Be There for the Conversation

The discipline of rangeland ecology and management has always excelled in integrating the basic sciences of soils, plant physiology, animal science, wildlife biology, sociology . . . but most of us prefer to leave the sociology to sociologists, who are usually called sociologists even if they work on agricultural and natural resource issues. With confl icts raging around the West over the highest and best use of rangelands, I am reminded of opening comments given by the dean of the College of Forestry, Wildlife, and Range at the University of Idaho in an introductory natural resources course. He said that if we (the students, mostly freshmen) were looking for a profession in which we could disappear into the wilds and do fi eldwork we were in the wrong place. Unless one is content to remain at the bottom of the pay scale, a career in any natural resource fi eld will be people work, and the greatest gains to be had in our management of natural resources are accomplished through successfully infl uencing people, not soils, plants, or animals. People are much more challenging to work with. We have different values, different worldviews, different life experiences, and different knowledge bases, and we don’t always apply the Golden Rule (love your neighbor as yourself). This is not rocket science—it’s much more complicated than that. As a consequence of several range meetings in the past 12 months, I have done a fair bit of unsupervised thinking on the nature and future of the Society for Range Management. One common thread of these meetings has been that we need to bring more people into our fold than just strict range types. Most employees of the various wildlife agencies, federal and state, do more range work than they do wildlife work. They are often more engaged in manipulating habitat than they are studying animal population dynamics, for example. And they are usually entangled in some way in the high-profi le confl icts over uses of public lands. Invite them to Spokane! Another common thread is the feeling that livestock producers, fast becoming an endangered species, should be more actively engaged in the SRM than they are. Modern as well as very old sociology recognizes the experiential knowledge of landowners and users as critical to the success of any large-scale strategy to improve or conserve land. If we as a profession are not relevant to ranchers, we are failing. If ranchers don’t maintain functional ecosystems, they will eventually fail. When ranchers fail, the result is usually less ecosystem goods and services, not more. As long as there are intact, contiguous ecosystems there is the possibility of improving them. Cul-de-sacs don’t sink much carbon or fi lter much water. So it is not enough to be the keeper of the science. Communication must go both ways and knowledge is useless unless rangeland users are engaged in application. Incidentally, or perhaps not incidentally, this is the theme of the 2012 SRM annual meeting in Spokane: Winter Dance—Lessons From the Past, Strategies for the Future. Be there for the conversation. Many academics, landowners, and environmentalists recognize that unless we maintain critical habitat for this keystone species, ranchers, the social and environmental cost will be high. The limiting factor may well be the social component of range management. We know enough to manage land and livestock sustainably. We know enough to do that profi tably. I believe that the social response to livestock grazing is shifting such that many of the various “publics” are beginning to value this truly sustainable food and fi ber production system. I can’t resist passing along this quote from Jim Corbett of the Malpai Borderlands Group: