Book Description
In this celebration of one of America's most enduring symbols, fromer ranger Butch Farabee brielfy revies the evolution of this national symbol.
Customer Reviews:
Great look at the history of park rangers.......2005-08-16
This book is full of wonderful photos that tell the history of national park rangers, as well as some interesting text. If you're a ranger, related to one, or simply a fan of parks, you'll enjoy this book. It's an easy read and will probably make you wish you had one of these great jobs.
National Park Ranger.......2004-06-23
With 30 years of first-hand experience, Butch Farabee captures the culture, values, language, objectives, history, unspoken processes and people of the National Park Service - rangers. A wealth of photographs and inside knowledge makes this essential reading for spouses and visitors. There is a thorough and illustrated discussion of uniforms and badges, evolution from predator control and fire suppression, to sustaining natural processes and recognizing the integral role of wildland fire in healthy ecosystems.
Rangers must have and constantly upgrade diverse knowledge, skills and abilities, and be able to diplomatically use those skills alone in the wild or in crowded urban settings. Rangers carry out technical search and rescue in every ecosystem - from 594 meters below the surface of Crater Lake to the top of Denali in Alaska at 6,194 meters, and under water in the Florida Everglades and Hawaii - while working efficiently using appropriate skills and equipment in team efforts. Commissioned rangers are federal law enforcement officers who effectively work with felons, traffic infractions and other local, state and federal agencies. Other ranges are interpreters who share the human and natural history of an area with visitors. Resource management, for the parks and people, permeates everything and every day. A ranger may repair a plumbing problem in the morning, help a visitor identify a plant, animal or rock before noon, carry out a custodial arrest or technical search and rescue in early afternoon, while working creatively within budget and administrative limitations.
The "way of life" of being a ranger is hard on rangers, spouses and children. Living conditions are often sparse and distant and people must be very tolerant, proactive for food, education and routine maintenance and be able to think and act long-term. Advancement comes competitively, often requiring major long-distance moves and extreme changes in climate - from cold interior Alaska, to warm Death Valley, to warm and humid Guam or Florida, to the snowy Great Lakes.
Rangers are female and male, come in every type of skin pigmentation, are physically abled and disabled, speak a wide variety of languages and come from many cultures. National Park Service rangers are consistently the most admired people and the most admired agency. Too many legislators use the NPS for political expediency and short-term gain. This is a good read and underscores the strong need for much better funding and support of rangers and the National Park Service.
An Absolute Must for Fans of Our National Parks.......2003-06-23
The mission of the National Park Service to preserve and protect our natural and cultural resources for future generations. Charles Farabee's knowledge and experience is portrayed superbly in National Park Ranger: An American Icon. Farabee is able to make the reader feel like they've been transported back to the late 1800's where our earliest parks were protect by members of the U.S. Army. Farabee then takes the reader to when the park ranger comes onto the scene and beyond. The history of the park ranger is very romantic and makes the reader yearn to travel back in time.
The only "slight" disappoint was the forward by the current NPS Director, Fran Mainella. While I understand that having the current Director involved with this passage is the proper thing to do, I can only take her comments with a grain of salt as the current leadership of the NPS and Department of the Interior (Secretary Gale Norton) do not appear to fight for the best interest of the service nor the environment. By no means should you let this deter you from purchasing this book.
Book Description
Beset by competing interests, efforts by federal agencies, Congress, and the courts to balance ecological and economic values in the development of federal land policies have produced a wide range of outcomes. This revised and updated volume of Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics examines the interplay between political organizations, interest groups, economic conditions, and demographic shifts, offering an explanation of changes in policies during this period that affected the management of rangeland, timber, energy, mineral, and wilderness resources. The book takes as its focus the often bitter interaction of state and federal governments, local economic and business interests, and environmental organizations to shape policies toward national forests, mining and energy resources, rangelands, national parks, annd wilderness areas in the Western US. The book also includes a review of different federal programs affecting public lands. It will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental politics and policy, natural resource management, public policy, and environmental history as well as to the general reader.
Average customer rating:
- Forest Fire Not the Problem, Forest Service Is
- A Justifiably Burning Issue
- A good case for abolishing the Forest Service
- Searing Insights on a Hot Topic
- Fire Liar for Hire?
