Description
Book SynopsisRangelands are vast, making up one quarter of the United States and forty percent of the Earth's ice-free land. And while contemporary science has revealed a great deal about the environmental impacts associated with intensive livestock production from greenhouse gas emissions to land and water degradation far less is known about the historic role science has played in rangeland management and politics. Steeped in US soil, this first history of rangeland science looks to the origins of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American west, exploring the larger political and economic forces that together with scientific study produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well being. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastr
