat

for germination. In fact, Palo Verdes and other leguminous

trees, like mesquite, are considered to be nurse plants

for the Saguaro. Meaning that a Saguaro growing up under one of

these trees has a much better chance of surviving its first

few years than one growing out in the open. Even after they're

dead, Saguaros continue to support the ecosystem, much like

fallen logs in a forest.

When you walk up to it, you're just enveloped

with the smell of the decomposition. And it's unlike

anything that I've ever smelled before. And the whole thing is

humming. But it doesn't actually move. I didn't see that. But you

know, there's such a hum of the, all the insect activity inside

that it's, it's alive in a very different way.

The annual Saguaro census has had a number of

focuses over the years. But the questions Tom and Nancy are

trying to answer have a lot to do with something botanists call

recruitment.

Which is a fancy way of talking about the next generation of

cacti. New recruits are plants that have germinated and

survived those tough first years to become part of the Saguaro

population. The reason Tom and Nancy are so focused on this

issue is that since 1993, only five new Saguaro plants have

become established in the entire study area.

We found one last spring, the one before that was

in 2015. And then there were just one or two in the last

decade. We're not seeing them, we're not seeing the little

ones.

This might sound alarming, and it might be

alarming. But the great thing about long term studies is that

they give us perspective. In the first decades of the study, the

1940s and 1950s, there was similarly very low recruitment,

just like after 1993. But between the 1960s and the 1990s,

there was a huge population boom, possibly because those

years tended to be wetter than average. And because Saguaros

are so long lived, they can weather long droughts, both in

terms of water and recruitment.

I think they're gonna be all right. What they have

going for them is their long age, so they can span long

periods of drought, and then expand that. Who knows, you

know, one doesn't know what climate change is gonna mean.

That's, that's the big thing.

And so, Tom and Nancy continue to volunteer

their time to check in on the Saguaros every year, and to

document them as they live and die and are hopefully, born

again

For a podcast called Future Ecologies. We haven't really

spoken very much about ecology in this series up until now. Tom

and Nancy's work with Saguaros might feel far removed from Jim

Corbett and goatwalking and Sanctuary. But as I've said, I

don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the people

involved in Sanctuary also maintain deep relationships with

the more-than-human world. Tom and Nancy devoted their careers

and now their retirement to working with plants. John Fife

is a consummate hunter and outdoorsman. Ann Russell became

a marine biologist, and Gary Paul Nabhan, would become the

preeminent ethnobotanist for the Southwest, as well as a

celebrated author and activist. And these are just some of the

people I spoke to.

In the years after Sanctuary wound down, Jim and Los Cabreros

Andantes would pivot from refugee smuggling, to applying

the principles of sanctuary and Jim's developing philosophy of

pastoral synbiotics to the land itself. They would create their

own sanctuary in the land where Saguaros grew up under the shade

of Juniper trees. What they created there persists to this

day, and provides a refuge for those who seek the enduring

stillness of the desert.

But can this community survived the challenges ahead and keep

the promises that they've made to one another and to the land.

In other words, will they be able to support the next

generation of herders, the new recruits for Jim's vision of a

sanctuary for all life.

From Future Ecologies This is Goatwalker, Part Three: Saguaro

Juniper.

On our second day in Arizona, our friend Teresa dropped

associate producer Ilana Fonariov and I off at the start

of a rough dirt road in the small town of Cascabel Arizona.

Susan Tollefson and her pickup truck where they're waiting for

us. Susan has been the keeper of the Hermitage at the Cascabel

Conservation Association for a number of years now, although

Jim passed away long before she arrived. We packed into her

truck and she started slowly down the dirt road leading to

the Hermitage. The land was stunning, rolling hills dotted

with Saguaros and ocotillos, interrupted by dry washes. We

entered through a cattle gate next to a grove of contorted

mesquite trees and an old windmill. Unloading our gear, we

were welcomed into a small handsome shelter with a bed and

a desk inside. On the desk was Pat Corbett's personal copy of a

book I've been desperately trying to get my hands on for a

couple of years. Jim's swan song entitled: 'Sanctuary for All

Life'. With the book in hand, we settled in for a few days of

reading and sojourning in the desert stillness, trying to get

to know the place – and Jim's ghost – a little better.

As journalist Miriam Davidson was wrapping up interviews with

Jim for her own book, 'Convictions of the Heart'. She

asked him what he thought he would do after Sanctuary.

I think that some of the things we're doing with

regard to land redemption. Well, the current work we're doing in

that direction may or may not come to fruition are pretty

important. And so I probably will continue to pursue that.

This cryptic response prompted a follow up

question. What did he mean by "land redemption"?

Well, this, this has to do with efforts to get a

group together to buy a ranch, which would permit individual

participants to have their own acreage within this system, that

would be their private property. At the same time, having

considerable common management of other aspects of land use,

develop a bill of rights for the land, that would protect the

community of plants and animals already there as this other

community settles in and would work out particularly ways for

human beings to be part of a wildland community without

destroying or or seriously altering it – where their

livelihood could be integrated in a harmonious way, rather than

being an intervention, and a destructive force

With the conclusion of the Sanctuary

trial, Jim would finally get the opportunity to try and put these

ideas into practice. Pat and Jim relocated from Tucson, to this

small town of Cascabel to the east, in the San Pedro River

Valley. They bought a piece of fertile Riverside land, where

Pat could keep horses and Jim could keep his goats. They

immediately recognized that the desert wild lands in and around

Cascabel were special.

We saw the land out there. And then Jim started to

think about how can he manage to get this land preserved. And

then he started talking to Tom and Nancy, because Tom has kind

of the brilliant, how-to-make-it-happen-financially

man, alongst with Nancy.

Tom and Nancy had kept a low profile during the

Sanctuary years, with Tom acting as the debt coordinator for Pat

and Jim's refugee smuggling efforts.

They're just incredible people who do an

incredible job of quietly making things happen. So he told them

about taking a hike up one of the ridges here, where you can

see a Saguar was growing under a Juniper tree, with the Juniper

being the nurse tree for the Saguaro. And Nancy was just

enthralled with this, and she said later that was all it took

to get her involved.

And one of the things I had said to him early

on was that, you know, if we get some land, I'm really interested

in having it be a place that has Saguaros. And so sure enough,

some time later, he came in and said, I found a place that not

only has Saguaros, but they're growing under Juniper trees. And

those are usually very separate ecosystems. It was like, whoa,

that's really different. And within a month's time, we were

out in Cascabel of looking at this place where sure enough,

there were Saguaros and Juniper trees acting as the nurse trees

for Saguaros. Then we went and put together Saguaro Juniper as

a way to start buying land in Cascabel.

This was the birth of the Saguaro Juniper

Corporation.

And Jim and Tom and Nancy were able to get a pretty

good sized group of people together to come up with the

money to purchase a parcel of deeded land, and that became

Saguaro Juniper.

The first purchase was in '88. And that was just 135

acres with 16 people.

Those 135 acres included the beautiful

Hotsprings Canyon, a tributary of the San Pedro River. And this

small acreage was only the beginning. From Jim's years of

goatwalking, he'd become convinced that the best way to

live in a symbiotic, non-violent partnership with the

more-than-human world was as a herder: as an integral part of a

herd. And to his mind, the only way to recreate a nomadic

herding community in modern day North America was to secure

enough land to support the herd and the herders without causing

ecological damage. In the arid West, this meant somehow

acquiring a lot of land, because it takes a huge area to support

even a small herd sustainably. 135 acres simply wasn't enough.

It was around this time that Jim would leave goats behind,

transitioning instead to cow herding.

Well, we came down here with goats. And, well,

let's see... the lions ate some of them. And then both of us

were getting to the point where we felt like we needed to skim

the cream off the milk. Well, it's a lot easier to skim the

cream off cow's milk, because it rises much more quickly, and

it's more visible, and so it's easier to skim. And so we

decided we'd start drinking cow's milk, we kind of retired

the goats. And we - finally we got down to a man goat and the

poor thing was so lonesome, so we decided to turn her up with

the horses so that she'd have some companionship, and we did.

But unfortunately, eventually after we'd done that for a while

a lion got her, but at least she had company in her last years.

There were other reasons for this transition as

well. For one, as Jim would write in Sanctuary for All Life:

Personally, I'm also more inclined to favor

cows now, since the cow has become the West's most commonly

denounced animal pariah.

In addition to the sense of kinship that Jim felt

with the maligned animals, this transition from goat to cow

reflected Jim's shift in focus from personal to collective

errantry. In fact, due to its Judeo-Christian mysticism, and

preoccupation with cows, Sanctuary for All Life is

affectionately subtitled "The Cowbalah of Jim Corbett".

Sanctuary for All Life continues the

exploration of pastoral symbiotics that Goatwalking

initiated. Where goatwalking is primarily a form of personal

errantry, the focus of Sanctuary for All Life is wildland

stewardship, by a covenant formed community, specifically,

stewardship on Saguaro Juniper range land by Saguaro Juniper

herders.

And those herders were herding cows, because of

all of the advantages cows had over goats, the greatest of all

was their unique ability – socio-politically – to unlock

enough public land for a small herding community to support

itself.

When they switched from goats, the cows that – it

was both good and bad. I mean, he could just get out with his

goats and, and go, but you can't quite do that with cows. But on

the other hand, you have to have cows in order to have the lease.

Let me explain that last part. The vast

majority of the land in the arid west of the United States is

public land, administered by the US Bureau of Land Management,

the Forest Service, or another governmental entity. But that

doesn't mean that this land is protected. Far from it. Across

much of this area, extending from the Borderlands of the

Sonoran Desert, North throughout the Great Basin to the border

with Canada, livestock grazing isn't just allowed, it's

mandated.

In order to hold a lease, you have to have a brand

and you have to have cattle, and you're supposed to graze it.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity,

livestock grazing is promoted, protected and supported by

federal agencies on approximately 270 million acres

of public land in the 11 Western states. Ranchers lease huge

amounts of land by paying modest fees at below market rates. In

other words, ranching on public lands in the arid West is highly

subsidized. And while many ranchers have adopted practices

to mitigate the harm that cattle can cause to wild lands, they

represent the minority. Throughout the history of the

United States, poor grazing practices have predominated,

resulting in ecological damage and degradation at a massive

scale. Despite this damage, the heavy subsidization, the

marginal amount of actual production involved, and the

fact that most ranchers can barely make enough money to keep

ahead of their debts, this system remains largely in place

to this day. But Jim and the Saguaro Juniper associates

recognized an opportunity in this dysfunctional state of

affairs.

With a herd of cattle, a little bit of capital and the promise

to graze, they could lease the public lands surrounding the 135

acres Saguaro Juniper plot, and steward it collectively. Jim

would be able to apply his philosophy of pastoral

synbiotics at a landscape scale.

Grazing use that is in harmony with the

untamed biotic community, and that displaces injurious

commercial grazing is therefore the key to the redemption of

these lands.

So when Jim Corbett spoke of land

redemption, he was proposing nothing less than the

restoration of the wild lands of the arid West, through covenant

community and cow human symbiosis. And with 1000s of

acres in and around Hotsprings Canyon now at his disposal, he

set out to see if it could be done.

On the second day of our retreat, Ilana and I set out

from the Hermitage to explore Hotsprings Canyon. It was a

cloudless day, and the canyon walls stood in stark relief

against the open skies. It didn't take me long to realize

that the Sonoran Desert is a botanist's dream. what looks

like a tangle of dry brush at a distance opens up into a world

of plucky barrel cacti, stoic Agaves, trailing wild grapes,

elegant Daturas, and gregarious jojobas, and wild flowers of

breathtaking variety and color. Raptors, songbirds, toads,

scorpions, grasshoppers, rattlesnakes, and even a desert

tortoise greeted us on the trail as we made our way up the wash.

And after a couple of dry miles, we heard the siren song of all

the trickle of a creek.

The cool water was a welcome reprieve to the increasing heat

of the day. And I couldn't help but notice the quality of the

riparian vegetation, and the water, and just the ecosystem in

general. Honestly, it was hard to believe that Saguaro Juniper

runs a herd of cattle and these lands. But clearly they take

great care to avoid inflicting damage on the riparian zones. If

there were scars from grazing, my eyes just weren't trained

enough to spot them. The entire Canyon pulsed with life under a

canopy of Ash, Sycamore, and Acacia trees – sheltering us

beneath the desert sun. We began climbing the walls of the

canyon, and it didn't take us long before we found what we

were looking for. There, overlooking the canyon below,

was a Saguaro and a Juniper growing side by side.

