Keynote Speaker 1-Dr. Nathan Sayre

Nathan:  “Thank you Ben, and Bill, and Malpai.  It’s a pleasure to be here.  Thank you all for coming.  I am in the very,  very closing stages of finishing a book which I have been working on for probably 15 years…if you include all of the research,  and all the time when I was down here.   It’s a history of ‘range science,’ more than a history of grazing.  It’s a topic which for whatever reason, maybe lack of interest, has almost never been written about.   It’s a topic that historians have neglected.   And in the next couple of weeks I hope to send out the final version.  The University of Chicago Press, if they work quickly, might have it out by the end of this year.

   There are many, many people, including quite a few people in this room, who have helped me in all sorts of different ways over the years.  I have learned a lot from them.   This includes scientists and a lot of ranchers.  I would particularly like to single out Kris Havstad.  There he is hiding... under his hat.  He and the Jornada Experimental Range were extremely helpful and supportive in all this.

   And I want to thank Malpai and all the people here.  In addition to the research about scientists and the history of the Forest service and other agencies. …I needed to learn what I have learned from the ranchers… about what it really takes and what it means to try to manage ranchland well.   Without that knowledge I wouldn’t have had the perspective I needed to tell this history.  So thank you everyone.

   As I said…the history of range science has been almost completely neglected.  Little more than a chapter of a book has been published by historians.  Even ranch scientists have written only a dozen or so articles on the topic.  The history in the South West has been particularly overlooked even though it was here that the flaws of conventional range science were most evident.  And the work of scientists at places like the Santa Rita Experimental Ranch outside Tucson and Jornada Experimental Ranch outside Las Cruces is extremely important in this history.   This is especially true in the formative early period between about 1900 and 1930, and that’s the period I will focus on today.

   If there are two things that are well established from the existing literature on the history of range science it is these:  First, everyone agrees that ranch science took as its foundation, the ecological theory of Frederic E. Clements.  Frederic Clements put forward a theory known as Plant Succession, which held that vegetation communities move through defined stages in a linear sequence,  (hence  ’succession’) that was fixed by climate and soils.  As adapted for range management purposes, this theory understood livestock grazing as pushing  vegetation backwards against its natural tendency.. The natural tendency being to move through these stages (eg. rocks, lichens, annual plants, perennial plants, trees…) to a climax that would be stable…That climax would be fixed by climate and soils.  The more you grazed it the more it would push back…in what came to be known as ‘retrogression’.   And it would push that vegetation community for example back from perennials to annuals.  Secondary succession was the result of these interacting forces.  The vegetation community would therefore be a function of grazing intensity or ‘stocking rate.’

   If you got the right stocking rate you could essentially make the vegetation stay put wherever you wanted it to stay in this series of stages.   It followed that reducing or removing livestock would naturally result in recovery towards original or climax conditions.  The key question thus became…how much grazing pressure to apply to a given piece of range land.

   The second thing that everyone agrees on is that… this was WRONG .  Clemencian theory didn’t work in many places, and especially didn’t work in places like the southwest.  We are talking about drier places where rainfall was highly variable and unpredictable.  In these places reducing or removing livestock does not necessarily   result in recovery, and the amount of grazing pressure may be of little significance compared to other factors…factors such as rainfall, but also fire, drought, and various other more or less random forces such as extreme weather events.    So the embrace of Clemencian theory by range science was a mistake.

   The obvious question… is why it took so long for this mistake to be recognized and accepted.  As it turns out it was recognized quite early on by scientists working in the southwest at places like the Santa Rita and the Jornada.   It was only the acceptance of this mistake that was delayed by something like 60 years.  Clemencian theory was not so much embraced by scientists, I believe, as it was imposed on them by larger political and economic circumstances largely beyond their control.  These forces produced a number of blind spots and mistakes that could have been avoided and there are lessons that can be drawn from this history about how to avoid such mistakes and how to understand how we got to the point where we are. 

    And I believe there are actually some reasons for optimism at the end of this story, even if it seems like a story of mistakes.   I’m going to try to fill this argument in for you by describing a handful of important moments and relatively unknown events in the history of range science.    

     The first took place in 1907 in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon, an area where sheep grazing was well established.   You can see (referring to charts) where sheep grazing was in some cases spread out, and in other cases bunched together.  The experiment that was conducted was called the “Coyote Proof Pasture Experiment.”   Up until this point, to the extent that any scientific research had been done about range lands…it had been done by an agency within the USDA called The Bureau of Plant Industry.

     The chief botanist for this new project  was Frederick Covill, son of a banker from upstate New York.   He hired James Jardine and Arthur Sampson to lead the project, and Gifford Pinchot who was the head of the new Forest Service created in 1905 (showed pictures of these men).   This was the first time the Forest Service had done range research.   Pinchot and Coville came up with an idea of fencing off a piece of ranchland, getting rid of all the predators that might harass sheep, and then putting the sheep in that pasture  without herders or dogs.   Herders and dogs were the typical way to tend sheep at the time.

      The theory was that the sheep wouldn’t run around so much trying to get away from dogs and coyotes etc, and they would graze more efficiently.   They also knew that this would mean that sheep owners wouldn’t need to hire so many herders any more.   This was actually the kind of quiet, background, ulterior motive of the studies--to figure out how to reduce the labor requirements of raising sheep on the range.   Labor was expensive in the west, and they hoped that with the fence and the elimination of predators the costs would go down.     Any cost of the fence would be made up by the reduced hired labor costs.                         

     So, in 1907Coville got on the train in Washington DC and he started west and he stopped in Lincoln Nebraska at the University of Nebraska, and met with Clements.   He asked if Clements had any ecologists that he might offer for this project.    Arthur Sampson was just finishing up his master’s degree, and Clements said to Coville... “This is your guy”.  (Which may have been because Sampson was kind of a boisterous, rowdy, partying, athletic type and Clement was the most uptight, anal, scientific nerd you have ever met?   I don’t think Clements wanted Sampson to do a PhD under him. )   Sampson signed on.  Coville continued west, stopped in Wyoming and met with a prominent sheep owner who advised him about the virtues of fencing and getting rid of herders, and then he stopped in Logan, Utah   and he hired Jardine, who was teaching and lecturing at Utah State University.   Sampson and Jardine went with Coville out to the Wallowa Mountains and oversaw this experiment.

     The importance of this experiment is hard to exaggerate in the history of range science; because before they had even starting collecting any data they were convinced it was a huge success.  The Forest Service people in DC were just thrilled at the success of this experiment.

   You can see this fencing was not a minor undertaking. (Slides of fence shown here)    They had to cut down a lot of trees.  It was only 4 square miles (2 miles on a side) for a total of 8 miles of fence, but they were trying to keep out ALL predators.   They didn’t just put up a 4-wire barbed wire fence.  They put barb wire in the dirt underneath, wire across the top, they wrapped the tops of the posts with barbed wire so cats couldn’t jump up on it, they used special sheep fencing, and they cut back all the trees on the outside perimeter by a large margin so the cats couldn’t jump from a branch across the fence.

    The fence cost a fortune, it didn’t really succeed in keeping all the coyotes out, and bears had a habit of just going right through it.   Nonetheless, they put a bunch of sheep in there.   Oh, and they also had to hire a hunter with his hound dogs to cruise the perimeter every day.  Whenever his dogs caught scent of a predator they tracked it and if they could catch up with it they killed it.   (By the way, the costs of this hunter ended up not being included in their calculations of the cost effectiveness of the project.) 

    They concluded that in fact you could raise the forage more efficiently, and you got more weight gain, more wool clip per acre of land, very low loses from predators and you didn’t have the cost of the herders.   So the success of this experiment enshrined fencing and enshrined predator control as central conditions for Range Science and management.   It’s important to understand also that if you got rid of the herders you got rid of one of the most difficult variables in the picture from a scientific point of view.   Colville and Jardine both knew that some herders were better than others, and a good herder could be just as good as a fence and a bunch of predator control, and a bad herder maybe not.   But as a scientist how do you control or measure for that?  How do you draw conclusions about good and bad herders?   So, getting rid of the herders and putting the fence around the land gave you an element of control that was very important from a scientific perspective.    It allowed you to essentially hold out a variable that would otherwise be more or less intractable

     The pictures of this experiment are lovely.   (showing a series of photos of the hunter with his cabin, bear skins etc, and some publications by Jardine written about their successes.)

     Let’s move forward to 1914.  In 1914, Congress passed legislation authorizing the Bureau of Biological Survey, yet another agency within the USDA, to control predators and pests on all lands nationwide.   This is important, because up to this point efforts to control predators and pests (such as prairie dogs) had been fragmented.  Some land types were open to programs like this and other s not.  This legislation said the Bureau of Biological Survey is going to get money and they will have authority to do this everywhere.

