In the wilds of the West... You put most people on many of the ranches in the West and they couldn't tell they're not in the wilderness. We see ranches and wilderness working together, enhancing each other. - Dan Dagget Dan Dagget was driving home from a visit to the Malpai Borderlands Group in Arizona when he first considered the notion of working wilderness. It was photographer Jay Dusard's way of describing what they had seen: a huge, wide open, wild landscape that was kept that way by working ranches. Ranchers in the Malpai run cattle on a BLM wilderness study area in the Animas Mountains. "But you would have a hard time telling the difference when you cross the fence from the wilderness area to the ranches," Dagget says. The private lands are protected from development by conservation easements, he says. So if you look at the ranches and the wilderness area as a whole, the true wilderness is really twice as big. Dagget recalls a conversation he had with a Forest Service ranger when he was writing a wilderness guide to the mountains near Tucson. "If you're really looking for wilderness values, don't go to the wilderness area," the ranger told him. "It's a zoo. If you want solitude, go over to the other side of the mountain." "But that's where the ranchers are," said Dagget. "Yeah, I know," the ranger replied. "Designated wilderness is a type of urban development," says Dagget. "Wilderness is a political designation not an environmental one." These are the kinds of provocative comments that he acknowledges are likely to "froth" his colleagues in the Sierra Club. But Dagget has gotten used to deflecting the slings and arrows of his friends as he finds himself making camp with their former enemies. "Wilderness is not limited to lands that are designated wilderness," he says. "Working wilderness is not a designation but a concept to use in these areas. We're not talking just about federal ownership. The main thing is keeping it open country, through conservation easements, for example." Dagget lists some of the features of working wilderness: no trail signs, no ORV access, no trails even, except trails that were there already, access by foot or horse, with special provisions for access by ranchers. "It would offer primitive solitude, the standard things you think of with wilderness," he says. "But it would be wilderness with a rural economy. People would be part of it and not just tourists." Dagget envisions working wilderness managed by collaborative teams whose "goals would include economic sustainability as well as ecological sustainability. "We have two powerful tools," he says, "bringing people together and bringing animals back to the land in a more natural way." 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).