I don’t miss the news.

I recently completed a three-week road trip/book tour up and back the Rocky Mountains. When I left Santa Fe with my wife, two kids, two dogs, and a trailer crammed full of camping gear, clothing, food, books and other necessities, I was certain that I’d miss the steady diet of daily news that is fed to me via a variety of ‘information delivery outlets’ (collectively the media). But I didn’t miss it at all.

As a result, upon our return we decided to deliberately starve ourselves out of much of the daily headlines and the virtual world of the Internet as possible. It won’t be that difficult - it’s not like I’m addicted to Internet blog sites, YouTube, the Wall Street Journal or CNBC anyway. There are only three or four websites, and two local newspapers, that I read on a regular basis. But even that may be too much.

That’s because so much of what does on in life these days feels and sounds like chatter. You are aware of this noise instantly, for example, when you visit any hotel lobby for breakfast - aware of the inane, chattering sounds emanating from the incessantly lit-up television. Spend any time in its proximity and you are bound to have any salient thought in your head washed completely out within minutes. And all person-to-person conversations inevitably suffer under its influence.

It’s the same with the Internet. In a hotel breakfast zone one morning, I observed a mother stare for a long time into the depths of her laptop while her two young boys idled soundlessly over their food. Eventually the older boy went and fetched his laptop, which he set up next to his mother’s. She kept staring. Watching her, I wondered: what possibly could be so important on the Internet that it was worth ignoring one’s children?

I haven’t a clue. And I don’t want to.

What I found instead on this trip was power of disconnectivity. Noise reduction meant that our trip was infinitely quieter both in the ‘real’ world of trees, rivers, and family activities, as well as inside my head. Less processing meant more connectivity with things that matter. Not that our trip has been quiet - not with nine-year-old twins along. Or the never-ending books-on-tape. Or the conversations with friends, the readings, the power point lectures, the highway sounds, the doggie demands, or returned cell phone calls.

But none of this was noise. It was part of life - real life, not a virtual life. I spent very little time in front of a computer screen on the trip and it made all the difference (it’s a painful irony that we berate kids today for how much time they spend in front of various screens without giving a second thought about how much time WE spend there).

Electronic connectivity is useful, but not essential. What is essential is conversation, face-to-face, and laughter, and feeling the fresh air pour in an open window, laced with wood smoke. Perhaps the challenges and ever increasing anxieties of the present century encourage us to slip into a virtual world of fantasy and bottomless distraction, but ultimately the real world can’t be ignored. And it shouldn’t. There are marvelous things out there, and most of them are connected the old-fashioned way - by nature.

It’s time to turn down the noise.

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Courtney White is co-founder and Executive Director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. He is the author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West. For further ruminations by Courtney, see www.chronicleofconsequences.com.

Last week we returned to Comanche Creek.

As I explain in the book, Comanche is the site of a long-running restoration project aimed at improving the habitat for the struggling Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout. It employs an innovative in-stream restoration methodology developed by Bill Zeedyk which protects eroding stream banks through the use of sticks and rocks - and not much else.

As with the horse farming demonstration I saw in Amish country a few weeks ago, our work in Comanche Creek is an example of how low-tech solutions may, in fact, provide longer lasting resilience and sustainability than high tech ones.

But high tech solutions is all we ever hear about these days - that and “efficiency.”

For example, I read in our newspaper recently that a scientist is proposing to build high tech scrubbers that would cleanse carbon from the atmosphere, thus reducing global warming. To do the job right, this scientist said we would need to build 67 million of these boxcar-sized machines, at a cost of trillions of dollars, and would only require a hundred new nuclear power plants to run them!

As unrealistic as that sounds, I think it represents the general attitude of Americans toward our various dilemmas. If certain politicians think we can drill our way to energy independence, then most citizens think that a fancy, and painless, high tech gizmo will ride to our rescue.

My guess is - it ain’t happening.

Energy efficiency, a preferred alternative of conservationists, won’t do it either. Repeated studies, going as far back as 19^th-century England, show that as energy efficiency increases so does energy consumption. Take my truck, for instance. If someone waved a magic wand and over it and doubled its fuel efficiency from 20 to 40 miles-per-gallon, how would I respond? Most likely, I’d give a little cheer and make that extra trip to Albuquerque that I’ve been wanting to do. The following week I might go again; and over the course of a month, I would probably burn more gasoline than I would have otherwise with my formerly ‘inefficient’ vehicle.

It’s called ‘Jevon’s Paradox’ after a British scientist who studied the phenomena. It illustrates a basic point: changes in technology aren’t very useful if they aren’t coupled with changes in behavior. And until there are actual changes in behavior, there won’t be meaningful progress toward lasting solutions.

That’s why I like low tech solutions. Working in a creek with sticks and stones requires a different relationship with the land. You use your muscles, for one thing. But you also think differently. You begin to pay attention to the nuances of soil, vegetation, and water. It’s a different world when you’re face-to-face with an eroding stream bank than if you viewed it from the seat of a smelly diesel-powered backhoe.

I vote for low tech. It’s not the answer to all our problems, not by a long shot, but it a good place to start.

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Courtney White is co-founder and Executive Director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. He is the author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West. For further ruminations by Courtney, see www.chronicleofconsequences.com.

I can’t get excited about the presidential race.

I know who I’ll vote for, and I’ll dutifully fulfill my democratic obligations on Election Day this fall, but I won’t be doing much more than that - which surprises me. In the past, I’ve eagerly participated in the quadrennial circus to elect a new President. In addition, over the years I’ve volunteered for various congressional campaigns, contributed (very) modest amounts of cash to candidates, and eagerly stood in long lines to cast my vote.

This year I reserved all of the above for a colleague who ran for county commissioner here in Santa Fe. And I did so for two reasons.

First, no one nationally is talking intelligently about issues that matter to me (whether they are talking intelligently about issues that matter to fellow Americans is an open question, I think). Take food and energy policy. Or climate change. Or family farming and ranching. Nothing substantive is being proposed, not by the two presidential candidates or by anyone in Congress (with a few exceptions). Take the new Farm Bill, please. There was a golden opportunity to change course. Instead, we’ll be growing more corn for ethanol.

I can guess why substantive discussions are being avoided: our leaders understand that as a nation, we’re in a jam of serious proportions. The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost after partying hard for sixty years and no one is willing to confront the mess we’ve created.

For example, on Independence Day, I listened to a great deal of chatter on the radio about energy independence. All I could think was: “We’re about twenty-five years too late.” At least the fireworks were pretty!

Second, if I’ve lost faith in our national leaders, I hold out a great deal of hope for local ones. In fact, I think over the ensuing years, the most important political unit will be the county and the most influential political leader the local county commissioner. That’s because commissioners have real power to change things at local scales and because they are responsive (or ought to be) to local communities.

And out West, where I live, counties are large in size, and thus control many resources.

“Relocalization” is much in the air these days, from talk about local food and farms to innovative ideas about local energy production. And given rising energy prices - which promise to go much higher - these discussions will only become more numerous, which is a great thing. I suspect it’s a harbinger of bigger things to come.

The next step is to relocalize democracy. Start over at the grassroots - including, the grass and the roots.

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Courtney White is co-founder and Executive Director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. He is the author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West. For further ruminations by Courtney, see www.chronicleofconsequences.com.

Last weekend I spent two days in Ohio’s Amish country checking out an event called Horse Progress Days. It’s an annual celebration of animal power - draft horses, mules, and oxen - that draws over 10,000 people, the vast majority of whom are Amish farmers.

It might seem like a curious thing to fly halfway across the nation to view a scene that seems frozen in time, circa 1914 (a date considered by one speaker to be the heyday of the family farm in America). And it was true - it felt very anachronistic to watch teams of huge Belgian and Percheron draft horses pulling manure spreaders and hay balers in front of a rapt crowd of men and women who looked like they belonged in another century.

But that was exactly the point. Ten or twenty years ago - last century - the idea of animal power would have been considered anachronistic. But today, with diesel pushing $5 a gallon and everybody talking about sustainability, local food, family farming, and organic agriculture, the draft horse suddenly seems, well, like a new idea.

That’s why keynote speaker Lynn Miller, who farms in central Oregon and publishes the Small Farmer Journal - the premiere horse farming magazine in the nation - was so excited by the large turnout at this year’s event. Thirty years ago, he said, everyone said horse farming was dead. Now, he continued, it is seen rightly as a possible answer to our food crisis.

Of course, horse farming never went out of style with the Amish - who deserve a great deal of credit, by the way, for keeping horse farming alive and well in America.

But I went for another reason than just educational. All one hears these days in the media about “solutions” to the various ills and crises that are besieging us all over the planet are only high tech answers. And the higher tech the better, it seems. You never hear about low tech alternatives - such as horse power. This is disturbing because, after all, humans have been engaged low tech behavior for millennia, often sustainably.

What I saw in Mt Hope, Ohio, last weekend told me that there is nothing anachronistic about horses. Or mules. Or oxen.

Maybe we should give low tech greater consideration - I know I will.

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Courtney White is co-founder and Executive Director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. He is the author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West.

In June 2006, 49 heifers were delivered to The Quivira Coalition’s ranch on the 36,000-acre Valle Grande allotment on the Santa Fe National Forest atop Rowe Mesa, southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. They were the first installment of what would become a 124-head herd of heifers, plus three Corriente bulls, all under our “Valle Grande” brand, and all under our management.

And just like that, a bunch of conservationists became ranchers.

This was an intriguing turn-of-events for the staff and Board of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit whose original mission was to create common ground between ranchers and environmentalists. It was also a surprising twist for me personally. If ten years ago you had told this former Sierra Club activist that I would be in the livestock business, selling local beef to Santa Fe residents, I simply would not have believed you. But here I am—a dues-paying member of the New Mexico Cattlegrowers’ Association.

Maybe it was not such a stretch. After ten years of encouraging ranchers to act more like conservationists, it suddenly seemed logical that we, as a conservation organization, begin to act more like ranchers. It was not just a matter of “walking the talk” either—the harder we looked, the more conservation opportunities we saw running the ranch as a ranch. In fact, when discussing this turn of events in my lectures around the region today, I state simply that The Quivira Coalition is “a conservation organization that manages livestock for land health and prosperity.” Obviously, this is something new under the sun. But what exactly?

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Courtney White is co-founder and Executive Director of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists, and others. He is the author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West.