There’s Strength In Combinations
Psychiatrists and pundits - the professional alienists and the professionally alienated - take most of August for their vacations. Somehow, the nation survives.
Before heading for the mountains of West Virginia, let me use a recent story of the binding power of a noxious weed to draw an offbeat moral.
Our knowledge of the history of the Great American West is shaped by classic movies. Conflict was clear. Aficionados of economic war thrilled to the struggle between the cattle barons (well-financed Anglos with huge spreads) and the sheepherders (hardscrabble ethnics fencing off small ranches).
Cattle needed wide-open public space to roam and forage, and cowboys rounded them up yearly and drove them to market. But sheep needed protection from coyotes, and shepherds had to build fences and daily defend their flocks.
The cattlemen claimed to despise the sheep-and-goat people because their animals grazed down to the roots, despoiling the public range for cows. The small-business shepherds replied that sheep ate forbs and anything that grew, while the cattle were finicky eaters of bunch grasses.
America’s self-image was the cowboy, not the shepherd; our song is “Don’t Fence Me In,” not “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Against that background, consider a story filed from Buford, Colo., by The Washington Post’s Tom Kenworthy.
Leafy spurge - a noxious European weed analogous to the South’s dread kudzu - has infested more than 3 million acres of the West. Cattle and horses can’t eat the sickening foliage, and with no natural predator to contain spurge, the weed takes over whole pastures. Big animals starve. Cattle people suffer as the leafy intruder sucks the worth out of ranches. Mowing is hopeless; chemical defoliants cost too much or draw criticism; neither fire nor flood eradicates the milky-sap plant. Where to turn?
To big cattle’s rescue come the little lamb and the friendly kid. Sheep and goats find the tough leaves of spurge edible, even nourishing. By setting a flock of sheep to intensively graze 14,000 acres of a wildlife preserve, Colorado’s weed fighters found a way to triumph over a yard-high enemy that had sunk roots 15 feet underground.
The sheep and goats are now being used to chew up the weeds and save the cattle. One land management official told Kenworthy that 240 goats had been let loose on 2,000 spurge-ridden acres with stunning results: “It was like inviting the high school football team to a pizza parlor. They just demolished it.”
What lessons can moralists draw from this?
The fabulous Aesop, in his account of a grateful mouse that gnawed away a rope binding a captive lion, concluded: “Little friends may prove great friends.” The minister who cannot find a Sunday sermon - or the speaker or committee chairman who cannot find an instructive anecdote - in the lambs and kids saving the great bulls of the Great Basin just isn’t trying. And evangelists of ecology will see in it the mysterious balancing act of nature that needs only a non-intrusive helping hand to work out the destinies of plants and animals.
But to the practical peacemakers of the political world, the story illuminates the way to dissolve ancient enmities. The cattlemen and the sheepherders were ethnically, culturally and economically at odds. Mutual contempt was bred in their bones and maintained a vestigial resentment long after the original reasons for hatred faded.
What brings them together now? A shared interest in defeating a fearsome enemy.
What the world needs is more of that self-interested fear of common enemies, whether drought, pollution or tyrannous ideologies. Such urgency creates alliances, concocts the amalgam of joint defense, and then breeds the habit of working together after crises have passed and enemies have been defeated.
Let the message beat through the jungles of Southeast Asia, the distended underbelly of the Balkans, the wasting chances in the Middle East: Your own version of the leafy spurge is coming! Now here’s how we must combine to control the evil weed …
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