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The millions of dollars in damages from the recent California wildfires — including the Thanksgiving flare-up in Malibu — could have been reduced or even eliminated if goats had been used to diminish the risks.

We have accumulated this evidence after 23 years of working on four continents with stewards of large land-holdings to heal damaged land, improve biodiversity and food production and reverse desertification, which yields a triple bottom line of sustainable environmental, economic and social benefits. Thirty-million acres worldwide are under holistic management.

Holistic-management practitioners have used animals — especially goats — to mitigate the risk of fire damage, especially in areas where urban areas and wild lands meet. Goats reduce the natural "fuel ladder" — vegetation less than 8 feet in height that allow wildfires to rush up the trees and into the canopies.

Holistic management practitioner and rancher Bill Burrows, who manages 40,000-acres in the western part of the Sacramento Valley near Red Bluff, Calif., has learned from practical experience that these animals are especially beneficial in California for three reasons:

First: It's very difficult to have prescribed burns because of strict air-pollution laws.

Second: mechanical methods are very expensive and cannot be used on steep terrain.

Third: chemicals are not acceptable to remove unwanted vegetation, because we have no idea of their long-range effect.

Animals, the only tool we have left, provide at least six benefits beyond reducing unwanted biomass:

• Their hoof action adds organic matter — their dung and urine — back into the soil.

• The soil is enriched and prepared for planting grasses and other desirable plant species.

• Healthy soil encourages root growth, which makes plants healthier.

• Healthy plants sequester more carbon from the atmosphere and hold more moisture in the soil, promoting more biodiversity.

• Live biomass is less susceptible to burning than dead fuel is.

• Grazing animals are the cheapest removers of biomass around. Goats, for example, cost $18.44 per acre, or $144 per ton of biomass removed.

A 2004 Federal Emergency Management Administration report confirms that goats effectively decrease hazardous ladder fuels and are an attractive alternative to prescribed burns, because they do not produce slash piles that must be removed or burned later.

Of course, we can't just throw the goats on the land and hope for the best. A grazing herd has to be managed so that the animals can systematically cover the vulnerable area.

As it happens, federal and state grants are available for individuals and municipalities to pay part of the expense of purchasing and using goats to clear flammable vegetation. I myself once received a grant to obtain 500 goats to cut a firebreak around a 239-home community in Northern California.

While there's no "one size fits all" solution to the increasing risk of wildfires in the West, using animals to ameliorate the fire hazard costs significantly less than the millions spent on fire suppression, and actually improves the land so that it is less likely to suffer damage from future fires.

Holter is the chief operating officer of the Albuquerque nonprofit Holistic Management International (www.holisticmanagement.org).