In the late 1980s, Jim's approach to wildland

conservation through cattle grazing was ahead of its time.

Allan Savory was just beginning to preach his gospel of Holistic

Management, and it would take years for his ideas to become

popularized. Saguaro Juniper was a novel experiment for its time,

and the grazing aspect wasn't the only unique feature. Jim and

the Saguaro Juniper community also wrote up and adopted a bill

of rights for the land, formerly known as the Saguaro Juniper

covenant.

The Saguaro Juniper covenant

a bill of rights for the land.

the land has a right to be free of human activity that

accelerates erosion.

native plants and animals on the land have a right to life

with a minimum of human disturbance.

the land has the right to evolve its own character from

its own elements without scarring from construction, or

the importation of foreign objects dominating the scene.

the land has a preeminent right to the preservation of its

unique and rare constituents and features.

the land, its water, rocks, and minerals, its plants

and animals, and their fruits and harvest have a right never

to be rented, sold, extracted, or exported as mere commodities.

In acquiring governance of the land, we agree to cherish its

Earth, waters, plants, and animals in a way that promotes

the health, stability and diversity of the whole

community. This entails attentive stillness to meet and

know the land is an active presence. It entails study,

observation, shared reflection, and cumulative experience to

increase and bequeath our understanding of ecosystem

health, stability and diversity. It entails symbiotic

naturalization into the land community – a communion of

actual nurture and shelter.

As elaborated by these entailments, fully accountable

governance – stewardship – is the distinctly human way of

bonding into one society with all who share in the land's

life, which is the foundation for instituting a bio-centric

ethic among humankind.

This is a remarkable document for its

time. The idea that non-human species and the more-than-human

world in general, have rights that human communities must

respect is embedded in most, if not all indigenous cultures. But

in the dominant culture of settler colonialism, the idea

that any rights could or should be extended to nature was and

continues to be a radical notion. The famous

conservationist, Aldo Leopold, entered into this conversation

when he suggested in 1949, that:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the

integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is

wrong when it tends otherwise.

In the modern era, many point to a seminal article

by USC Professor Christopher Stone, published in 1972, and

entitled "Should Trees Have Standing? Towards legal rights

for natural objects". But it wasn't until the dawn of a new

millennium that a small burrough in Pennsylvania would become the

first jurisdiction in the United States and in the world, to

formally codify rights of nature into law. Shortly thereafter, in

2008, the South American nation of Ecuador would famously become

the first to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution,

making the Indigenous word Pachamama iconic for the rights

of nature movement.

From 2008 to the present day, there has been a cascade of

similar declarations and laws passed at all levels of

governments around the world, concerning everything from

rivers to whole territories. But in 1991, when the Saguaro

Juniper covenant was adopted, it was a complete anachronism.

Looking back, Jim was so prescient – responding to the

crises of the moment, with solutions that wouldn't enter

the mainstream until long after his own death. Even if Saguaro

Juniper had been an utter failure, the covenant document

alone would represent an incredible contribution to the

evolution of settler thought on the rights of nature. That being

said, Saguaro Juniper was and is anything but a failure, even

though it could probably never have lived up to Jim's

astronomic ideals. After having spent much of the '80s covertly

naturalizing Central American refugees into the United States,

Jim had set out to accomplish nothing short of finding a way

to naturalize entire human communities within wildland

ecosystems.

How exactly would he do this? In Goatwalking, Jim explored

sojourning and human-goats symbiosis as a means of hiding

the world within the world – of escaping, if only for a few

weeks, into a pastoral solitude that opened the way to what he

called errantry. With Saguaro Juniper and Sanctuary For All

Life, Jim explored the covenant-bound community and

cow-human symbiosis as a means of getting the land back to the

land – of finding a way out of dominion and into communion with

wildlands. His assessment of the roots of institutionalized

violence in modern civilization was simple:

Civilizations were born when warriors learned

how to enslave the farmers who had learned how to enslave the

land.

Adam HugginsHis solution:

learn to stop enslaving the

Adam HugginsHis solution:

land. And though he may have been a Quaker at heart, his

Adam HugginsHis solution:

experience with Judeo-Christian congregations during the

Adam HugginsHis solution:

Sanctuary Movement led him to embrace a surprising approach:

Adam HugginsHis solution:

the observance of the biblical Sabbath. Here's Jim, speaking to

Adam HugginsHis solution:

a gathering of Quakers.

Have you heard that Cain's punishment for murdering

his brother actually consisted of his forgetting the meaning of

the Sabbath? That makes sense. Since he was the first tiller of

the earth, he probably did value his work so highly, that he

forgot, much as we have forgotten. For millennia,

Semitic peoples have called wilderness "God's land",

distinguishing it from settled areas possessed and remade to

fit human plans. The generation that crossed the Jordan was

reared in the wilderness in order to assure the integrity of

the covenant-formed community's new consciousness. Succeeding

generations were given the sabbatical observances as their

way to retain this consciousness, and thereby to

resist assimilation into societies dedicated to

conquering and consuming the creation.

Many of us know that, according to the book of

Genesis, the God of Abraham rested on the seventh day of the

creation, resulting in the occasional inconvenience of

businesses being closed on Sundays. Far fewer are aware

that the biblical Sabbath is a much more radical proposition.

According to the books of Exodus and Leviticus, every Seventh Day

is to be a day of complete rest and sacred assembly. Every

seventh year is to be a Sabbath of rest unto the land itself.

And every 49th year – that's seven times seven for you math

nerds – is to be a jubilee year, when all land should lie fallow,

and be returned to its original owners. Who or what exactly

qualifies as the original owner has been subject to some debate,

to put it mildly. But Jim had his own interpretation. For Jim,

sabbatical practice would be the key to getting the land back to

the land.

Sabbath is a time to quit grabbing at the world to

rest and to rejoice in the creations goodness. It opens

away toward the peaceable kingdom. That is a non-violent

alternative to the apocalyptic hopes of revolutionary zealots.

Lacking all Sabbath, a people would also lack a gathering

place in time from which to hallow the earth.

To live up to its covenant, the Saguaro Juniper

community would need to live sabbatically. Jim saw the

practice of nomadic cattle herding as the best way to do

this in the Arizona desert. In his own words:

God does a bovine form display to those

who live this pastoral way.

In embracing a sabbatical approach to land

redemption and restoration, Jim placed himself firmly in

opposition to Allan Savory's developing practice of Holistic

a herding system based on closely managed

rotational grazing. Jim felt that the herd was to be joined,

not managed. He considered the concept of artificial

enclosures, which are necessary in rotational practices, to be

antithetical to any hope of harmoniously integrating a herd

in wild lands. To Jim, managed herds were abandoned herds.

No amount of cross fencing can fit

an abandoned herd into a wild land harmoniously.

in Jim's estimation, Holistic Range

Management was chiefly concerned with the growth of grass, while

his own practice of pastoral symbiotics was chiefly concerned

with the growth of post-civilized humanity. This is

because at a fundamental level, Jim believed that human beings

can't know enough to manage life on earth. And so, in the final

decade of his life, Jim would resist the management paradigm.

Land redemption, giving the land back to the land, would begin

with the rejection of goal-oriented thinking. It would

be a process of evolutionary succession, rather than utopian

intervention, characterized by an emphasis on means over ends.

To recognize that management is

itself the problem is to understand that Sabbath

observance is the restoration of the world.

Jim's steadfast commitment to his principles is

nothing if not admirable. But as you may have already guessed, it

wasn't always easy to live up to, or even to live with. Here's

Pat.

It was difficult sometimes, you know and

sometimes in our relationship, it was like the irresistible

force met the immovable object, and then we would just have to

stop and back up and see if we could find some other compromise

to decide this issue. And so if I decided I was not going to do

something in a particular way, then we would have to have that

discussion. Because otherwise, it could be a little bit like

living with a bulldozer.

Perhaps as a result of Pat's positive

influence on him, Jim did at times seek compromise in order

to create the Saguaro Juniper community.

He was very inclusive. You know, when he was

thinking up a plan and a project, he really didn't want

it to be just him. He wanted it to be, you know, ideas from you

know, whoever was participating.

For example, despite Jim's pastoral ethic,

allowance was made within Saguaro Juniper for Tom's love

of gardening.

The thing about Jim was that, yeah, well, he

wanted to be pre-agriculture and think that way. But knowing that

Tom was into gardens, you know, he's writing up the covenant and

saying, "Okay, Tom, how can we fit agriculture into this?"

On the other hand, his strict interpretation of the

Saguaro Juniper covenant would exclude one of his closest

friends. Here's John Fife.

When he created the covenant community out there, he

of course, came to me and said, "Okay, we want you in on this".

And I said, "Great, I love that country. I've been out there

again and again and again and the Galiuros, and I think it's,

it's a special place and I'd love to buy it. 'Cause I want to

go hunting out there". And Corbett looks at me and says,

"Oh, you can't hunt". I said, "What do you mean I can't hunt,

I want to be a part of the community. That's what I've

always done out there". And h said, "No, no, that's part of t

e covenant that the par icipants have written into the

there w ll be no hunting of deer or othe

parts of the ecosystem out the e". And I said, "Well, you know,

then I can't buy in". And he s id, "Well, it's really imp

In the end, John wouldn't be a part of the grand experiment. So

rtant. I really want you to be part of this". I said, "Well, y

u've excluded those of us who u derstand hunting as a part of t

e whole ecosystem that we're a art of". And he said, "Well, I'

sorry". And I said, "Now let me get this right, Jim. You r

n cattle on covenant land, righ ?" "Yeah. That's part of

the covenant. We're gonna w 're gonna work with herding on

the covenant land", said, "a d all those cows are dying of o

d age out there, right?" He said "Well, no, no, no, that's not

part of the deal". I said, "S you take cattle in to slaughte

, and you won't let me hun deer out there? Is that the dea

?" He kind of grinned. And the one day I see Pat, you know,

we're just talking about what s going on with the ranch and w

at's going on land and ever thing like this. And she said, "

nd we had a really bad nigh . Recently, mountain lion came i

and killed some of our goats" And I said, "Oh, and what Jim

o about that?" And Pat said, "H hired a hunter to come and

ill the lion". I said, "Really?" So I couldn't wait to see Cor

ett. I said, "Corbett, you won t let me be a part of the coven

nt out there, and go hunter, b t you hire a hunter to kill a li

n who's killed your goats? Is that what you're trying to

tell

why agriculture and not hunting? It's a puzzling contradiction.

And it wasn't the first compromise that would be made.

Jim's rejection of the very idea of management would run up

against the reality of holding grazing leases.

And so as soon as you enter into the contract with the

state, to lease the land, then it's not totally free and easy.

That begins a sequence of events, which leads to more –

more management than one would like.

it would prove impossible, even for Jim, to be

among the animals 100% of the time. And so water systems and

fencing and summer pasture, some kind of management had to be

accepted as part of the system.

And then the other part of it, of course, is Jim's

philosophy, which is that not just to protect land in a

preservationist way, but be part of it and interact with it. And

he sort of... well let the cows teach you. And so there's a,

there's an element of both conservation from the point of

view of just not wanting heavy use on the land, but then the

it's wanting to use the land as part of the

whole process. So that – that's the tension that always exists

between where to graze, how much to graze, and what the limits

are in terms of both the land and the people and so forth.

On the final night of our retreat at the Hermitage,

I decided that I was going to try and sleep outside on the

ground without a blanket, just like Jim. I suppose that I

wanted to see what it felt like to live beneath the stars in the

desert, and imagine myself as part of a herd of animals

without recourse to the comforts of civilization. It was chilly

enough in October that I ended up compromising and bringing out

my sleeping bag. Ilana was perfectly happy to sleep inside.

The desert night was incredibly still, and the stars luminous as

I had hoped. But lacking what I imagined to be the reassuring

presence of my fellow herd animals, I felt alone and

exposed in a way that I was not accustomed to, despite years of

backpacking, often solo. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar stillness

of the desert. Or perhaps it was the lack of a tent. But for the

first hour or so, sleep eluded me. My mind was busy – cycling

through the many challenges and contradictions posed by trying

to live as Jim had lived.

