The fence runs for about nine kilometres along the north side of the valley, four strands of wire on steel posts, put in over two summers in the late 2000s. Inside it the ground cover is visibly better than outside. You can see the line from the ridge. Photographs of it appear in reports.
I have stood at that fence with my uncle, who moved animals through that valley for forty years, and what he said was not that the fence is wrong. He said: of course it is better in there, nothing has been on it.
That sentence contains the whole argument and it took me some years to unpack it.
The story the fence illustrates is that the grassland degraded because there were too many animals on it, and that removing the animals allows it to recover. The evidence for the second half is standing there in front of anyone who walks up to it. Exclosure works. Take the grazing off a piece of plateau grassland and the cover comes back.
But the first half — that overgrazing is what degraded it — is a separate claim, and the fence is not evidence for it. A recovered exclosure tells you that grazing pressure was above the level that plot could sustain in the years it was fenced. It tells you nothing about why the pressure was there, and specifically it cannot distinguish between too many animals and animals in the wrong place for too long.
Those are not the same and the difference is the whole of what was lost.
The system my uncle worked was not a stocking rate. It was a schedule. Herds moved between seasonal pastures on a pattern held in the heads of a small number of people, adjusted every year for snow, for how the spring came, for where a family's other obligations were. The winter pasture was not grazed in summer. The high summer pasture was reachable for perhaps eleven weeks. The pattern was the management, and it was invisible to anybody looking at a map, because it was not on the map.
What has happened over three decades is that the movement stopped, by a set of separate policies none of which was about grazing pressure — settlement, allocation of use rights to households, the fencing itself, and the simple fact that moving animals requires a household able to be away and fewer households are. Animals that used to be on eleven pastures across a year are now on one or two.
So the same number of animals, on a fraction of the ground, for the whole year, produces exactly what you would expect, and it looks identical to overgrazing in every measurement anybody takes, because it is overgrazing — of that piece of ground. The diagnosis is right about the plot and wrong about the system, and the remedy that follows, which is to remove more animals and fence more ground, reduces mobility further.
Now what I owe the other side, because I have heard this argument made badly by people who like the sound of it.
Mobility at the old densities is genuinely gone and is not coming back by anybody wishing it. The households are not there. The knowledge is held by men my uncle's age and it is not written down, and it is not the kind of thing that survives being written down, which is a separate essay. Some of the ground is degraded past the point where a schedule would fix it, and on that ground exclosure is not a mistake, it is the only thing that works. And there is real research — not much of it, and mostly from the eastern part of the plateau — showing that fenced recovery persists after the fence comes down, which is the strongest thing anyone can say for it.
I accept all of that. My objection is not to the fence. It is to the fence being read as the demonstration of a theory it cannot test, and to a research programme that has spent twenty years measuring inside and outside a wire and comparatively little measuring what the movement used to do, while the people who could still describe it are alive.
My uncle is seventy-four. The last full season he ran was 2009. When I ask him about the schedule he can give it to me pasture by pasture, with the weather conditions that would change it, and he does this the way somebody recites a road they have driven — without effort, and without any sense that it is remarkable, and with a slight impatience at being asked.
I have most of it on a recorder now. What I do not have, and cannot get, is the thing that would let anybody use it, which is the reasoning: how he knew, in a particular June, to go up eight days early. He says you could see it. I have asked four times.
