The Drake Exclosure — The American Thinker

When I bring environmentalists here and ask them what they would do to remedy this apparent failure of one of their most basic principles, invariably, they say they would continue to protect the area even though that policy has failed for 66+ years.

By Dan Dagget
May 18, 2013

Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about liberalism I’ve learned from an unexpected source — nature. Some of the clearest and most instructive of those lessons have come from a U. S. Forest Service “study area” in the central Arizona high desert.

In 1946, the U. S. Forest Service erected a fence around a portion of an area exhausted by human overuse and misuse in this arid rangeland to demonstrate one of the core principles of modern liberal environmentalism — that the best way to restore damaged land to ecological health is to protect it from the impacts of humans. Today, the Drake Exclosure (The Drake) (PDF) has been under the beneficent care of nature alone for more than 66 years, but…

Rather than the revived Eden one would expect to find after 66 years of environmental protection, much of the Drake, today, is as bare as a well-used parking lot.

“Actually, it looks pretty much the same as it did back in 1946,” said a Forest Service scientist studying the area, “but the trees were smaller.”

Read more at the American Thinker