At first, I thought I might be imagining the snorts and

stomping emanating from the open wash. But by the time the heavy

footfalls were indenting the dry earth around my head, I realized

that I was laying in the midst of a stampede of totally

unfamiliar, unidentifiable, wild mammals. Frozen in terror, I

curled up inside my sleeping bag and prayed that I wouldn't be

detected. As soon as the group had passed, I unclenched

unzipped and made a beeline towards the Hermitage and the

warm bed waiting within. Somehow, Ilana was unsurprised

to see me returning so soon.

It was only the next day that I realized that I'd been lying

directly in the path of a pack of wild New World pigs, known as

Peccaries, or Javalinas. I had been so caught up in retracing

Jim steps, I'd forgotten to consider that herds can come in

diverse forms.

Today, the Saguaro Juniper faithful continue to manage a

small herd of cattle, fulfilling the covenant and protecting

1000s of acres of land in the San Pedro River watershed.

We're part of a wildlife corridor that stretches

all the way down and across the river. We all think that's

pretty important and want to try and keep it going.

Pat Corbett continues to take an active role

out on the range, on horseback with the herd.

Well, when the cattle are on range, I kind of

act as the range rider, and try and keep track of the cattle,

and the water, and whether the fences is wrapped, and then I

call on somebody else who's younger and healthier than me to

come repair whatever it is that needs to be fixed. Like I say,

getting on the horse is kind of hard. But once I get on the

horse, I can just sit there, and getting off is a little bit

difficult.

Saguaro Juniper maintains a solid base of

community support. On occasion, even Ann Russell is able to make

the trip out from California to help out.

Yeah, I got to do that last April, Pat lent me her

chaps. And it's just very quiet. We were walking. I was on a

horse called Lumpy, short for Lumpen Proletariat.

It's like one big family, at home on the range.

The fact that they're cows and not people, at

a certain point it's not very relevant. You know, we're all

here together.

Of course, it's a nuanced relationship.

You know, I eat our beef. So obviously, you know, we

slaughter livestock. But we have this great commitment to making

sure that they lead a good healthy, in bovine terms, happy

life, contented life. And in the process of doing this, we don't

damage the land where they're being kept.

The Saguaro Juniper approach to conservation

– based on the conviction that humans can be naturalized into

the wildland community – is still uncommon. but is slowly

gaining traction in the environmental community.

Thinking and acting as if human beings can

actually be a positive part of wildlands is a pretty radical

notion. And it's almost more radical to conservationists than

it is to farmers and ranchers. And that's the notion that's

that if if I love Saguaros, I don't have to

say "people should never go near Saguaros, or the Sonoran Desert

as a whole" – that there can be a place that we can be part of.

It's largely a labor of love. The beef and

other products from the cows is enough to maintain the

operation, but not enough to provide stable employment for

herders. This means that, while a number of young people have

been attracted to Saguaro Juniper, and its sister

organization, the Cascabel Conservation Association, it's

proven difficult to provide them lasting opportunities to be a

part of the herd.

Well, there are a lot of young folks, I'm sure,

who would really like to. The problem is, you know, this kind

of operation doesn't really bring in enough money to, you

know, keep a lot of people employed. We really struggle to

pay one person, in fact, and we don't get all of that from the

cattle operation. And so it's – it's tended to work out that the

people who can be involved in this are folks who are retired

and still physically active and have an income that allows them

to live here

In this way, Saguaro Juniper is a lot like

many small, community based conservation organizations in

aging communities. It's also a bit like the Saguaros in Tom and

Nancy's study. Saguaro Juniper will only thrive in the long run

if it can seed and support the next generation. In ecology,

"recruitment" is just a fancy word for this process of

welcoming new members into a community, whether they're

cactus sprouts or young herders.

Right now, Saguaro Juniper is welcoming people who want to

pursue a sabbatical life in the desert – carrying on and

adapting the work that Jim, Pat, Nancy, Tom, and others began

several decades ago. They've just published an expanded

second edition of Sanctuary For All Life, and they've been

reviving monthly sabbatical gatherings. They've even started

a Goatwalking group. From my most recent conversations with

community members, they're entering an exciting, uncertain

period – a time of rediscovery, reflection, and hopefully, of

renewal.

So is it possible to create a Sanctuary for All Life in this

place, at this time? for Tom and Nancy, even after all of these

years, there are times when Jim's ideals feel out of reach.

To me, it's a bar that I can't achieve. But on the

other hand, it's an ideal that I really respect, and look to do

what one can, and also enable others who might be interested

to try.

When I reflect on Jim's writing, he never fixated

on the goal – just the process, just the journey. And that

journey, by definition, is going to look a little bit different

for everyone.

It occurred to me as we were sitting, talking,

that the cows and the Saguaros both do the same thing for me.

They're both ways that encouraged me to get out and be

part of the system myself. The fact that we're out every

spring, counting the Saguaros, means that, you know I'm a part

of that system and seeing things and understanding that I

wouldn't otherwise – and it's true with the cows that keeps me

grounded, and in this place.

I finished reading Pat's dog-eared copy of

Sanctuary for All Life on the last morning of our retreat,

shortly before Susan picked us up. For a few moments, I lay

still in the sun, grateful for the opportunity to sojourn on

this redeemed land. Speaking frankly, I don't think that the

pastoral life is for me. The only milk I can stomach is nut

milk, and too much idleness drives me to distraction. But I

do hunger for that stillness that among all of the demands of

civilized life, can be so elusive. I worry that all of my

frantic activity is just kicking up more dust from the parched

earth. And I'm terrified of the possibility that, in working so

hard to restore the earth, I've sacrificed the daily presence

that might allow me to hallow it.

I think that I return again and again to Jim's life and his

writing, not because it agrees with me, but because it

challenges every part of the person that I've become. It is

like walking into the desert. Not sure if you're going to come

out again, searching for a forgotten spring.

And on a desert mountain, amidst the

harsh of soaring granite, I've opened a forgotten spring. The

few who remembered thought it had long ago gone dry, but I

found the hidden place dug down until the stream ran clear and

cold in the summer sun. So what are epitaphs to me? Still in my

20s I could already write as good a remembrance as any I

could imagine for myself at 90:

"He kept a lamb or two from

could imagine for myself at 90:

freezing. He found and opened a forgotten spring".

Jim died in 2001, leaving both the manuscript and

the project – of creating a Sanctuary for All Life –

unfinished. In the next and final episode of this series,

we're going to leave Jim behind, picking up the threads that

extend from his life to the present day crisis in the

Borderlands. and to those continuing the work of Sanctuary

in its many forms. That's next time on the forth and final part

of Goatwalker.

Goatwalker is produced by myself, Adam Huggins, and Mendel

Skulski for Future Ecologies. Ilana Fonariov is the Associate

Producer for this series. For photos, citations, and more

information about the people and events described in this

episode, please visit futureecologies.net

Okay, I have some exciting news for those of you who've been

asking about Jim's books. In a coincidence so well timed you'd

think we'd planned it, as of last month. Sanctuary for All

Life has been republished by Cascabel books, with a new

afterword by 13 folks who continue to honor the covenant

and manage the Hermitage. It's a fascinating read, and it's

available for a reasonable price on Amazon. You don't have to

borrow Pat's copy or make a special order from a used

bookstore in Germany like I did. In equally exciting news, thanks

to the efforts of a number of dedicated folks, Goatwalking is

going to be republished in September of this year via

Kindle Direct Publishing. If you'd like to know when it's

ready, you can send your name and email address to

goatwalking2021@gmail.com

In this episode, you heard Ann Russell, Tom Oram, Nancy

Ferguson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Jim Corbett, and Miriam

Davidson. Narration was by Philip Buller. Music was by

Satorian, Hidden Sky, and Sunfish Moon Light. The

ever-evolving Goatwalker theme is by Ryder Thomas White and

Sunfish Moon Light. Special thanks to Teresa Madison, Susan

Tollefson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy Ferguson, Tom

Orum, Gary Paul Nanhan Gita Bodner, Amanda Howard and the

University of Arizona, Sadie Couture, Phil Buller, Danny

Elmes, and Susan L. Newman.

Future ecologies is an independent production,

supported by our patrons. To join them, go to

patreon.com/futureecologies.

This series was recorded on the territory of the Tohono O’odham,

and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territory

of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and

other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples.