Healing the land: 'Pitchfork Ranch' chronicles how one New Mexico ranch's habitat was restored
Mar. 5—By David Steinberg
A. Thomas Cole, an Arizona trial lawyer, and his wife Lucinda retired from their workaday worlds in 2003.
They bought an 11,393-acre cattle ranch with the not-so-modest idea of returning its land to pre-European settlement conditions. The ranch is located about an hour south of Silver City.
Now 21 years after their move to New Mexico, the Coles have collaborated on another project — a book about the rehabilitation of the ranch's land they spearheaded. He is the author, his wife the editor. The book is titled "Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch."
Habitat restoration is half the story of the book. The subtitle links it to the other half of the story, which views restoration on a global scale — "How Healing a Southwest Oasis Holds Promise for Our Endangered Planet."
The book is filled with environmental warnings from its first pages on.
The book's preface contains a poem by a son of the ranch's pioneer-settler. The poem, "The Drouth and Me," Cole writes, "captures a cowman and his family's life, forecasting the planet handed down to their children and the rest of us — hotter, dryer, damaged and dependent on prompt solutions."
"Prompt solutions" is what Cole seeks, though promptness may not be soon enough.
Solutions are centered on five core elements — that the contentions of global warming, species extinction and soil loss are planetary emergencies; that we humans have failed to take these emergencies seriously; that a key solution is to change our inherited, convenient way of living; that an important response is natural climate solutions and restore habitat; and we must take part in what he terms "the Voice of the Streets" to foment "political agitation to transform our destructive way of living ..."
In the book's introduction, Cole notes that the Pitchfork Ranch, in cattle production for more than a century, has changed its tune. There's a very small cattle herd now, but Cole explains the ranch is "an enterprise for habitat restoration, introduction of at-risk species, carbon sequestration ... research, a place for wildlife to breed, birth and raise their young ..."
Cole notes that the ranch's arid landscape has a unique hydrology, a rare source of water called a ciénaga, Spanish for a swamp, bog or marsh. The goal for the Pitchfork's Burro Ciénaga, he said, was to "shallow the landscape, to slow the water down so the sediment will drop."
The book suggests that properties of various sizes on the planet — from a small city lot to a huge ranch — can benefit from restoration practices.
The smallest lot Cole refers to is "John Doe's 0.02-acre rental residence in Silver City." It benefits from curb cuts to divert rainwater from the street onto the property, and berms and plants for water retention.
The book intertwines fresh, well-thought-out perspectives on a multitude of familiar and unfamiliar history — the history (and prehistory) of the Pitchfork, of the region, of the West. It provides a whole chapter on cattle, and commentaries on varied humans using the land — the developer and the land speculator, the lawman, the outlaw, the banker, the lawyer and, yes, the cowboy.
Cole writes that the best book that he's read on the cowboy is Jack Watson's "The Real American Cowboy." Cole quotes Watson's book: "Most cowboys on ranches worked for very rich capitalists. In the (1870s) they typically worked for a partnership of a Western owner-manager and an Eastern financier or two."
Cole's writing sometimes is dense because he tackles so many related subjects so intently. But his explanations of topics are straightforward and readable. Given the wealth of information on climate science the book discusses, the reader would do well to reread portions to better digest them. The book contains plentiful photographs of changes in the Pitchfork's habitat restoration.