    Here is a photo from an 1897 Bureau of Biological Survey publication about rabbit driving.  This event took place in a central valley in California in 1892.  This is how it worked….you got several thousand people, spread them out over  an enormous area,  and they start beating bushes and scaring the rabbits out of the brush towards a V shaped kind of shute that would then open into a corral.   If the rabbit tried to turn back you just clubbed it over the head.  If it ended up in the corral you clubbed it over the head there.  They killed about 20,000 of them in this particular rabbit drive.  

    The reason I think this is important is first because it was not done by the Bureau of Plant Industry   or the Forest Service.   It was done by a different agency.   They got rid of wolves across huge areas and prairie dogs across huge areas.  They got rid of any number of other things with more or less success.  They did reduce the presence of predators and pests.   In many cases this happened initially because settlers wanted to do it.   It wasn’t because government got it started or wanted to do it.        But Government got very enthusiastic about this because it helped build support among constituencies.  Of course, once the government got into it they figured out how to do it really, really thoroughly.

     All of this took elements out of the range lands--potentially important ecological elements-- that were gone now.   The problem was that range scientists in many cases now began to forget to think about the disappearance of these critters, and they began to think that the current range was the natural condition of range lands.  The absence of predators or pests wasn’t something that occurred to them in most cases.   I think this created a blind spot for range science.    The possibility that wolves or prairie dogs might have played a role in shaping the vegetation of these landscapes kinda fell out of view.   It was not well recognized, indeed scarcely even studied, until well after the persecution had taken place.

(Looking back at the picture of the rabbits)

 1915…in this year all grazing and range related research within the USDA was transferred from                  the Bureau of Plant Industry to the Forest Service.   The Bureau of Plant Industry had been the lead agency for such research since 1895, but the Forest Service had created its own office of Range and Forage Plant Investigations in 1910, and they had put James Jardine in charge of it.   The apparent duplication of effort caught the attention of administrators.  With its extensive base of grazing lands, and growing research apparatus, the Forest Service got the nod, taking over the Santa Rita and Jornada range reserves in the process.    

    There is no evidence that the Bureau of Plant Industry resisted this takeover as its attention was             primarily devoted to crops and agriculture anyway.  The significance of this transfer cannot be overstated.  Frankly   the Forest Service did not see range lands as a priority compared to timber production, and it treated range science as something of a step child.  It was interested in range research primarily because it was seen as a means of addressing a politically sensitive problem --namely ranchers.   Their presence on the national forest lands predated the agency and they also frequently exercised significant political power through western congressmen.

     In range, as in other areas, the Forest Service expected science to provide answers (that is, the right answers) to questions posed by and for the administration.    It was an administrative ‘agenda’    in which science was intended to validate help.  If range scientists produced results that were at odds with other more important priorities of the agencies those scientists would not find success.    And this was particularly pronounced in respect to fire.   Basically, until many, many years later, you could not publish a paper that said fire in any way could be a good force ecologically.  This held true absolutely true for Forest Service scientists, and it held almost completely true for any scientists who worked in the USDA.   There was a scientist who published a paper in the 1920’s.  He worked in the southeastern US.   He suggested that cattle would gain more weight on land that had recently been burned.   He lost his job for doing it.  He didn’t even work for the Forest Service; he worked for the Bureau of Animal Industry.

Next slide…1919…These two Publications came out back to back.  The first was by Jardine and Mark Anderson.   Jardine had become head of grazing research in the Forest Service, with the title Inspector of Grazing.      The second was by Arthur Sampson who had been hired by the Forest Service to run the Great Basin experimental station in Utah.  In these two publications, both in the same series from the USDA ,  Jardine and Anderson laid out the administrative framework for Forest Service grazing for the next 50 years.   “This is how we do it folks,” they said.     Sampson laid out a scientific argument from the ideas that Clements had developed and had taught him, and he applied them to range management.                                      It became the most important paper for range scientists for at least the next 30 years. 

     Government agencies are really good at leaving paperwork behind, and the National Archives and Records Administration is really good at keeping track of them.   And so you can find all those memos and internal reports that people like Jardine wrote to their superiors.   You find out what they were really thinking, as distinct from what they put in their publications.  And this was critical to putting this story together.  In his annual report in 1919 James Jardine misinterpreted the results of Arthur Samson’s research in the Wasatch Mounts of the Great Basin experimental station.                                   

    Sampson had shown that plant succession could be used to detect overgrazing early so that management adjustments could be made before lasting damage to the range occurred.   He suggested that if you look at the composition of the vegetation and you detect signs of retrogression, that’s the evidence you need that there is too much grazing going on.  You catch it before the animals begin losing weight or dying or before the damage is too severe.   This was the contribution that caught Jardine’s eye.  He thought “Amen, finally we can avoid these problems by detecting signs of damage early on.” But Jardine took this one step further.   He was well aware that forage production varied widely year to year.   He had in fact headed the Jornada Experimental Range just a few years earlier.  When he was there he had advised that stocking rates should be adjustable, with at least a 30 percent up and down, year to year adjustment to match forage production. 

   But in 1919 he took Sampson’s work to mean that once you determined what the correct stocking rate was for a grazing allotment further adjustments would no longer be necessary.  You would find the right number and you would stick with it.  This avoided forcing the rancher to reduce the herd back and forth, up and down, and you could avoid the bureaucratic hassle of figuring out what that stocking number should be.  Sampson had said no such thing.  He had not in fact directly studied stocking rates at all.  But Jardine appears to be motivated by the needs of the ranchers and the Forest Service bureaucracy.

    Ranchers wanted to be able to capitalize their forest leases.   They wanted to be able to borrow against their leases.  Bankers, in order to do this needed to know how many livestock a lease would produce in order to collateralize the loan.  And the bureaucrats wanted to avoid restocking charges every year for administrative convenience, and because they knew such charges would probably result in disputes with ranchers.

    That misinterpretation, that idea that Clemencian ecology ratified static stocking, is I believe the most important mistake in the history of range science.   And it was clearly not done on the basis of science, although it may have looked that way.   It was done from an administrator’s point of view.  This was an administrative need and not justified by the science itself.  Clements himself was emphatic about the need to adjust stocking rates in response to variable rainfall.   And Sampson didn’t say you could keep stocking rates constant either.      Nonetheless, somehow the authority of Clemencian theory as a scientific theory got attached to a policy that was about stocking rates that suggested that there was a fixed stocking rate for a given pasture.

1920…In this year assistant district forester  John Hatton  published a circular called “Livestock Grazing as a Factor in Fire Protection on the National Forests.”   It summarized the results of a survey to 160 district rangers in 1912.  (I’m not sure why it took 8 years to get this published.)   He got 120 responses back, and from the responses he calculated that the average size of fires on ungrazed Forest Service land   was 273 acres.   The averages size of fires on ‘normally stocked’ land was 15 acres, and the average size of fires on overgrazed lands was just 4 acres.  Eighty one percent of the respondents agreed that grazing reduced the incidence of fires, and more detailed records from 7 national forests showed that “grazing causes an average reduction in the number of fires of over 60%.”

     Hatton’s concluding recommendations closely resembled those made by James Jardine 5 years earlier at a lecture he gave at the Yale School of Forestry.  Jardine noted that grazing reduced fuel loads, and that stock trails and driveways could serve as fire lines and improve fire fighters access to remote areas.  Water sources developed for livestock could also aid in firefighting.  Jardine even went so far as to advocate overgrazing of strategic points, where the sacrifice of a small area will aid in the protection of a much larger and more valuable area.  Not only was grazing a benefit for fire protection but the need for fire protection justified investments to open up remote forest areas to livestock grazing.   In other words, build bridges over creeks or build roads so that ranchers could get their livestock in and reduce the fire risk in those areas.  He wrote “livestock grazing in the national forests is an important factor in fire protection.  The benefits outweigh the harmful effects and   the net gain is an advantage for conservation.”       

    Hatton repeated all these recommendations,   many in identical language.   I suspect he just borrowed them from Jardine’s lectures.  He also called for research into lightning incidents to help identify the best locations for driveways and strategic points for possible amelioration by grazing; in other words, let’s find out where lightning strikes the most often and we will go graze it really heavily.

     As far as I know, Hatton’s publication was the last time the Forest Service publically admitted that ‘overgrazing’ (using that word)might be justified as a means to the end of fire suppression.    Employees (here the archives prove useful again) in the Forest Service discussed the idea internally in memos and at conferences throughout the 1920’s.   They all agreed on the benefits of grazing for fire suppression, and they endorsed it, but they stopped short of calling for overgrazing.   Instead they used terms such as     normal grazing, full grazing, careful grazing, moderate grazing, and regulated grazing.  Obviously this was in part a matter of optics, endorsing overgrazing as policy would have been impolitic. 

     But it wasn’t just optics, it was also a genuine scientific problem.    Despite some 30 years of research up to this point in time, range scientists still couldn’t answer the question of exactly where does normal grazing turn into overgrazing.  They still couldn’t figure out what the correct stocking rate was.   They knew a given piece of range could support wildly different levels of livestock in one year compared to another, and the impacts of grazing were inconsistent and largely unpredictable.   Data from the Jornada and Santa Rita ranches suggested that in fact maybe light grazing was better than no grazing.  They had incidents where the same number of stock in one year did no apparent damage and in another year did dramatic damage.   So, how to identify a stocking rate that would be normal, and how that was different from overgrazing, was something they couldn’t do yet.  

    The weird thing is that after 1930 the entire question of grazing as a method of fire suppression vanished completely from the documentary records.  It simply stops being discussed.  You don’t find publications about it and you don’t find internal reports about it.  It occasionally comes up in very oblique ways in memos.  There is a great one I found for Bill McDonald’s allotment from the 1930’s.  It reads...”This allotment is really well managed.  We’ve got really good grass.  There’s a fire risk here.”    So they knew about this…but they never talk about it again.  Why?

1926:  Introducing Earle Clapp…Clapp was head of the branch of research for the Forest Service for many years, and in 1926 he enshrined Successional Theory as the foundation for all grazing research in the agency.   He headed a committee convened by the Society of American foresters” (There were two other members; none of them were range scientists.)   They wrote a report called.  “A National Program of Forest Research” which was published by The American Tree Association.   It was 232 pages long, in which 16 pages were about range issues.   It explicitly declared that Forest Service range management and range research would be subordinate to the production of timber.  Based solely on the work of Sampson in the Wasatch, Clapp and his co-authors announced that Successional Theory was the way range research would be conducted.  This was how it would be financed.  They candidly admitted that in fact we had very few answers to the outstanding questions of range management.  But Successional Theory, as we knew from Sampson, was the way to proceed.

    Beginning two years later in 1928, when funding for the Forest Service research apparatus dramatically increased, Clapp was able to impose this decision nationally.  Range scientists in the southwest had not previously formulated their research in terms of Succession at all, but after 1930 this suddenly changed, even though in most cases the actual results did not square very well with Succession Theory.   It’s really quite striking.   There are lots of documents from the Santa Rita and Jornado archives to look at; published reports, internal reports, and memos.  But up until 1930 you simply never see anyone talking about succession, or retrogression or Clemencian Theory.  Then, suddenly in 1930, the papers start to frame everything in that language, even when it is tortured, and even, for example, when they are struggling to really feel good about an idea like black grama being the climax in a site.

    I believe this was a defining moment.   Clapp had expanded the research programs, he merged grazing research with the rest of the bureaucratic research, he divided the west into five regions each with its own forest and range experiment station, and he consolidated things.  He more or less said if you want to publish scientific results about forest and range lands this has got to be the framework.   He probably didn’t need to say this, he just simply signaled this to his mid-level bureaucrats and they passed the word on down.

    Perhaps this is the most interesting point to draw out of all this...The evidence is only circumstantial, but I believe that it is pretty strong, that the Forest Service and Clapp had an unspoken, ulterior motive for embracing Clemencian Theory; fire suppression.  I think the silence about grazing as a tool for fire suppression, the embrace of Clements at the same time in about 1930, coinciding with the reorganization and expansion of range research, I think they are connected.   Jardine’s misinterpretation of Sampson’s research sanctioned static stocking rates.  Static stocking rates set to match average forage production guaranteed that grass coverage would be minimal at just the same time as fire risk was highest-- at times of drought.  The fire folks and the Forest Service had complained about this.  They had said ’in extreme drought periods there is nothing we can do to stop fires.  It’s impossible to stop fires in extreme drought years.’    If you set an average stocking rate in a wet year you’ll have an abundance of grass relative to the herd.  In dry years you might not have any grass at all.   They knew this, and they knew how it would dramatically reduce the spread of fire and its ignition.

     As the survey had revealed, grazing reduced fire frequency and fire sizes.   Fire suppression had by this time become the Forest Service’s highest priority.   Exactly what constituted overgrazing was still an elusive question precisely because forage production varied so widely with erratic precipitation. But a science that ratified grazing at rates high enough to suppress fires when the rains failed, but low enough to allow grasses to recover during wet periods, met the agency’s needs perfectly.

     There’s a lot more I could go into about what happens next...particularly in the 1940s and 1950s.  I want, however, to focus on the broader contours of what this did--to the subsequent history of the science and to the politics around rangelands.   Clemencian Theory as it was adapted to range management in the Forest Service set the terms for the political struggles of the last 75 years.  Everyone argued about stocking rates and what’s the right number?  Ranchers wanted more, the agency wanted less,   environmentalists wanted none at all because that’s the best?  Right?

     All basically working within the framework of this adapted Clemencian Theory in which the question is--how many livestock you have.  That’s the variable you can control, that’s the variable that is economically important to the rancher.   That’s what everyone was fighting about, and to some degree there are still people fighting about it in those terms.  But the theory underlying it was flawed, and as a result the debate could not be resolved.

     Range scientists started doing a lot of this (presents slides showing transects and measuring vegetation).   The more the agency needed authoritative numbers to fight back in Congress or with ranchers, the more arcane and complicated and sophisticated and detailed these types of methods tended to become.  Monitoring got more and more apparently precise with more numbers, more calculations, more pages of data, all in the pursuit of this elusive, correct stocking rate. 

    Ironically, even as stocking rates were reduced in many places you didn’t see the return of the grasses that had once been there, and the search was on to ‘fix’ the problem by resorting to chemicals, to heavy equipment,  to non-native grasses.   Here you see (referring to numerous slides) more people looking at the ground while mesquite trees tower over them (chuckles from audience)and here a calculation of the stocking rate as an average based on rainfall and forage production, and here’s a guy examining the success of a grass reseeding.   This next picture I love.  Here they are out in the sage brush and they have removed all the sagebrush and are planting non-native grasses to see if they can figure out how to turn this area into grassland.  Clearly adjusting stocking rates wasn’t working, and for many years there was an expensive pursuit of these technological fixes.

    To wrap up, I guess these are my concluding thoughts.   First, Range Science was born in and from politics.  It was called into being by agencies, especially the Forest Service, and the story gets more complicated when other agencies got involved after the depression, like the soil conservation service and the BLM.   It actually changed things significantly because these are scientists now that don’t have to work under the Forest Service priorities.  I think the scientists themselves had motives that were pure enough.   I don’t think they were duped or malicious in intent.  I think they were honestly doing the best they could to figure out was what in fact a genuinely difficult and complicated set of problems.   But the context within which they worked belied any idea of science as a pure pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

     I think the assumption at the outset was that science was needed, and in fact would be authoritative precisely because ranchers didn’t really know how range lands worked or how best to manage their livestock sustainably.   In the 1890s and 1900’s most of the ranchers, or at least the ones they were trying to help,  were relative newcomers to these landscapes, and didn’t necessarily have very much experience, and you might have legitimately said they didn’t know what they were doing.  So therefore the scientists were needed to come in and figure it out.  At this point in time I think it is fair to say that assumption is not true.  The ranchers that are still out there by this point, at least many of them, have been doing it for a long time.  And they probably know at lot.   In fact they may know more than the scientists about how to do this.

     Fortunately an alternative to Clemencian Theory emerged roughly in the 1980’s, and it has begun to take hold within the agencies, particularly in the BLM and NRCS.   The Forest Service is a little bit more resistant to it.    I think it is also fortunate that the scientists themselves now have the freedom to acknowledge that the old theory was wrong and to try to rethink these things.  Many of them in fact have concluded that these systems are very complex, very idiosyncratic, very site specific and that the history of a given piece of ranch land makes it unique in ways that you need to understand.  In fact, the ranchers that have managed that land for a long time do know a great deal, and the scientists need to learn that.  They need to learn things from those ranchers, rather than pretending that the ranchers need to learn from them.  

     All of these things give me an element of hope.   We now understand, and maybe even the Forest Service acknowledges, that natural recovery does not automatically result from reduced grazing.   And original conditions might not be a realistic or appropriate goal.  We have room within this new theory for the possibility that fire may be necessary and beneficial as a tool for sustaining range lands in the conditions most desirable for ranchers and society alike.

     So, I hope it is fair to say that we have learned from these mistakes.   It probably is too soon to say if the new theory in the long run will prove to be ’The Answer.’   There may not be a single answer.   But I think we are somewhere now that is better than where we were fifty years ago.

Thank you.

Questions from audience

Q  I propose that there may be a larger context here than just the context of plant ecology where generally Clemencian ideas held on for so long and up until very recently among people even not in these kinds of landscapes?  Why is that that the scientists were so blind to the fact that succession is not always the process that dominates ecology?

Dr Sayre:   There have been a number of attempts to sort of pin down Clements and his influence in plant ecology.  The most detailed look at it suggests that there is this sort of sequence where any theory builds up its support and becomes sort of ascendant and dominant, and then eventually it begins to be battered by critics, and goes down.   The peak period of Clemencian dominance from an academic point of view was between WWI and WWII—the interwar years.   Another factor here is that during that time half of all the PhDs in ecology granted in the US were granted from the University of Nebraska.  After about 1940 it starts to lose its grip.

     We need to note that there ARE landscapes where succession theory works better.  It is not like the theory is wrong everywhere.  In a lot of contexts perhaps it is perfectly appropriate.  Neil West, a range scientist, wrote an interesting series of papers in which he touches on this.   After 1940 or 45 the academic ecological community was aware of the weaknesses of Clemencian theory and started to move away from it.  But within the range science community it hung on because of reasons more institutional than scientific. Range science was kinda ‘wed’ to this theory and stuck with it.   It was caught in a kind of political crossfire in which deviating from it would have been unacceptable.  Because if you deviate from it, what are you left with?

Kris Havstad:  Another factor that definitely is playing a role is the textbooks being used...(partly inaudible....lists folks  writing the text books for range science...and some time period) and they were still using those Clemencian theories and terminology in writing the texts.  So the students were still getting it fed to them, and it’s hard to go against a textbook.

Dr Sayre:  And in respect to International stuff since WWII.  As the UN and FAO and USAID started to develop pastoral landscapes in Africa and  Latin American they would call in people  like Sampson, and flew them overseas to give the pastoralists of Africa the ‘wisdom’ of our range science.   In that context the flaws of the theory became even more obvious, and other people began to notice.  European social scientist in particular were saying “Why are you feeding them that stuff?”  That came back at us around the 1980s.

Q:  The cattle ranchers at the time were only given loans from the banks based on the number of cattle that they had.  They didn’t care about what the plants were doing. They wanted as many cattle as possible.  So really it’s a banking problem, and a failure by the banks to see that they needed to protect their investments.

Dr Sayre:   Yes, great point.  The Bankers were demanding regular returns from irregular landscapes.  They were demanding an annual payment at a certain interest rate no matter what, whether it rained or not.   Here is the irony in that...there is a chapter in my book about efforts to measure the range and the political battles around stocking rates.  If you go pour through the Forest Service historical allotment files it looks like the stocking rate never changed.  You read over and over every year 320 units, 320 units, 320 units.   It only seems to change if the ranch changes hands or it’s a condition of a re-lease agreement.  So it looks like the stocking rate was the same no matter what year to year.    But, when I talk to the ranchers and read between the lines of the various reports, I don’t think the ranchers never adjusted their stocking numbers.   I think they did to the extent that they could, but if they were under the pressure of loan payments they had much less flexibility.    There’s the irony; that we have vast piles of files and miles of paperwork purporting to tell us how many animals were out there on each allotment, when really we don’t have any idea.

Q:  Re the Book “Politics of Grass.”  How has it held up?

Dr Sayre:  I don’t think it has been declaimed or denounced as somehow inadequate, but I think it has been superseded by more thorough treatments written since then. That book was particularly about BLM.  Karen Merrill wrote a book about 15 years ago on the same vein.  I don’t think she takes issue with Politics of Grass, but she goes into much greater detail on the politics etc...   She benefits like I did from the voluminous bureaucratic records of the BLM.  She also dug into the records of the livestock associations.  It’s a ‘richer’ account I think.

Q:  Is there any difference between carrying capacity and stocking rate?

Dr Sayre:  Yes, from an academic or semantic point they are different.  Stocking rate is more descriptive,  and is simply how many animals do you have  per unit of land or pound of forage.  Carrying capacity implies a longer term judgment about the ability of a piece of land, and is more about the average or norm compared to what you should have.  But, conceptually they are about the same.

(approximately 2 minutes of audience discussion here is inaudible and does not involve Dr Sayre).

Thank you!