[APWG] Who are we--are we the Land Doctors?

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Who are we?  Are we---the Land Doctors?

Dear All,

After 40 years of being the oldest commercial company doing native grass
restorations and non-riparian ecological restoration in the arid West of
the United States, that give a person a lot of time to think about things.

That is a total of about 350,000 hours, if you include the time you might
be dreaming about weed whacking and land-doctoring in your sleep.

If we ask ourselves, Who we are?-- Reminds me of a chilling scene in the
movie, The Last Wave (1977) the Australian film directed by Peter Weir
about a white lawyer in Sydney who has an encounter with an aborigine, who
asks him, “Who are you?.. Are you Mookeroo?”

Or are we Land Doctors?  Or are we landscape painters, and we are just
applying the paints directly to the landscape instead on a canvas?  Or we
could be Land Archaeologists, unearthing the ruins of a past local native
plant understory.  Or we could be Land ER nurses

One issue that does not seem to get much thought among our weeding and
restoration community, is who we are?  Also,  knowing who our other elders
are, and is the knowledge of the Land Doctor elders being saved and
distributed, so that other project do not have to start from scratch every
year?

So who are we anyway?   I like to look of us as a group of Weed Doctors or
Land Doctors, that are trying to invent the medicines and technologies
that can bring the original local native understory back to life.  We need
to find and invent the medicines that work quickest, best and cheapest, so
that more land can be doctored for less money, in a shorter amount of
time.

And we may have been mistakenly expecting academia or Monsanto to come up
with the best Land-Doctoring medicines, but those expectations have not
produced any results that are able to produce high quality end-results,
like Mark Vande Pol and his 14 acres of 99.6% weed-free landscape in the
Santa Cruz Mountains in California.

So I am looking forward to the Land Doctors inventing the methods and
finding the proper Land Doctoring medicines, so that all of our future
projects--either weeding projects or ecological restoration--can achieve 
99%+ native cover results.

We have awesome Land Doctors in our midst, like Dr. Michael Shaw with his
74 acres over 90% native cover near  Santa Cruz, and Dr. Vande Pol,
producing a 99.6% weed-free landscape with over 200 species of natives
popping up and biting him on his ankles.

With all that talent and expertise, you would thing that every other Land
Doctor would be thrilled for 3,000 miles, and they would build whole
conference and symposia around what these two guys, can teach us?

But that has not been the case so far, and perhaps it is because those of
us who do weed whacking across the United States, plus all of us who do
ecological restoration Land-Doctoring across the Country, do not see
ourselves as Land Doctors yet?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333