Author: Nathan F. SayrePublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608325X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Steeped in US soil, this first global history of rangeland science looks to the origin 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. Neither scientists nor public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy - from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities - contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates to this day. The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of these conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists. -- from back cover.