We grow some big rackety grasshoppers here in Northern Arizona. They part before me like the Red Sea in front of Moses, and sounding like an orchestra of castanets when I walk across the north half of my little meadow after a wet winter.

Gardening is not for the faint of heart out here on the brink of the Colorado Plateau. We don’t have much in the way of soil or water, and those great big hungry grasshoppers are not my only uncooperative neighbors. Elk linger patiently. Have you been to the nursery? What didja bring me? Ooooo . . . an apple tree! Thank you! I love these! Between the wildly expensive water and the extreme measures I had to take to try to keep my uncooperative neighbors out, I figure the produce I got from my little garden cost me about $350 a pound.

I obviously had to let the garden go and grieve the loss because I did so love the miracles du jour I found there: the hopeful little plant people poking their curious heads up out of the dirt; butterflies tasting blossoms; plants busy Crafting sunshine and water into a flower; vines making those fabulous curly-queues they climb the fence with. I dashed home at lunch whenever I could to commune with the garden, it was a nice mental health break in the bedlam of my auto parts day.

One lunchtime there was mysterious movement under the leaves of a squash plant, and I gingerly moved the stickery, viney stem and large leaves aside to see what it was. Two inches might be big for a grasshopper, but it’s little bitty for a horny toad.[^1] Although they feed on ants preferentially—a much more advantageous prey-to-predator scale—the baby horny toad had ahold of one of those whopper hoppers and was not about to let go. Bigger is better, right? Any little kid will tell you that.

They were belly to belly, head to tail. The horny toad had chomped on to the underside of the grasshopper’s abdomen. A bead of clear goop was oozing around the wound as the grasshopper’s mighty back legs kicked at the sides and head of the little lizard. The horny toad held on with unblinking, dispassionate reptilian perseverance as the grasshopper’s sharp mandibles worked steadily at sawing off the end of her tail. A bead of bright red blood oozed there. It was an epic battle between evenly matched opponents.

Although I hoped the stalwart little lizard would prevail, and was tempted to interfere on her behalf, I have learned that I cannot mediate relationships in Nature.

Weeds taught me this. I have tried to reinvent the plant community around my home by planting flowers, trees, and vegetables many times in the decades I have lived here. Every time I fail, opportunistic non-native plants move in to take advantage of the fertile, amended soil. I would dig the invaders out and plant native wildflowers and grasses in response, but the intruders always came back to choke them out.

Then my back went south and I had to surrender the field. Ten years after my capitulation now, the wild grasses and wildflowers who have always lived in Garland Prairie have inched out the invasive usurpers. My takeaway? If I leave Mother Nature to take care of the dirt here, and who lives in it, she does.

To wit: In 1906, ‘conservationists’[^2] killed off the predators in the famously rich hunting grounds north of the Grand Canyon known as the Kaibab Strip or the Arizona Strip. All of the mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, and wolves that could be found were slaughtered to improve deer hunting on the Strip. By 1920 the mule deer population had exploded dramatically beyond the carrying capacity of the once lush, grassy environment. Large deer herds, abetted by domestic sheep, cattle, and horses, overbrowsed and caused disastrous ecological damage. Ultimately tens of thousands of deer starved to death. The pictures are heartbreaking. Skeletal deer stretching up on their hind legs to get the last mouthful of a piñon tree they’ve killed trying to eat the bark and needles of although deer can metabolize neither.

It was a genocidal horror show, complements of human meddling.

There are many examples like this of humanity trying to ‘improve’ ecosystems, in the history of the American West. Lest we delude ourselves that we know better now and have learned from our past mistakes, here are some current examples of humanity trying to micromanage ecosystems:

• The U. S. Fish and Wildlife service has determined that the best way to protect the endangered snowy owl in the Pacific Northwest is to kill half a million of their barred owl competitors.
• The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposes to introduce poison into the Colorado River to eliminate competition for the endangered humpback chub from a predatory invasive species of fish that got past the Glen Canyon Dam recently when Lake Powell was near dead pool.
• There was a proposal in the early aughts to deforest the Mogollon Rim so more water would run off to the thirsty desert cities below.
• It can no longer be denied or ignored that the Colorado River cannot supply enough water to the millions of humans who rely on it now. Pipelines from the Mississippi watershed or the Baja Gulf have been proposed to augment the Colorado’s carrying capacity.

