Abstract
Nomadic or itinerant livestock herding declined dramatically in the western United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. Historians have emphasized two causes of the decline: racial discrimination against herders and federal laws that restricted public lands grazing to owners of nearby private ranch properties. Range science played an important and overlooked intermediary role between these factors by linking the success of rangeland settlement to the purity of livestock breeds, the relative fitness of native versus non-native plants, and the supposed habits and traits of people of various types. Interconnected assumptions about race, nature, nation, and property were simultaneously incorporated into range research and euphemized via the norms and language of science itself. Producing range science as a science thus served to depoliticize and legitimize the dominance of land-owning, Anglo stockmen over western rangelands.
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Notes
- 1.
By this, I mean the first to study rangelands as such, rather than incidental to other kinds of research and exploration, such as geological investigations and surveys for railroad routes.
- 2.
“Agrostology,” from the Greek root agrōstis, is the botanical study of grasses. As the name of a government agency, it seems never to have caught on, requiring a parenthetical definition “(Grass and Forage Plant Investigations)” in official publications.
- 3.
The phrase appeared in quotation marks in the report, presumably alluding without attribution to John Muir. Muir was not a member of the Academy’s National Forestry Committee, which wrote the report, but he was closely and publicly associated with it. Five years later, John Minto (1902, 233, emphasis in original) pithily wrote, “The epithets used [to disparage sheep] are the worn coin of the half insane but charming Carlylian writer on mountains and forests, John Muir.”
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Acknowledgments
In writing this chapter, I benefited from generous and constructive feedback from many people, including Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, Diana Davis; participants in a seminar discussion hosted by University of California-Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix, including Bill Hanks, Carla Hesse, Marion Fourcade, Terry Regier, Lynsay Skiba, and Istvan Rev; and a number of graduate students with whom I am fortunate to work, including Christopher Lesser, Julia Sizek, Robert Parks, and Mike Simpson. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Sayre, N.F. (2018). Race, Nature, Nation, and Property in the Origins of Range Science. In: Lave, R., Biermann, C., Lane, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_16
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