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A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service (The Political Economy Forum)
Robert H. Nelson
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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ASIN: 0847697355 |
Book Description
In A Burning Issue, Robert Nelson makes a compelling case for abolishing the U.S. Forest Service. Created in the early 20th century to provide scientific management of the nation's forests, the U.S. Forest Service was, for many years, regarded as a model agency in the federal government. Nelson contends that this reputation is undeserved and the Forest Service's performance today is unacceptable. Nelson advocates replacing the service with a decentralized system to manage the protection of our national forests.
Customer Reviews:
Forest Fire Not the Problem, Forest Service Is.......2001-10-18
Excerpted from a book review by Ronald N. Johnson in the Independent Review (Fall 2001)
In A Burning Issue, Robert Nelson argues that the U.S. Forest Service is demoralized within and besieged from without by a wide array of interest groups. He attributes this sorry state of affairs to the Forest Service's inability to define its mission in a time of rapidly changing values in American society. His solution to this predicament is to abolish the agency.
"The leading policy issue today on the national forest system--issues that demonstrate the inability of the current Forest Service to deal with the basic problems of the national forests--revolve around forest fire and its ecological consequences." Federal fire policy has sought to eliminate fire, but has instead merely changed its time and place. Wildfires have gone from being high-frequency, low-intensity events, which sustained certain ecosystems, to low-frequency, high-intensity fires prompting costly suppression attempts that have often proved futile.
According to Nelson, a variety of interest groups have converged to sustain the fire-suppression policy. There is litle question that interest groups shape policies and political behavior, but Nelson's book would not win high praise from academics for its application of public-choice concepts. Although Nelson may have correctly identified the underlying interest groups, he does not offer evidence to support his claims about their politicking. However, such an analysis is not his objective. Rather, he seeks to make the case not only that Forest Service fire policy, along with reductions in timber harvests, has been a costly mistake, but that the alternative approach advocated by many so-called environmentalists is also fraught with contradictions and costs.
Although I concur with Nelson's recommendation to abolish the Forest Service, I think it is an unlikely outcome, and his intermediate or short-run proposal offers only limited benefits. Nevertheless, his book should be required reading for all students of government, not only those concerned with Forest Service policy, because it provides an excellent source in any attempt to understand the consequences of allowing a governmental agency to become so buffeted by competing pressure groups that it loses direction and becomes an even more costly entity.
A Justifiably Burning Issue.......2001-02-22
This is a superb analysis of a once great government agency. Mr. Nelson makes a compelling case for abolishing the Forest Service -- his book merits the thoughtful attention of anyone concerned with the preservation and responsible management of our nation's national forests....this includes the Forest Service itself!
A good case for abolishing the Forest Service.......2000-11-23
Robert Nelson argues that it's time to abolish the U.S. Forest Service. Nelson spent 18 years in the Department of Interior's policy shop, and he knows the issues. His book covers the history of the Forest Service and its policies that lead - to some extent - to this year's devastating Western wildfires. The service has made too many resource management mistakes. It doesn't have the same interest in forestry and grazing management as the people who reside in the areas the service manages. Nelson makes a convincing case that the people with strong local interests in resource management could certainly do no worse than the Forest Service when it comes to preventing devastating fires, so let's give them a chance. As Nelson explains, ecosystem management from on high is used to justify anything the service might want to do, but top the top-down approach doesn't work any longer for resource management. And, as Nelson writes, it's not just the executive branch that needs a new approach. Congress might not know what it's doing, either: "Federal politics is today dominated by national television networks and other media that distort as often as clarify the real forest issues. If decisions for the forests of the West are made in Washington, most democratically elected representatives will be far removed from the places where their decisions take effect. Many members of Congress will have never visited the national forests where their votes will be determining future policy." This book should be assigned to all forestry majors, in colleges everywhere. (Note-I wrote about this book for Timberlinemag.com.)
