Dan Dagget

When Dan Dagget talks about becoming a team player, he speaks from experience. The Arizona Sierra Club activist says that when he was first invited to meet with ranchers to explore common ground, "I came armed for bear. But I soon learned this was going to be different. We would leave our guns at the door. We would participate. We would speak only for ourselves. And we would really listen. We started talking about land, not agendas, and we found we had a lot in common."

Beyond the Rangeland Conflict , the book Dagget produced with Jay Dusard, explores ranches that are restoring and preserving land that "both ranchers and environmentalists could love."

Dagget writes about ranches that are in good shape because they've opened up their management to people once considered outsiders, federal and state land managers, biologists, and environmentalists. Most of the ranchers in the book are using some form of holistic resource management, or HRM, an approach to grazing brought to the West from southern Africa by grazing guru Alan Savory.

Dagget is now speaking to groups about the success stories in his book and working with Common Ground, a group of facilitators who are trying to spread HRM-style collaborative decision-making to ranches across the West.

Dan Dagget can be reached at P.O. Box 23713, Flagstaff, AZ 86002, (520/774-4801). Beyond the Rangeland Conflict is published by Gibbs Smith, P.O. Box 667, Layton, UT 84041, (800/748-5439).