Description:
What happens when you dare talk about evicting cows from the West? If you're professor Debra Donahue, a considerably nonplussed Wyoming state senator threatens to introduce legislation to dissolve your employer, the University of Wyoming law school. While Senator Jim Twiford's threat can be viewed as a stunt, there's no denying that Donahue and her book The Western Range Revisited have upset the status quo in this arid state with a population less than that of Salt Lake City. Specifically, Donahue recommends livestock be removed from public lands "receiving 12 inches of precipitation or less annually." To support this argument, she examines a bumper crop of scientific evidence pointing to "severe degradation of western ranges" caused by overgrazing--and, in the process, unravels a complex tangle of regional politics and culture that foster such overgrazing. Why, for instance, does the livestock industry enjoy such political clout when it employs so few people? One reason, explains Donahue, is that the relatively unpopulous intermountain West "accounts for approximately one-third of the total Senate membership; thus westerners generally wield disproportionate influence on the Senate." Resulting from this influence, says Donahue, are two fallacies that conspire to keep livestock on the range despite poor return on investment and egregious environmental damage: "Public land grazing is important to the economic base of local communities, if not the region, and the ranching way of life merits preservation, both for its own sake and as a means of preserving the West's open spaces." Cowboys take their lumps, too, from the author's cultural demythologizing: to wit, the so-called rugged individualists of Catron County, New Mexico--a hotbed of antigovernment fervor--collect more federal subsidies than the national average. Why? Because they're trying to live off public land that has been abused for more than a century. Donahue concludes that grazing's "ecological impacts are more widespread than those of any other human activity in the West, and elimination of grazing holds greater potential for benefiting biodiversity than any other single land use measure." That said, the "essential ingredient yet lacking is the political will to oppose a narrow, but powerful, interest group--the deeply entrenched western livestock industry." Whether or not you agree with Donahue's thesis, her controversial book will go a long way toward bringing this debate to a broader audience. --Langdon Cook
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