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About this book
Rangelands are vast, making up one quarter of the United States and forty percent of the Earth's ice-free land. And while contemporary science has revealed a great deal about the environmental impacts associated with intensive livestock production—from greenhouse gas emissions to land and water degradation—far less is known about the historic role science has played in rangeland management and politics. Steeped in US soil, this first history of rangeland science looks to the origins of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American West, exploring the larger political and economic forces that—together with scientific study—produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well being.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces—from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation—promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastrous environmental consequences. To address the crisis, government agencies turned to scientists, but as Nathan F. Sayre shows, range science grew in a politically fraught landscape. Neither the scientists nor the public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy—from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities—contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates about rangelands to this day. Looking at the global history of rangeland science through the Cold War and beyond, The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of past conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces—from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation—promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastrous environmental consequences. To address the crisis, government agencies turned to scientists, but as Nathan F. Sayre shows, range science grew in a politically fraught landscape. Neither the scientists nor the public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy—from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities—contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates about rangelands to this day. Looking at the global history of rangeland science through the Cold War and beyond, The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of past conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists.
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Yes, you can access The Politics of Scale by Nathan F. Sayre in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
2017Print ISBN
9780226083254, 9780226083117eBook ISBN
9780226083391Index
Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables.
adaptive management, 206, 219
Advisory Council on Arid Zone Research, UNESCO, 194
Agent Orange, 159, 161, 226n6. See also herbicides
Agricultural Adjustment Act, 58, 223n15
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 99
Agricultural Research Service, USDA, 105
allotments, grazing. See leases, public land grazing
Alvord, General Benjamin, 5–6, 29
American Geographical Society of New York, 5
American Tree Association, 67
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, USDA, 222n6
Animal Damage Control, USDI, 222n6
animal unit months (AUMs). See under measurement, vegetation
Ares, Fred, 131
aridity, 9, 93, 211
Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station, 99
Arizona Wool Growers Association, 46
artificial improvement, 19, 31, 133, 136–38, 161–63, 186, 206. See also reseeding; shrub control
Australian Rangeland Society, 194
Bailey, Vernon, 222n9
Barnes, Will, 94, 143
beavers, 18, 31, 35
Behnke, Roy, 204, 226n1 (chap. 7)
Bennett, Hugh Hammond, 169
Bentley, H. L., 6, 139–43, 147, 216–17
Bessey, Charles, 48, 71, 170
bison, 11, 14, 80, 82, 207; extermination of, 6, 9, 31, 35
Biswell, Harold, 61
Botanical Survey of Nebraska, 71
Box, Thadis, 194, 195–96, 205
Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, 144–45
Brannan, Charles, 134
Brown, Lester, 181
Bryan, W. J., 216
Bureau of Agricultural Economics, USDA, 99
Bureau of Animal Industry, USDA, 61
Bureau of Biological Survey, USDA (BBS), 15, 34, 35–36; criticism of, 57; and fencing, 222n9, 222n11; and prairie dog extermination, 38–45; and pred...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on Units of Measurement
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION / Rangelands, Science, and the Politics of Scale
- ONE / Producing the Range: Extermination and Fences
- TWO / Fire and Climax: Bureaucratic Divisions of Scientific Labor
- THREE / Squinting at Blind Spots: Southwestern Rangelands and the Consolidation of Successional Theory
- FOUR / Fixing Stocking Rates: Monitoring and the Politics of Measurement
- FIVE / To Manage or Manipulate: Natural versus Artificial Improvement of Depleted Rangelands
- SIX / The Western Range Goes Global: Neo-Malthusianism and Pastoral Development
- SEVEN / Till the Cows Come Home: Overseas Failures and Critiques of Range Science
- CONCLUSION / Capital, Climate, and Community-Based Conservation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index