Tony and the Cows: A True Story from the Range Wars - Softcover

In 1995 Will Baker traveled to California�s Trinity River to write a magazine piece on the annual Earth First! Rendezvous. There he met activists, students, mystics, freaks, witches, troubadours, guerrilla poets, and visionaries�among them a passionate defender of the Southwest desert named Tony Merten, a former officer in the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club. The two struck up a friendship and debated vigorously their views on matters environmental. One issue in particular roused them: the increasingly hot controversy over the century-old practice of allowing ranchers to graze livestock on public lands for a nominal fee.

Seven months later Tony Merten, who made his New Mexico ranch a habitat for wildlife, shot himself to death while under suspicion in the criminal investigation of the wanton shooting of thirty-four cows and calves. The tale of Tony and the cows leads us�inevitably, in Baker�s account�to a reassessment of the roots of contemporary eco-philosophy in all its manifestations: the Animal Rights movement, Deep Ecology, technophobia, and the fashionable tributaries of Native American and Eastern thought. Baker�s implication is obvious and urgent: we cannot preserve �Nature� until we understand, accept, and deal with human nature.

This book delivers a jolt of that truth, and it invites readers to begin a tough reassessment of our environmental crisis.