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Few scientific experiments have influenced more land than one conducted in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon by the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Plant Industry and US Forest Service in 1907–1909. Four square miles of land were enclosed with a “coyote-proof fence,” guarded by a hunter, and stocked with an untended band of sheep. Data were collected on vegetation and sheep performance inside and outside the fence, and two years later success was declared. By 1910, the Forest Service had wrested range research from the Bureau of Plant Industry, subordinating the emerging field to timber production and fire suppression for decades to come. The young scientist who conducted the experiment, James Jardine, was promoted to Inspector of Grazing for the fledgling Forest Service, while his Wallowa collaborator, Arthur Sampson, went on to become “the father” of range science. The model of range management that they pioneered was applied across the US West and, later, on many rangelands in the developing world. Fencing and predator control are now generally viewed as unrelated management practices, but in the Forest Service model they were intimately connected. A critical physical geography of the Wallowa experiment reveals that the institutional context in which it occurred was more important than the findings themselves, and that although the results appeared to be scientifically rigorous and ecological, the methods were weak and the real criteria for “success” were economic. The high costs of fencing could be justified only if they were offset by a reduction in labor costs for herders. But without herders to guard the livestock, predators would have to be eliminated. Enormous public subsidies were required to implement the model, which continues to affect rangelands around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring is a critical component of adaptive management but often weak or missing in practice. We examined grazing allotment files to identify patterns in monitoring and management practices on the Coronado National Forest from 1927 to 2007, and conducted interviews with key informants to understand the mechanisms behind those patterns. Standardized, documented monitoring occurred on a near-annual basis on all allotments until 1978; ceased abruptly from 1978 to 1998; then resumed. Before 1978, monitoring frequently indicated excessive stocking, but reductions often did not occur. Interviews revealed that monitoring ceased for this reason, as agency employees turned to more informal methods in hopes of affecting management. Monitoring resumed in response to litigation by environmental groups. Curiously, more effective adaptive management of grazing allotments appears to have begun during the period when standardized monitoring was not occurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of diversified farming systems (DFS) rarely mention rangelands: the grasslands, shrublands, and savannas that make up roughly one-third of Earth's ice-free terrestrial area, including some 312 million ha of the United States. Although ranching has been criticized by environmentalists for decades, it is probably the most ecologically sustainable segment of the U.S. meat industry, and it exemplifies many of the defining characteristics of DFS: it relies on the functional diversity of natural ecological processes of plant and animal (re)production at multiple scales, based on ecosystem services generated and regenerated on site rather than imported, often nonrenewable, inputs. Rangelands also provide other ecosystem services, including watershed, wildlife habitat, recreation, and tourism. Even where non-native or invasive plants have encroached on or replaced native species, rangelands retain unusually high levels of plant diversity compared with croplands or plantation forests. Innovations in management, marketing, incentives, and easement programs that augment ranch income, creative land tenure arrangements, and collaborations among ranchers all support diversification. Some obstacles include rapid landownership turnover, lack of accessible U.S. Department of Agriculture certified processing facilities, tenure uncertainty, fragmentation of rangelands, and low and variable income, especially relative to land costs. Taking advantage of rancher knowledge and stewardship, and aligning incentives with production of diverse goods and services, will support the sustainability of ranching and its associated public benefits. The creation of positive feedbacks between economic and ecological diversity should be the ultimate goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term anthropogenic takes its meaning from an implied contrast to an idealist notion of nature as separate from humans and endowed with a timeless or cyclical equilibrium. In recent decades, however, scientists have concluded that human influences now dominate nature at global and geological scales, reflected in the contention that Earth has entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic global warming is central to these developments, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change obligates the international community of nations to 'prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.' Scientific debates surrounding anthropogenic impacts on the environment have a much longer history, however, revealing chronic empirical difficulties with the human-nature dualism combined with an inability to overcome it conceptually. Anthropologists have a key role to play in emerging transdisciplinary efforts to understand the anthropogenic across scales from the molecular to the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation easements have increased dramatically but their social and ecological outcomes are largely unknown. To examine the influence of social relations and institutional structure on easement design and conservation outcomes, we compared two regions where land trusts hold conservation easements protecting large areas of private rangeland: Lassen Foothills, California, and Malpai Borderlands, Arizona and New Mexico. We conducted interviews with landowners, land trust staff, and public agency employees, and analyzed easement documents and monitoring reports. Social relations and organization goals influenced easement terms and their direct effects on land use. Furthermore, easements had important indirect conservation-relevant outcomes resulting from increased land management resources, financial incentives, and altered relations among landowners, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Easements entail a combination of collaborative and regulatory approaches, and their embedded social relations are important for conservation outcome assessment. These findings have significant implications for how conservation programs are designed, monitored, enforced, and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical origins of ecological restoration in the arid and semiarid deserts of the southwestern USA. Scientific knowledge and aesthetic valuations both emerged during a period of acute environmental degradation between 1893 and 1905, strongly influencing subsequent debates and practices. In science and aesthetics alike, the historical nature of southwestern landscapes was occluded: Clementsian ecology and range science posited a climax condition and an "original capacity" for livestock, while aesthetic treatments such as those of John Van Dyke saw transcendent and timeless beauty in the dramatic dynamics of actively degrading landscapes. In recent decades, southwestern ecologists have renounced Clementsian ecology and its implied telos of "pristine" presettlement conditions. But aesthetic ideals continue to influence broader debates and practices of ecological restoration in the region, specifically with regard to grasslands, riparian areas, livestock grazing, and fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the environmental impact of the barrier built along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. It states that the construction was part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which mandated installation of fences, barriers, and surveillance technology on five segments of the border. However, it argues that the project may have myriad negative effects on wildlife, vegetation communities, and watershed functioning. It suggests that an adequate assessment of border hardening must consider social effects, which mediate both the ecological impacts.

Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under-acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary southwestern United States is characterized by fire-adapted ecosystems; large numbers of federally listed threatened and endangered species; a patchwork of federal, state, and private landownership; and a long history of livestock grazing as the predominant land use. I compared eight sites in southern Arizona and New Mexico to assess the interacting effects of these characteristics on conservation practices and outcomes. There was widespread interest and private-sector leadership in restoring fire to southwestern rangelands, and there is a shortage of predictive scientific knowledge about the effects of fire and livestock grazing on threatened and endangered species. It was easier to restore fire to lands that were either privately owned or not grazed, in part because of obstacles created by threatened and endangered species on grazed public lands. Collaborative management facilitated conservation practices and outcomes, and periodic removal of livestock may be necessary for conservation, but permanent livestock exclusion may be counterproductive because of interactions with land-use and landownership patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography — the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve 'the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions — rather than scale per se — should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the environmentalist's perspectives regarding cattle ranching which provides biodiversity and conservation values in the U.S. Based on Clementsian successional theory, two mainstream approaches would be seen to affect plant communities and productivity of nutrients and water cycling process. The author believed on the new ranch principle which sustain wildlife habitat, biological diversity and functioning watersheds.

While it is recognized that farming alternatively is inherently knowledge intensive, in the United States, farmer knowledge has been widely overlooked and under-documented within the scientific literature. Farmer knowledge of soil in particular is understudied in the US, especially given that healthy soils have been identified as the basis for resilient agriculture. Applying an exploratory, case study approach, we interviewed 13 organic farmers based in Yolo County, California to understand how organic farmers in this region acquire knowledge about their soils, to document what organic farmers in this region know about their soils, and to share key management practices organic farmers use to build soil health in the region. We found the organic farmers in this study acquire knowledge about their farming systems primarily through direct observation, personal experience, experimentation, and inherited wisdom. To evaluate soil health, farmers in this study cited using a range of indicators, including soil structure, crop health, growth habits of weeds, and soil biology. We found that these organic farmers possess extensive place-based knowledge of their local farming systems, and that this knowledge base represents an important source for innovation and adaptive management in scientific and policy-making contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to explain why and how increasing commoditization and incorporation in the market economy are only now leading to a critical transition from pastoralism to ranching in Central Africa. While there are similarities between pastoralism and capitalism—in both systems, entrepreneurs are strategically maximizing their "stock"—there are also differences. We argue that these differences can be understood as two distinct types of logic that are embedded within larger sociocultural systems: cattle logic and capital logic. Understanding how these logics operate within different systems is critical for explaining the current shift from pastoralism to ranching in Central Africa. We outline a theoretical model that integrates concepts from practice theory and the literature on critical transitions in social-ecological systems to explain the shift. We illustrate the theoretical model using a case comparison of three different livestock husbandry systems: Woɗaaɓe pastoralists in southeastern Niger, peri-urban Fulani pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, and Fulani ranchers in the Adamawa Region of Cameroon. We then use these cases to explain the persistence of cattle logic among the Woɗaaɓe in Niger, as well as the shift from cattle logic to capital logic among Fulani in Cameroon. Studying the transition from pastoralism to ranching is important because it has major implications, including increasing economic inequality, weaker community relations, and potential degradation of grazing lands, for livestock husbandry systems in Central Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science‐practice gap is often cited as a limitation to successful restoration outcomes; however, the existence of such a gap in information exchange is rarely measured. Here, we quantify the gap by focusing on common recommendations from both scientists (i.e. researchers) and managers (i.e. practitioners, land managers) on what is needed for successful restoration. We surveyed 45 managers associated with 244 invasive species (Tamarix spp.) removal projects across the southwestern U.S. to determine the degree to which they have utilized four strategies advocated by scientists: (1) collaborate widely, (2) monitor beyond cursory visual methods, (3) use a variety of information sources, and (4) consider project goals beyond invasive species removal. Half of these managers were also interviewed to assess managers' perceptions of the role of science in restoration. Twenty‐three scientists specializing in Tamarix‐related research in this region were also surveyed to assess how much they understood and/or shared the concerns of land managers. We found that managers were following scientists' recommendations and that managers' perceptions of the role of science in land management did not have any bearing on the management actions taken. Scientists reported being influenced by managers, and the concerns of scientists and managers were more overlapping than expected. Boundary organizations and river‐wide partnerships were often cited as important in facilitating effective communication between land managers and scientists. A lack of funding for monitoring and for longer‐term projects was cited by both groups as a limitation to incorporating scientists' recommendations into restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent opinion piece rekindled debate as to whether geography's current interdisciplinary make-up is a historical relic or an actual and potential source of intellectual vitality. Taking the latter position, we argue here for the benefits of sustained integration of physical and critical human geography. For reasons both political and pragmatic, we term this area of intermingled research and practice critical physical geography (CPG). CPG combines critical attention to power relations with deep knowledge of biophysical science or technology in the service of social and environmental transformation. We argue that whether practiced by individuals or teams, CPG research can improve the intellectual quality and expand the political relevance of both physical and critical human geography because it is increasingly impractical to separate analysis of natural and social systems: socio-biophysical landscapes are as much the product of unequal power relations, histories of colonialism, and racial and gender disparities as they are of hydrology, ecology, and climate change. Here, we review existing CPG work; discuss the primary benefits of critically engaged integrative research, teaching, and practice; and offer our collective thoughts on how to make CPG work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]