Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. And it hinted at something that Wick and Rathmann had yet to consider: Plants could be deliberately used to pull carbon out of the sky.Ĭlimate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. It clearly illustrated a concept that Creque had repeatedly tried to explain to them: Carbon, the building block of life, was constantly flowing from atmosphere to plants into animals and then back into the atmosphere. Creque’s quiet observation stuck with Wick and Rathmann.

Grasses, he liked to say, were like straws sipping carbon from the air, bringing it back to earth. The carbohydrates that fattened the cows had come from the atmosphere, by way of the grass they ate. Where had that additional truckload of animal flesh come from?Ĭreque had an answer for him. Meadowlarks and other animals were more abundant. The land seemed richer than before, the grass lusher. Wick needed to take an extra trip with his trailer to cart the cows away. When Wick returned the herd to its owner that fall, collectively it had gained about 50,000 pounds. By summer’s end, the cows, which had arrived shaggy and wild-eyed after a winter spent near the sea, were fat with shiny coats. Shallow-rooted annuals, which die once they’re chewed on, gave way to deep-rooted perennials, which can recover after moderate grazing. Within weeks of their arrival, new and different kinds of grass began sprouting. The cows beat back the encroaching brush. He didn’t want medicated livestock excreting drugs that might harm the worms and insects living in his soil - most cows are routinely dewormed - so he tracked down a herd of untreated cows and borrowed them for the summer of 2005. He even bought a molasses lick to supplement the animals’ diet of dry thatch. He dug wells for water, pounded in steel posts and strung nonbarbed wire. If you simply let them loose and then round them up a few months later - often called the “Columbus method” - your land is more likely to end up hard-packed and barren. If the ruminants move like wild buffalo, in dense herds, never staying in one place for too long, the land benefits from the momentary disturbance. But from Creque’s perspective, how you graze makes all the difference. Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts. This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. He even considered introducing wild elk, but the bureaucratic hurdles seemed too onerous. He thought about renting goats to eat the weeds and brush, but they were too expensive. But the distaff kept moving into what had been pasture. He pulled it, mowed it, doused it with herbicides. Wick was especially bothered by the advance of a prickly, yellow-flowered invasive weed called the woolly distaff thistle. “Our naïve idea was not working out so well.” “Our vision of wilderness was failing,” Wick told me recently. The land seemed to be losing its vitality. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. Within months of the herd’s departure, the landscape began to change. The first step they took toward what they imagined would be a more pristine state was to revoke the access enjoyed by the rancher whose cows wandered their property. Wick and Rathmann would often come home and find, to their annoyance, cows standing on their porch. For nearly a century, this had been dairy country, and the rounded, coastal hills were terraced from decades of grazing. So smitten were they with the wildlife, in fact, that they decided to return their ranch to a wilder state. She even trained the resident towhees, small brown birds, to eat seed from her hand. Rathmann loved watching the many animals, including ravens, deer and the occasional gopher, from the large porch. The couple quickly settled into their bucolic new surroundings. He knew the area well, having grown up one town away, in Woodacre, where he had what he describes as a “free-range” childhood: little supervision and lots of biking, rope-swinging and playing in the area’s fields and glens. Wick, a former construction foreman - they met when he oversaw a renovation of her bathroom - was eager to tackle the project.

They picked out the 540-acre ranch in Nicasio mostly for its large barn, which they planned to remake into a spacious studio. Rathmann is an acclaimed children’s book author - “Officer Buckle and Gloria” won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations. When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space.

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