Searing Insights on a Hot Topic.......2000-09-06
The recent wildfires in New Mexico and Colorado are a painful illustration of the costs of federal land management. America's National Parks and National Forests are in disarray; millions of acres are just one spark away from complete conflaguration. Thus, the latest political economy forum book, Robert Nelson's A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.s. Forest Service could not be more timely. Nelson, a professor at the University of Maryland (and a former colleague of mine at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) lays out why Smokey the Bear must shoulder much of the blame for turning the national forests into a tinderbox. Political management of the U.S. Forest Service lies at the heart of its current difficulties, Nelson explains. It is not simply a matter of the wrong leadership or wrong institutional mission. Building on his earlier work on federal land management, Nelson shows why neither the progressive era doctrine of "scientific management," nor newer notions of "ecosystem management" or "natural regulation" can solve the current mess. Only a wholesale reconstitution of the forest service's structure and responsibilities will suffice. Indeed, Nelson explains why America's forests, and neighboring communities, would be safer were the forest service eliminated altogether in favor of decentralized forest units directly responsible for their management and care. For the forests' sake, hope that such an approach becomes politically viable before the next fiery maelstrom ignites.
[Note, this review originally appeared as part of my column in the Washington Times.]
Fire Liar for Hire?.......2000-08-17
With nearly 5 billion acres ablaze out West this summer, Nelson's book is well-timed if poorly thought out. His thesis is that the Forest Service should be abolished entirely and he's being funded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- a "shill tank" for less government and more big business profiteering -- to say as much. The problem is that the REAL problem (as Nelson admits) is too much fire suppression for too long out west. Nelson argues that a "fuel buildup" out west requires more "mechanical thinning," (i.e. logging for private profit on public lands). In reality, however, mechanical thinning is simply too expensive to do the job, while proscribed fires require a LARGER Forest Service budget to be effectively managed. It's hard to read Nelson's book without seeing it as being little more than a clever stalking horse: an industry-funded case statement for more rape and ruin of the forest. A visit to the Competitive Enterprise Institute's web site (one of Nelson's employers) makes it clear they have never seen an environmental or public health law they liked. Nelson's book is less a case statement for forest protection than it is for continued massive subsidies for industry exploitation of public land. When Nelson says "mechancial thinning" will not pay for itself, he is really calling for massive public subsidies of the timber industry. When Nelson advocates "recovering" lost revenue from "thinning" the forest, he is really advocating chopping down healthy forests for commercial purposes. Bottom line: this book blows a lot more smoke than any of the fires out west. We need more science and less "forest liar" propaganda.
Book Description
The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area's civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments—Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast—have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.
Customer Reviews:
Green Activism, Bay Area Style.......2007-09-29
This book really helped me understand the world I was born into--Berkeley in the late 1950s. As Richard Walker points out, that world reflected the work of countless Bay Area activists reaching back to John Muir. Many were civic-minded and dedicated women, and some started or built environmental organizations with national impact. This book describes it all: the people, the organizations, the issues, the victories (always temporary), the challenges, and the movement's shortcomings and unintended consequences.
Always attuned to class issues, Walker acknowledges that these movements were mostly led by upper class folks and ultimately turned parts of the Bay Area (e.g., Marin and Napa) into lightly populated enclaves for the well off. Working families in the Bay Area have had great access to public parks and the coast, but activists so far have done little to impede the siting of toxic nastiness in low-income neighborhoods. Walker questions the link between efforts to slow or stop growth and the Bay Area's high housing prices, but he notes that the growth that has occurred--in the eastern part of Contra Costa County and the San Joaquin Valley, for example--isn't very smart and may be linked to the inner Bay Area's aversion to virtually any growth at all. At the end of the day, though, it's hard to resist Walker's conclusion that Bay Area residents have plenty to be thankful for. Highly recommended.
Back to the Land.......2007-08-23
Professor Walker's book is a solidly researched, comprehensive history of the environmental movement in the Bay Area. Written in a clear, accessible style, the book covers a century of landsaving, from the early days of the Sierra Club to the exciting years from 1965-75 when most of our environmental protection laws were passed, to the recent use of land trusts , conservation easements, and urban growth boundaries to safeguard the Bay Area's precious green heritage. This book will stand, along with John Hart's "Legacy" and Amy Meyer's "New Guardians for the Golden Gate" as the canonical texts in the environmental history of California for years to come.
Inspiring! Understand how the Bay Area came to be such a terrific place to live.......2007-08-23
While this book was a bit academic and long on details, I found it a pleasant and easy read. I am a Bay Area resident and a NYC transplant and have marveled at the accessibility of the Bay Area's natural beauty and recreation.
I love the SF Bay Area for its beauty and outdoors and I wanted to know how it happened and who to thank. Now I know.
Another book worth considering, which is much more specific to the creation of one area is New Guardians for the Golden Gate: How America Got a Great National Park
Average customer rating:
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A Rediscovered Frontier: Land Use and Resource Issues in the New West
Philip L. Jackson
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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ASIN: 0742526178 |
Book Description
A Rediscovered Frontier describes the changing land use issues taking place in the rapidly growing western United States, paying special attention to the previously unexplored area of private lands planning and local growth management. A Rediscovered Frontier begins by exploring the term New West, describes prototypical land use patterns found throughout the West, and examines the spatial circumstances of rural and small town growth patterns. Intended as a text for college students taking courses in land use planning, a sourcebook for land use planning and environmental management professionals, as well as anyone who cares about western environments, A Rediscovered Frontier addresses the social, economic, political, and above all, geographical realities of land use in the West today.
Book Description
In 1979 the Nevada state legislature passed a bill providing for state control of certain lands within the state boundaries under the administration of the Bureau of Land Management. Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming immediately followed suit. Public land users reacted swiftly and the Sagebrush Rebellion was on.
Westerners, driven by the sheer size of the federal estate (99 percent of BLM lands are located in twelve western states) and angered by what they perceived as undue influence by the environmental movement on federal policies, sought to protect and control the resource and recreational use of public lands that they deemed essential to their state economies.
In this book, R. McGreggor Cawley objectively investigates the Rebellion, looking at the driving force behind the movement, the strategies used by the Rebels, and the consequences of the controversy. He examines how the definitions of key federal land management concepts, such as conservation, influenced policymaking and explores tensions that pitted the West against other regions and the federal government.
In the process, he analyzes James Watt's beleaguered tenure as secretary of the interior and the Reagan administration's proposal to sell federal lands and shows how the conflict created an unexpected division within the environmental movement.
Going beyond the Rebellion, Cawley offers provocative interpretation of events in federal land policy from the 1960s to the 1990s and establishes a framework for assessing future developments in federal land policy.
This book is part of the Development of Western Resources series.
Average customer rating:
- Scholarly, definitive, and surprisingly engaging
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Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West
Timothy P. Duane
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0520226763 |
Book Description
The rural west is at a crossroads, and the Sierra Nevada is at the center of this social and economic change. The Sierra Nevada landscape has always been valued for its bounty of natural resource commodities, but new residents and an ever-growing flood of tourists to the area have transformed the relationship between the region's nature and its culture. In an engaging narrative that melds the personal with the professional, Timothy P. Duane--who grew up in the area--documents the impact of rapid population growth on the culture, economy, and ecology of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1960s. He also recommends innovative policies for mitigating the negative effects of future population growth in this spectacular but threatened region, as well as throughout the rural west.
Today, the primary social and economic values of the Sierra Nevada landscape are in the amenities and ecological services provided by its wildlands and functioning ecosystems. Duane shows how further unfettered population growth threatens the very values which have made the Sierra Nevada a desirable place to live and work. A new approach to land use planning, resource management, and local economic development--one that recognizes the emerging values of the landscape--is necessary in order to achieve sustainable development, Duane claims. Weaving personal experience with outstanding scholarship, he shows how such an approach must explicitly recognize the importance of values and the application of an environmental land ethic to future development in the area.
Customer Reviews:
Scholarly, definitive, and surprisingly engaging.......1999-08-29
Duane paints an interesting and comprehensive portrait of how the Sierra Nevada area has been transformed by the shift from an emphasis on resource extraction to a lifestyle choice.
His illustrations of the paradox thus created--the region's success as a recreation destination is imperiling the very qualities that are giving it that success--is particularly compelling.
Anyone with an interest in the Sierra Nevada, or mountain/recreational area living in general, will find this a fascinating read. I can't imagine anyone who is making policy for any area trying to grapple with the issues of growth and quality of life not having a copy of this work.
The scholarly component--I did find myself skimming a few areas--makes it a great reference work. It is very well indexed and clearly presented. And each time I started feeling like I was wading, I re-engaged fully at the start of the next section.
Average customer rating:
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Give and Take: How the Clinton Administration's Public Lands Offensive Transformed the American West
Manufacturer: High Country News
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0974448508 |
Book Description
Learn how those impacted by new national monuments are redefining land protection in the West.
*Uses in-depth new reporting and cutting edge commentary to bring to life one of the West's most pressing issues: the protection of its environment and natural heritage amidst massive social and economic change
*Features thought-provoking essays by such leading writers and social commnetators as Ed Marston, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm, Charles Wilkinson, Laird Noh, William Debuys, Rochelle Oxarango, Mark Dowie, and Perry Swisher
*The drama resulting from President Clinton's bold naming of seven new National monuments is vividly brought to life utilizing coverage from the pages of High Country News, the award-winning environmental news service
Reading more like drama than history, through the analogy created by Clinton's naming of the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah, Give and Take captures the complexity of the issues surrounding protection of what appears to be the limitless frontier amidst natural and manmade limitations.
Give and Take combines frontline reporting by journalists for High Country News, with commentary by some of the West's leading writers. It vividly brings to life a diverse populace, contradictory aspirations and forces, spectacular and fragile natural landscapes, and evolving economic forces that are reshaping the myths regarding the West's lands and culture.
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- Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching
- Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species
- Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building
- Not so great
- One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies
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Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West
George Wuerthner , and
Mollie Matteson
Manufacturer: Foundations for Deep Ecology 2
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Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching
ASIN: 1559639431 |
Book Description
In the American West, the sky is wide and the mountains are grand. Everything is on a big scale - including the debate over livestock production on the nation's public lands.
For more than a century, ranching and its associated activities (such as the growing of irrigated feed crops) has been the major land use over most of the western states. While many Americans think of cowboys as heroes and the "Wild West" as a place for cattle roundups and rodeos, others see livestock as a scourge upon the land. What is most disturbing to some activists is that ranching activities occur not only on private property but also on public lands - more than 300 million acres of federal, state, and other publicly owned lands are used by private ranching operations. For the most part, the ranching operations pay very low fees to run their livestock on these lands, and also receive numerous government subsidies including range improvements, fencing, and predator control.
Welfare Ranching presents one side of the debate over public lands ranching, offering a graphic look at the negative consequences of livestock production in the arid West. The authors highlight changes in the region that they see as being caused by ranching, and examine what they feel are problems associated with using tax dollars to support environmentally questionable activities. Through photographs and essays, the book shows examples of overgrazing along with what the authors argue are more subtle signs that indicate large - scale ecological disruption. The authors also discuss changes that could be made to help solve some of these problems.
Welfare Ranching gives one view of the cultural and historical causes of the current situation and offers a vision of possible renewal.
Customer Reviews:
Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching.......2007-02-02
Welfare Ranching provides the data and insight into the public lands livestock industry that has long been needed. Here in the West the damage is seen on hundreds of millions of acres of our public lands. What is amazing is the lack of attention among our public officials at the tremendous cost of this outmoded practice. The lost soil, polluted streams and destroyed wildlife habitat have value in the billions of dollars on an annual basis that so far outweighs any possible economic benefit of livestock production, it is necessary for the public to become educated on this issue so they will pressure our lawmakers and public officials to make and enforce ecologically sound regulations and practices to restore this land. A final note, the soil loss and plant community losses are a loss in carbon storage - this is going to become a critical issue as we at last deal with greenhouse gases. Finally, let's not forget the history of the sheep and cattle industry in their efforts to have our public lands turned over to the States and then sold to ranchers for 10 cents an acre in the 1940's. This continues today with the farm and ranch lobby and their henchmen in congress who constantly are working to undermine environmental protections and have the land sold off to industry.
Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species.......2005-05-05
Welfare Ranching is a beautiful book, full of full-color photos and articles by dozens of scientists and concerned biological conservationists regarding the destruction of the American West by cattle ranchers. Wuerthner and Matteson point out that there are 525 million acres of land in the Western United States which are used for livestock grazing. That only eleven percent of U.S. cattle producers are in the west, but their grazing area equals twenty-five percent of the total land area of the lower 48 United States and most of that is public land. These lands are often over-grazed, degraded, and denuded of plants. The water sources are manipulated by the ranchers to provide water for their livestock, thereby removing the water from access by native plants and wildlife. The introduction of livestock into the arid lands of the American west is like introducing an exotic species into a community. The livestock completely undermine and degrade the ecosystem and their presence is linked to the decline in native bird and vegetation populations. It has been noted that by raising domestic animals which demand large quantities of water and forage in a place that is dry, and by favoring slow-moving, heavy, and more or less defenseless livestock in terrain that is rugged, vast, and inhabited by native predators, ranchers have put themselves in a position of constant warfare with the land. Nearly all public lands [in the Western U.S.] that have any forage potential for livestock are leased for grazing. This includes 90% of Bureau of Land Management land, 69% of U.S. Forest Service land and a surprising number of wildlife refuges and national parks. Three hundred million of these acres have the potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration by terminating domestic livestock production on public lands
Bird species need water and vegetation to survive, and many are threatened or driven into extinction by the ubiquitous livestock grazing which destroys their habitat. Birds generally do not respond to the presence of grazing livestock but to the impacts on vegetation as a result of grazing. Breeding Bird Survey data suggest that grassland birds as a group are showing greater population declines than any other avian assemblage in North America. This is attributable to habitat modifications including livestock grazing, fire suppression, prairie dog control, cultivations, and exotic grasses.
Livestock grazing harms native species and promotes alien plant growth. The hundreds of photos in the book, Welfare Ranching, document the denuded, degraded land and polluted, manipulated water sources which result from cattle grazing. Some ranchers suggest that since bison used to naturally live on the grasslands, cattle are a good modern day substitute, but cattle and bison are not similar animals. Bison moved around a lot, effectively grazing on plants only once before moving on, and bison also lived in drier areas and ate drier plants than cattle do; domestic cattle spend most of their time within 400 meters of water. Cattle ranchers also suggest that the grasslands need to be grazed by cattle in order to be healthy, but in a native grassland there is a wide variety of animals that naturally graze in a sustainable way, such as nematodes, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, elk, and bison.
Livestock grazing is the most common land use in western North America. It is difficult to study in a controlled manner as there are not many large areas free of grazing because approximately 70% of the eleven western states is grazed. A study comparing Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northern New Mexico, one of the largest grazing exclosures in the American West, with six grazing sites, found that plant species richness was higher in the protected areas than in the grazed areas (Floyd et al. 2003). Recent paleo-ecological studies on the Colorado Plateau determined that the most severe vegetation changes of the last 5,400 years resulted from livestock grazing during the last two centuries (Cole et al. 1997).
It is apparent that many species of grassland birds, and neo-tropical migratory birds have declined drastically in the past few decades. Much of the research on this subject has found that the decline in bird species is correlated to the decline in habitat and vegetation which is directly linked to grazing livestock on the majority of land area in the western United States. Over half of the grazing is done on publicly owned lands which, due to the time-honored traditions in the West of allowing cattle ranchers full access to any lands they want, and because these ranchers and their grazing interests have been very important in the political and social life of the West for over a century, and because, until recently, grazing on public lands has been an accepted practice with no special attention paid to it, the question of closing off public lands to grazing has become a power struggle and a contentious issue between conservationists, ranchers, the government, and land managers. There is enough documented evidence that grazing has many deleterious effects on the land such as: damaging the soil, polluting the water supply, destroying native vegetation, encouraging alien species, and that ranchers and land managers have altered the ecosystem by: controlling fires, diverting the scarce water supply to cattle use only, and actively killing many native animal species that they consider inconvenient or dangerous to their interests.
It is obvious that livestock grazing on western lands is not a sustainable operation. It is environmentally damaging and causes great loss of biodiversity. It is sustained only through the political influence of cattle ranchers and the ignorance and indifference of the public. The great wave of new research which is being done by conservation biologists and environmentalists will help change this devastating scene in the future when students begin to inform themselves by reading these research papers, and when the popular media brings the desolation and waste to the notice of the people, that their land is being appropriated by private interests who are destroying the environment and profiting at the expense of thousands of plant and animal species each year.
Welfare Ranching, The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, brings these facts to the people in the form of a beautiful well-documented book full of great photographs. Most of the information in this book is taken from scientific articles and journals. How many of us spend our time reading dry scientific journals? If you would like to have a combination of fact and photos, in an interesting to read and understand format with articles published by well-known conservation biologists and others whose main concern is to save our lands and our native plants and animals, then Welfare Ranching is the book to have.
Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building.......2004-02-02
I found this book while browsing at Cody's in Berkeley last week. It's big. It's colorful. It's angry. And sadly, it's packed full of deception. The problem is that if you live in Staten Island, NY you won't know that you're being decieved unless you've spent a lot of time visiting Nevada's Great Basin and watching the seasons change.
Two examples (among many):
- Lots of close-in photos of range cattle in late-summer condition standing near a water tank with cowpies scattered all over the bone-dry vicinity and not a blade of grass in sight. The fact is that if you zoom-out about 50 yds. you'll see a major difference between the heavily-tracked barren ground surrounding the water trough and the grazing allotment outside of the perimeter. Ditto for a different time of year. The perception is that the entire range is bone-dry, overstocked, and full of cowpies. Not true. The stocking rate on that sort of range is 1 cow for every 250 acres. Lots of room for a cow, her calf, and a few of their cowpies.
- An aerial photo designed to discount the idea of ranching as a natural defense against urban sprawl is taken high above the Gallatin Valley in Montana - the source of urban sprawl would be Bozeman. The photo shows several thousand acres of ranches, mainly irrigated alfalfa farms. The point of the photo is, "well, obviously there's no sprawl here." The problem?Bozeman isn't even captured in the photo! So, the photo is a lie that would make even George Orwell blush.
I'm an environmental activist. I think there's no more important issue facing our time than preventing a head-on collision with ecological catastrophe. So, it disappoints me greatly when a book like this is bankrolled and released by someone like Doug Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, especially after his success with "Fatal Harvest".
His credibility on this particular issue has been lost. More importantly, much of the hard work of building consensus among stakeholders in public lands coalitions has been vanquished because one green element decided to lie shamelessly to further its agenda of removing livestock from public lands. The hurt feelings and distrust will take years to mend, I'm afraid.
This book should remain on the shelf.
Not so great.......2003-09-26
This book is deceptive -- so readers be wary. A picture of a mountain meadow and something along the lines of: "This is the way it could be" and then a picture of a desert - "this is the way it is." The pictures are taken in two entirely different ecosystems! And yet the editors imply that if cows were not present, picture 2 would look like picture 1. Not true.
Some interesting writing. Too bad, though, that it was framed by deception.
One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies.......2003-07-21
I'm afraid that most readers will only look at the pictures and read the captions and headlines. That's the point. No one sits down and reads through a book like this, so the message is as broad, blatant, and one-sided as a billboard. It is meant to seduce anyone who gives it a superficial glance. Leaf through it casually and discover that cattle are bad for just about anything you care to name. Are they good for anything at all? No. This is propaganda at its best (or worst).
"Welfare Ranching" is filled with pictures that are captioned to manipulate, rather than instruct. For every lush "cattle-free" area shown in the book, a barren area-just as "free"-could easily be found. The same is true of pictures showing cows on dry, dusty land. The photos are carefully chosen to show a single perspective.
On page 275 is a photo captioned "Campground full of cow manure, Nevada." It shows a flattish clearing dotted with sage and grass and a few old, dry cow pies. In the background are tall brush and trees with the hint of a mountain in the distance. It could be Nevada. Someone might camp there, if they chose to. It could also be someone's back pasture. Page 45 is a full page picture of "Severely eroded land." OK. What eroded it? We are meant to believe it was cattle, but even the author won't stick that label on. A horrifying photo of a cow carcass in a river occupies page 193. It probably smells as bad as the deer carcasses I used to find in the creek behind my grandmother's Connecticut farm.
The footnotes are probably not meant to be read, either. Otherwise, why would the author cite himself so often? Can a serious, reasonable argument against cattle ranching can be made by someone whose reference is a book called "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory?" The chapter on the health implications of meat consumption is written by the author of "The Vegetarian Way." The chapter on livestock raising from a global perspective is co-authored by an "environmental activist" advocate for wolf recovery and a math professor who authored "Judaism and Vegetarianism."
The "factual" parts of the book are a clever mixture of half-truths, excerpts out of context, skewed statistics and a grab-bag of factoids winkled out of scientific papers to fit the situation. For instance, on page 13 the author states that "ranching and associated activities provide very few jobs...most ranch operations...are not highly profitable...ranch families depend on [outside] jobs (to) help keep the ranch financially afloat." On page 15 the author argues that ranchers dominate Western politics because: "low salaries [of public office] rule out participation by people without other sources of income. Yet ranchers...having the financial latitude to engage in off-ranch pursuits-are able to hold office with less sacrifice than the work would require of others." The statement is made that "Vermont produces more beef than all the public lands in Nevada." USDA statistics show 500,000 head of cattle in Nevada in 2002, 285,000 in Vermont. Nevada has fewest cattle of any western state except Alaska.
Then there are all those questionable critters that cows are accused of threatening. There are snails the size of a pinhead, cave bugs and tiny fish. I couldn't help wondering how many insects and reptiles survived the sprawl of Phoenix or Seattle? Shouldn't we get those people "off the land" too? Abundant dinosaurs roamed where Los Angeles is now. Maybe we should try to "restore" them? There's more than a hint of wanting to "play God" in all this fervor over weeds and worms.
As for the cows, a "shift away from animal foods is not only an important individual choice, but also imperative for the well-being of humanity, and the ecological systems of the earth." (page 285)
"Welfare Ranching" is not simply a vegetarian tract. There is an underlying, more sinister agenda-The Wildlands Project. That includes a wide swath of land from the tip of South America to Northernmost Canada that is to be free of all human activity. The author of this extreme fantasy is Reed Noss, cited more than half a dozen times in the footnotes. Buried in the text are lines like this: "The majority of the West is directly or indirectly influenced by livestock production, either as rangeland, as cultivated land or pasture growing feed for livestock, or as delimited reserves of nature where naturally migrating wildlife are persecuted the instant they step outside the boundaries people have imposed on them." (page xiv) So, if you take away the rangeland, cultivated land and pasture, "migrating wildlife" will no longer have those boundaries.
In case anyone misses the point, in the next sentence the author adds the "hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest" to the "total physical and ecological footprint of livestock production." When all that Midwest farmland is out of production, there will be room for all the westerners evicted from the Wildlands Project to live. (What they will eat might be a problem.)
"There is no single conservation opportunity for rewilding...300 million acres as ending livestock grazing on all public lands." (page 324). Rewilding is the agenda. Concluding with "Our Vision" the author says: "We dream of a landscape where bison, pronghorn antelope, wolves, and grizzlies are free to roam...in which landscape-scale ecological processes can operate with a minimum of human interference. The elimination of livestock production from our public lands will set us on that pathway."
It's not just a "pathway." The Wildlands Project calls for one half of the land area of the 48 states to be encompassed in core wilderness reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades. What's left over is where people can live-within the boundaries set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
Book Description
Over the past century, solutions to natural resources policy issues have become increasingly complex. Multiple government agencies with overlapping jurisdictions and differing mandates as well as multiple interest groups have contributed to gridlock, frequently preventing solutions in the common interest. Community-based responses to natural resource problems in the American West have demonstrated the potential of local initiatives both for finding common ground on divisive issues and for advancing the common interest. The first chapter of this enlightening book diagnoses contemporary problems of governance in natural resources policy and in the United States generally, then introduces community-based initiatives as responses to those problems. The next chapters examine the range of successes and failures of initiatives in water management in the Upper Clark Fork River in Montana; wolf recovery in the northern Rockies; bison management in greater Yellowstone; and forest policy in northern California. The concluding chapter considers how to harvest experience from these and other cases, offering practical suggestions for diverse participants in community-based initiatives and their supporters, agencies and interest groups, and researchers and educators
Customer Reviews:
Good cases and an overview of what we need to learn.......2003-08-12
This is a nice discussion of community based initiatives (stakeholder groups) for solving intractable environmental problems. The case of the Quincy Library Group is particularly fascinating, but I haven't read all four cases yet. The intro and closing chapters by Ron Brunner present a theoratical discussion of what we can and need to learn from community-based efforts to come to grips with environmental problems in the western United States, where environmental politics is often polarized.
These groups seem to have been successful at bringing together opposing interests in communities throughout the west; and movign away froma desire to exploit or protect everything to a discussion of sustainable management strategies. Yet they have also been criticized by environmentalists for their susceptibility to parochial interests of communities in affected areas; and to influence by resource extractors. The environmental NGO's, for their part, seem too often willing to oppsoe everything without ever really addressing management questions (shall we simply export all our environmentally destrcutive industries?). Corporations, on the other hand, are too often willing to come to the table and act reasonably when they see no other choice. Can local stakeholder groups bridge the gap? Science aids understanding, but is both uncertain and unable to answer questions of what we value. Worth reading.
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