Eric Schwennesen - Endurance

It didn't use to be so long ago that we were the new, energized, informed generation. In the 1960s and beyond, hard technology surged; the Space Race gave a focus to nearly the entire planet, and we watched the unimaginable become reality in almost no time at all. For a while the sheer inertia of the effort attracted much of the attention of the human race as we watched ourselves go from a sedentary planet-bound species, to actual space travelers. 

Spinoffs from that effort affected us from then on. Suddenly anything, literally, was possible; all we needed was a clear target. Other disciplines were caught up in the excitement; almost all opened their outlooks to dramatic new possibilities. Chemists and physicists moved to complete the Periodic Table of the Elements; archaeologists took bold new ideas about our past; biologists began to anticipate extraterrestrial life. And land management?

Well, land management managed to successfully evade any effort to update or energize our thinking. In the US in the 1970s, the accepted wisdom of Range Management was hardly different from what it had been in 1930, or for that matter in 1905. The dramatic accomplishments of satellite imagery were largely used to bolster the status quo, which had a common theme: grazing, as practiced by traditional pastoralists, did not follow acceptable rules of management as determined by established academics. 

Remote imagery was interpreted through the lens of first-world prejudice, which took as a given, that ancient pastoralist cultures were responsible for the extensive land degradation across the planet. Vast projects were created and funded to teach traditional herding cultures the errors of their ways; this would then bring about a great blooming of landscapes everywhere.

Somewhere along the line a few faint voices began to grow louder, refuting the academic line. Results of the vast projects were generally disastrous, accomplishing very little, or no, improvement and displacing much of the pastoralist base they were supposed to improve. But by the 1990s the strategy of blame had become academia's, and officialdom's, most prized institution; careers and rewards were regularly boosted among the fraternity, if not with the occupiers of the land. 

Now we have passed the millennium. The evidence is eloquent that our academic understanding of grazing has been wrong; around the world efforts to correct and clarify have revealed dramatic breakthroughs and hence, dramatic blooming of landscapes.

However, half a century after these efforts have shown great promise, the land management institutions of the world have done little to acknowledge their errors. Here is the proof: ask any technician or range specialist to scientifically define the most basic term of their discipline: "grazing".

 Eric Schwennesen is a commercial beef rancher in the Mogollon Rim country. He grew up in Belgium, cowboyed in Nevada, and helped Navajos and many African peoples with rangeland conflicts for over 35 years. He recently published "The Field Journals: Adventures in Pastoralism" about his experiences.