“When you’re taking a product from the land… all of the energy that we make use of comes from the sun,” rancher Dennis Moroney reminded the audience at the Sustainable Rangelands Through Low-Input Grassfed Production symposium during the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Range Management (SRM).

It has been quite an eventful year, especially professionally. In February, I co-organized a rancher-oriented session on sustainable grass-fed livestock production at the international Society for Range Management conference hosted by the Colorado Section in Denver. In April I left the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service after five good years to start my rangeland and ranch planning, monitoring, management and consulting business, Shining Horizons Land Management, LLC.

At the Ute Indian Museum in Colorado’s Uncompagre Valley, on Chipeta Day, an annual event hosted by the Friends of the Ute Indian Museum, I signed up for the plein air art festival. I’d never done anything like that before, and only recently started to revive my artistic side — hibernating since I was in high school — so I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but with a little encouragement from both my art instructor and my girlfriend, I did it anyway.

Last night I, the sole human resident of Cox Park, woke to a noise from my outdoor kitchen.

Either the heifers have gotten in there again, or it is another bear, I thought. I had awakened to a bear in the kitchen a few nights ago, scaring it away before it got any food.

I was not born here, but I call this region home. Like so many before me, I heard its call from across the continent, and came chasing a dream. A formless dream, not of riches, but of a landscape of beauty and myth, romance and adventure. To “see the West before it’s gone,” but of course it is not going anywhere; it is just changing. The land is not a static backdrop for the human drama, but a dynamic aspect of the one great story.

I just read Paulo Coelho‘s The Alchemist, the story of a boy who leaves the seminary to become a shepherd so that he can read and travel, and who lives out his own personal legend seeking treasure, physical and spiritual, crossing the Sahara. I had thought that sometimes we, at least some of us, need to strike out cross-country instead of following the established path. Now I see that we all need to find our own way.

My goal is to live as part of the Western landscape, in a way that makes sense in the greater whole, that not only does not degrade it but sustains and restores it. Success is measured in terms of a triple bottom line of ecological, economic, and sociocultural resilience.