Bison and Cardano
*for a thought experiment about transforming the landscape with Bison, Ranchers, and Cardano see part 2
The Bison, 2021. Patrick Salamon and Tyler Case. inkless ballpoint pen, seashells, razorblade on Living Canvas.
digital: Cardano Conks physical: Fungallery. Philadelphia, PA, USA
Charles Hoskinson has a mushroom farm in Colorado. And a bison ranch in Wyoming. We talk a lot about mushrooms on this blog, but we would be remiss if we left the subject of Bison alone. CryptoBisons, a game project that we learned about at the Cardano Summit, is further cementing the relationship between Cardano and the Bison. Long live Mushrooms and Bison on Cardano!! And lobsters, birdies and turtles too. And we’d be remiss if we ignored the mighty mammoth, though that’s a story for another day.
The story of Bison is fascinating and poignant, full of lessons for the present day stewards of this continent. During the ice age, there were as many as 6 different species of bison across the world- most inhabiting North America. After the last glaciers receded, the American Bison we know today (Bison bison) spread out from Mexico to Alaska and exerted a powerful influence on the ecology of Turtle Island, supported indigenous populations for thousands of years, and played a major role in the history of the USA.
We’ve discussed “silvopasture” a bit deeper in the Ethiopian Highlands blog post. The role that fences, gates, and ranchers play in managing herds of ruminants in active silvopasture systems is one that mimics the effect of predators on herd behavior in the wild. In short, herds of ruminants seek out patches of grass that are at peak nutrition. To protect themselves from predators as they graze this grass down, the herd packs tightly together. They poop and pee, lay heavy hoofs on the soil, and when they move on, the highly disrupted soil bursts with powerful new growth, beginning the cycle once again. It is because of the bison, their bio-alchemical stomach (rumen), and pressure from wolves and grizzlies (and at one time sabertooth cats, short-faced bears and competing tusked megafauna) that the midwestern United States boasts some of the deepest and best topsoil on earth.
When we talk about the conquest of the American West, we think of Oil and Gold. But the topsoil (and the ecological and climatological systems connected to it) has always been the most fundamental natural resource. After all, a growing colony/empire needs bread, and it could grow only so much as the basket could provide, and that basket is only as full as the topsoil is deep and fertile. The breadbasket on this continent was the best on the planet. A growing human population also needs protein, and it found it by the ton in bison who take a feedstock that’s inedible to humans, grass, and turn it into nutrient dense protein.
When a market grew for bison hides in the 1800s, settlers slaughtered entire herds and stripped the hides, leaving the carcasses to rot in massive mounds. Meanwhile the people whose ancestors had travelled alongside migrating bison for millenia were pushed farther and farther until they, like the bison, had all but disappeared.
We cannot talk about bison and the American West without acknowledging the incredible history and pain of the indigenous people on this continent:
The treaties that the government forced natives to sign, only to be ignored in the name of progress. The outright campaign to annihilate the Bison in order to force tribes further from their homelands. “Every Buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” This conquest over nature and natives continues to this very day, now we might have a slogan. “Every pipeline is an Indian gone.” The same government responsible for upholding historical treaties is the same governmental cleptocracy that wins when pipelines carrying oil shale run through “sovereign” Indian territories.
Of course the native people of this continent haven’t entirely disappeared, and the bison haven’t disappeared, and the story of people and bison and the land and our beloved, troubled nation lives on. We have a chance to turn this to a story of redemption. But where do we start? In Regenseed, we look to nature, we look to opportunity, we look to the power of people, and we see where we might apply technology to solve problems in a decentralized way.
This process is on one hand practical and on the other hand, cultural. That’s why the emerging meme of “Bison” in the Cardano ecosystem is powerful- it has cultural relevance that people can grasp; it’s iconic, with enormous ecological AND cultural relevance. Before we enter the world of practical applications we should honor our species’ history with this species.
How do we invite indigenous stakeholders into the story of the Bison that is unfolding in Cardano?
The Cardano Community, understandably so because it takes time, has yet to forge a collective ethical framework. And without this ethical framework, it’s difficult to build trust. And we need trust in order to invite members of marginalized communities whose trust has been betrayed again and again. And we need those communities on-board up-front so we can build that ethical framework. You see the challenge?
In the centralized world, you can state your intent up front: our organization stands for this. In a decentralized network, what we do is find the others who believe in what we believe and organically/collectively grow the culture we want to see. I see this happening in our Climate Change: The Challenge Telegram Group. And it’s beautiful to witness. And since Cardano is a holocracy, we can take our values and share them with the broader ecosystem. We do this by inviting proposers to develop practical solutions to the problem of climate change. If these projects succeed, it increases the currency of our values in the ecosystem. It says “people like us do things like this” (thanks Seth Godin!). It says “people on cardano come together to solve climate change.” It is a tall order. We are playing around in the primordial soup of the worlds emerging financial operating system after all. We are the butterflies fluttering around the cape verde islands during hurricane season.
Minting a Bison NFT can be a fun novelty, or it can be a sacred act of healing.
What does this mean for the story of bison in Cardano? We need to ask ourselves: Are we the blockchain that takes a powerful cultural symbol and abstracts it, gamifies it, with the hope of moving capital to preserve the species, perhaps create incentives for ranchers to raise bison instead of cows on its native range? Because this would be a meaningful accomplishment. But, we are the butterflies that make up the big butterfly, why don’t we aim higher? Is there a way that we can take this cultural icon, and before we abstract it and gamify it, we listen to the stories of bison passed down from the Cheyenne, the Comanches, the Lakota Sioux. We listen and we talk and we think about how we can use the bison not only to restore ecology but to reintigrate culture that has been all but lost. Because if we can earn the trust to stand with the people whose ancestors stood with the bison long before a European toe ever touched this soil, the culture of Cardano itself- which is now the force that drives its progress- will become stronger. We should do it this way, because it’s the right thing to do. This is what pushing power to the edges looks like.
Practically speaking, what can we do to bring bison back to more of their native range? We know bison have evolved within ecosystems dominated by perennial grasses, and we know that there are only a few small areas left of relatively undisturbed native Prairie left. At one time, the sub-species Wood Bison (still extant but very limited in its range) lived in forests as far east as Pennsylvania. As much as I’d love to see wild bison in my home state, we should probably start where the bison are at now: places like Colorado and Wyoming, and Dakota.
The Western US is currently in the mist a long-term drought. The Colorado River, the water supply for tens of millions and huge tracts of water-intensive agriculture, is drying up at a rate that can no longer be ignored. Let’s be honest, it’s desertification: a long term (but reversible) process, not just a recent anomaly. We can blame anthropogenic climate change, poor agricultural management of natural resources, deforestation, and perhaps longer natural climatic trends exacerbated by human activity. Take your pick. Either way, it’s no coincidence that it’s followed the disappearance of bison. By the time the Dust Bowl hit and the Prairie breathed out millenia of accumulated life-force, the bison were almost nowhere to be found. The ecosystems of the continent rely on an orchestra of countless organisms to play their parts, and the concertmaster, the bison, was silent. What had been open prairie was now crossed with barbed wire. The migratory patterns that had carried nutrients across the landscape were erased. Where there had been bison and prairie chickens and antelope, there was now cattle, cattle, and corn to feed cattle.
But in a places like Colorado and Wyoming, where ranchers are raising cattle and raising bison, there is an opportunity to do something both radically new and radically old. To leverage Technology and Networks like Cardano to create space for Bison to do Bisony things that will restore the prairie to something of its original glory. It’s no accident that the herd of bison on Charles’ ranch has increased from 400 to 500 in only a couple years. And bison aint bunnies.
When bison return to the land, the land can support more life.
The genius needed to see this change through exists within the growing Cardano community. I hope that as we bring the story of the Bison into Cardano, we make room for indigenous voices to be heard, and for indigenous communities to benefit from the restoration of their unceded territories. As a digital, tech-focused community, we may feel that indigenous ways of life are backward, but nothing could be further from the truth. Is there a role for technology? Absolutely! As one example, “virtual fencing” technology exists to make silvopasture much cheaper and easier to pull off while making fences (that prevent free movement of wildlife) obselete. Wouldn’t it be cool if Cardano found a way to replace fences with virtual fences, re-established natural predator-prey patterns, make room for the wolf alongside the bison. Wouldn’t it be cool if Cardano found a way to create a token economy that secures the value of wildlife and wild places for generations? Wouldn’t it be something if Cardano became the blockchain that indigenous communities used to leverage the power of technology for cultural empowerment?
Now, how…. on to Part 2