Who does this make sense to?

These are glaring examples of humanity’s scientific myopia and egotistical hubris that illustrate the pitfalls of reductionist thinking. Reductionist thinking sees ecosystems as collections of independent parts, any of which can be removed without consequence to the system overall. Reductionist thinking supposes that the math is simple and that if we just kill enough barred owls, the snowy owls will thrive.

By contrast, ecological thinking recognizes that natural systems are comprised of subtle, complex, and mutually dependent relationships. The deer on the Strip starved to bring their population back into balance with the grassland they depend on for food so they could once again survive within their ecosystem.

It doesn’t occur to reductionists (or capitalists) that humans might find a way to live within our means. Voices that dare suggest we might consider limiting growth, or tourism, or conserving water in the increasingly intense debate over Colorado River water rights are practically nonexistent. No one dares breathe the blasphemous idea that maybe we could live without another golf course.

So I left my little horny toad friend to pay her tuition. Or not. Maybe she let go and learned to eat ants like the rest of her kind. Maybe the grasshopper prevailed and learned to eat horny toad. Maybe the horny toad succeeded in establishing a new niche eating whopper hoppers.

There is not one example I know of where human meddling in an ecosystem left that ecosystem better off. Our exterminator/extractionist thinking always makes it worse. Mother Nature populated the Desert Southwest sparingly to keep populations (human and otherwise) within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. If we were brave enough to look into that awful mirror the deer on the Strip starved to death to put up in front of us, we could see into our own future.

Mother Nature will survive us—planet earth has a broad range of tolerances. Humans, however, have a breathtakingly narrow range of tolerances and we would do well to remember it.

Eulogy

There are no spare parts in Nature and mankind has neither the wisdom nor the patience to micromanage ecosystems. We bulldoze rather than tweak. We delude ourselves that we are clever enough to develop technologies that will save us from the consequences of our actions without cessation of our bad behavior. Any recovering alcoholic can tell you this is the very definition of insanity. Owing to this illogic, our species is now riding multiple cascade failures and negative feedback loops to the bottom of an ecological abyss.

The cascade failure of the ecosystem I inhabit has already begun. It is not some vague future threat; it is happening today outside my dining room window. Climate change has left us with dramatically less rain and snow than we had before here in the alpine desert. This, and mankind’s pernicious use of insecticide, is causing the collapse of insect populations; which leaves nothing for the insectivorous birds and bats to eat and leaves flowering plants without pollinators; which leaves nothing for the seed-eating birds, and so on. As for ants, I haven’t seen a horny toad here for over a decade.

The latest insanity here in Arizona is “Ag-to-Urban,” which is the sale of farmland—along with its ground water rights—to developers. We are trading sustenance for growth. Who does this make sense to? We can’t eat golfers, and we can’t drink tourist dollars. How will we feed ourselves and all the hungry newcomers? What will we drink?

Edward Abbey famously said that growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell and, it should be noted here, with likely the same result. Cancer either makes the body (that would be us) ill or kills it.

Mankind has waged an epic battle against Nature since he ascended to the position of apex predator on this planet. His campaign to conquer Nature is nearly won now. He deludes himself that it is an epic battle waged between evenly matched opponents. But the advantage Mother Nature has, that we do not, is time. She can wait it out with infinite patience and wisdom, to finesse the vast and subtly interconnected relationships that comprise healthy ecosystems. She gives it time to play out, and prove itself.

What will a win in man’s epic battle to conquer Nature look like?

We stand on the brink of eternity. Will we survive ourselves? Or will we, like the dinosaurs before us, become an interesting layer of fossils for some future mollusk or corvid archaeologists to discover?

You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come back.

Homer

[^1]: I know they’re horned lizards, but I grew up calling them horny toads and can’t seem to break myself of the habit. These dear lizard people have been my lifelong friends, my playmates as a child.

[^2]: Use of the term ‘conservationist’ here should be kept in its historical context. In the early days of the 20^th^ century conservationists were not people and organizations trying to preserve ecosystems as the word is now used. ‘Conservationists’ then were people and organizations trying to micromanage relationships in nature to increase wild game populations for hunting purposes. I was raised by one. The horror show and environmental disaster on the Strip was the brainchild of President Teddy Roosevelt, who loved to hunt deer.

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Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.

Terryl is the author of:
The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-9894698-5-2

AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.

A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.

Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.