NAVIGATING THE RANCHERS, POETS AND WACKADOODLES

 This article was published in the June 7, 2025 edition.

The Eastern Sierra is a rare example of a microculture where people from vastly different backgrounds coexist, drawn together by a shared reverence for the land. Despite deep perceived divides, they find common ground in their connection to place.

That dynamic is precisely why Taimur Ahmad, a PhD student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, chose the Eastern Sierra to test a theory: can sharing relationships to land provide a framework for making environmental issues bipartisan on a national scale?

Ahmad presented his findings on Tuesday night at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) Page Center as part of the center’s ongoing Seminar Series.

“Most of you probably care about ecological issues in general,” Ahmad began. “And what I think is so interesting about ecological questions is that, at this point, most of our ecological challenges aren’t technical.”

He argued that, despite technological advances and existing environmental policy frameworks, the failure to address climate and ecological crises stems from ideology and cultural division rather than from science or engineering. His approach as a sociologist and ethnographer is straightforward: to build understanding, he spends time with people.

“I’m just hanging out with people,” he said before walking the audience through his three study groups – ranchers, outdoor recreationists, and Native tribes.

Ahmad explained that mainstream environmental thinking often falls into two camps: dominion, the belief that nature exists to serve human needs, and conservation, the belief that humans must preserve nature from disruption. Despite their apparent similarities, both frameworks separate people from the natural world. 

He instead offers a third framework, which he calls integralism. He defines integralism as a model in which humans are participants in nature, simultaneously dependent on and responsible for its health. Put simply, it’s how people devise their identity from the land.

From his fieldwork, he found that many people exhibit integralist behavior despite having different livelihoods.

“There’s so much research that shows that people who are different from each other don’t get along,” Ahmad told the audience. “So, why do people get along when they don’t have a lot of stuff in common? Well, very broadly, when they share experiences, values, and interests.”

Through interviews with ranchers, including Zach Smith in Big Pine and Tani Tatum in Bishop, Ahmad uncovered a profound sense of cultural identity deeply embedded in ranching life, which extends beyond economics.

Branding days, for example, are essential to a rancher’s career and profit, but also have a great deal of personhood wrapped up in them. It’s bloody, hot, hard, but it’s who they are.

“People want to rope. People want to wear their boots. That’s the Western mystique,” Smith told him.

Tatum echoed this with a heartfelt reflection on land stewardship: “If someone said you won’t make a dime, but you can take care of the land anyway, you would.” For her, caring for the land isn’t optional. It’s intrinsic. 

For a rancher, there’s no benefit to overgrazing the land or stripping it of life. Not only would it hurt their herds, but it would also deter them from who they are and what they practice.

Ahmad noted that ranchers often reject the term “environmentalist” yet speak of soil health, water quality, and livestock well-being in ways that reveal an ecological ethic. 

Even when perspectives diverged, as with 90-year-old rancher-poet Duane Rossi, who lamented wildlife protections and believed in shooting mountain lions, Ahmad encouraged the audience to look deeper. Rossi’s opposition to predators stemmed not from disregard but from a sense of imbalance and loss in the landscape he once knew.

The second group Ahmad explored was the climbers and outdoor enthusiasts, whom he jokingly referred to as the “crunchy granola wackadoodles.” Through time spent in Pine Creek Canyon with a local developer and climber, Ahmad discovered that this group has a spiritual reverence for the place, expressed through outdoor recreation.

Despite being extractive of the land in some ways (building trails where bighorn sheep once were the only travelers, for example), the trail developer knew places exceptionally well and had a relationship with them. He knew when even a stone had been kicked out of place in the Canyon.

Similarly, Allison Webber of Friends of the Inyo described Ahmad’s outdoor recreation as a spiritual act: “Maybe it looks like I’m just using it as a playground, but I deeply care about the land,” she said.

Despite occasional friction with older residents, Ahmad argues that this group, too, operates from a deep ethic of place-based identity. They may alter the land by installing bolts and treading on it, but they also invest in it and consider themselves part of it.

The third and most foundational group in Ahmad’s research was Indigenous communities.

 In a moving conversation with Kathy Bancroft, tribal historic preservation officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, Ahmad encountered a fundamentally different worldview. 

“You’re not just living on a sterile piece of land,” Bancroft told him. “You’re living with all these past stories and history.” 

Her words underscored a different relationship to land, in which every peak and spring has a story, a teaching, and a role in sustaining life. For Indigenous communities, Ahmed found stewardship isn’t about protection from humans; it’s about relationships with humans. Fire, irrigation, and harvesting weren’t disruptions. They were acts of care. 

Today, those practices are often restricted, and Bancroft mourned the consequences. 

“Now, there’s so much sagebrush you can’t even get to the pine nuts. And when fire comes, it just destroys it all,” Bancroft said. 

Across all three communities, Ahmad identified a unifying theme: identity derived from land. Whether expressed through cattle husbandry, spiritual recreation, or intergenerational stories, this connection acts as a cultural glue, superseding race, politics, and class. 

“If you derive your sense of self from the land and your culture from the land, you cannot hurt it. Destroy it. You have to respect it,” he said. “You cannot dominate it nor say humans shouldn’t be there at all,” he said. 

By exploring these shared values, Ahmad hopes his work can contribute to a national conversation that moves environmentalism beyond partisan deadlock and toward a more integrated, empathetic approach.