Abstract
On a clear day, standing atop a windswept ridge on the southern border of the United States, one can see a hundred miles into Mexico (fig. 2.1). From the southern horizon, the Sierra Madre range extends north to meet the Rockies along the continent’s spine. To the west, the low, blistering Sonoran Desert stretches from the heart of western Mexico into Arizona. To the east and southeast sits the higher, grassier Chihuahuan Desert. The Great Plains lie to the northeast, the Great Basin to the northwest. Here in the heart of a region often misconceived as singular and undifferentiated, six distinct biomes meet, as have an equally rich diversity of human communities and cultures. Home to Apache and Anasazi, to Irish and Scots, Mormons, Mennonites, Mexicans, Texans, and an increasing abundance of “snowbirds” from the north, the million-plus-acre Malpai borderlands is a human and biotic crossroads situated on a low spot on the spine of the continent. Its basin and range topography, isolated mountain ranges sometimes called sky islands, arid grasslands, and shrubby deserts comprise parts of two nations (Mexico and the United States), four states (Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico), and numerous local, state, and federal jurisdictions. As one might expect, the challenges of sustaining conservation and land management across all of these ecological, social, and geopolitical boundaries are staggering.
I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever … and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.
—Frederic Remington
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
This phrase was originally coined by borderlands rancher Bill McDonald. It has gone on to influence the work of organizations such as the Quivira Coalition, which seeks diverse partnerships across the West.
- 2.
Brown and Kodric-Brown, 1996; Curtin, 2010.
- 3.
See work by Brown, Valone, and Curtin, 1997, and Swetnam and Betancourt, 1998, that documented vegetation response to rainfall timing, which was thought to be linked to climate change. Balanced between desert and grassland ecotones, southwestern ecosystems are considered to be especially significant bellwethers of environmental change.
- 4.
As researchers working with the Malpai group, our research program flowed directly from research showing that current levels of desertification were climatically driven. Ranches that had not been grazed for decades showed accelerating rates of change, but they also showed two to three times the change of grazed landscapes, indicating that large grazers such as cattle are key for mitigating climatic effects (see Curtin and Brown, 2001). The research programs in the borderlands expanded on this preliminary evidence to examine how communities through active grazing and fire could adaptively manage to address climate change impacts.
- 5.
See Maestas et al., 2002, paper on the impacts of exurban development on wildlife. Though focused on Colorado, the results are equally relevant to the borderlands.
- 6.
See Curtin et al., 2002, for a review of range science in the borderlands and its interface with larger and more dynamic approaches to conservation and scholarship.
- 7.
This was, perhaps, a pragmatic decision of the MBG leadership, who recognized that range scientists, with their long association with ranchers, had less credibility with the mainstream environmental community.
- 8.
See Wolf, 2001; Curtin, 2002a, 2005; Sayre, 2005.
- 9.
Bill McDonald and much of the group very much resisted the title of “model” placed on them by agencies, conservation organizations, funders, and others. They saw what they did as necessary and effective in their landscape, but not necessarily relevant to others. But as the visits and press increased, the group came to accept and assist in informing other groups, including ranching workshops for other parts of the country that spawned now successful organizations across the West, as well as exchanges with East African and Mongolian herders, and outreach to groups in the Middle East and even entirely different systems such as fisheries, as chronicled in the opening sections of this book.
- 10.
The Portal Project has become one of the longest running and most widely cited ecological experiments on the continent. It was begun by James H. Brown and colleagues in 1977. By the time I worked on the project in the mid-1990s, the nearly twenty years of data were profoundly influencing the way ecologists approached complex interactions between organisms. See Brown et al., 1986, for an early overview of the project and its experimental design.
- 11.
The phrase “wicked problem” was originally used in social planning and stems primarily from the work of Rittel and Webber (1973). It describes problems without clear solutions or definable end points, an increasingly common reality in conservation and resource management. We will return to the concept and its implications in later chapters, for the reality of this intrinsic complexity and how to address it is a cornerstone of this book.
- 12.
For example, Milchunas’s 2006 review of grazing studies in the southwestern United States documented that out of hundreds of peer-review studies, virtually none are conducted at the scale where grazing actually occurs on the landscape. In these scale-dependent systems (and grazing impacts in particular are very much an outcome of how much room the cattle have to roam), viewing ecological processes at a level consistent with management completely changes research implications and has profound implications for land tenure and developing sustainable land use.
- 13.
Milchunas and Lauenroth’s 1993 monograph, comparing grazing studies through a global meta-analysis, remains one of the definitive analyses of grazing impacts. Over the course of more than fifty studies, there was little documentation of negative impacts, with the exception being times of drought. Though data existed to support the premise that grazing was more damaging during drought, less was known about the thresholds of change in grazing impact in relation to climate, which in many management situations is the key question. Many researchers and practitioners still hotly debated whether grazing in arid and semi-arid climates was compatible with conservation at all. The Nature Conservancy and researchers working with the MBG took a good deal of heat for collaborating with ranchers.
- 14.
The British mathetician George Box famously stated, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Such is the case with the Malpai model of mid-elevation interactions (figure 2.4), where the simplifying assumptions allow one to see more clearly the fundamental components of the system.
- 15.
The monitoring was done for a range of reasons, from assessing range health on the vast Gray Ranch as part of an easement with The Nature Conservancy, to documenting fire effects on plant and animal species of special concern, including agave and bats, montane rattlesnakes, and jaguar.
- 16.
The term peer-review-quality science appears in frequent meeting notes and e-mail correspondence during the group’s formative period. The term was used at the urging of John Cook and science advisors such as Jim Brown and Ray Turner and was adopted as the group’s standard.
- 17.
In the 2005 White House Conference on Collaborative Conservation, of the more than 400 groups represented, the MBG was the only one to experimentally test their underlying assumptions, and one of a very few to conduct coordinated research of any kind. See biologist Karl Hess’s summary of collaborating groups in the United States (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/whccc/).
- 18.
See Wolf, 2001.
- 19.
See Funtowicz and Ravetz’s (1993) classic discussion of reconceiving science, as discussed in the introductory chapter.
- 20.
Recent articles in the journal Science have shown that close to 80 percent of the results of laboratory studies are not reproducible. Yet reproducibility is supposed to be the gold standard of science. With enough design and statistics, even contradictory hypotheses can both be proven true. In the words of Mark Twain (paraphrasing nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli): “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
- 21.
Ecologist David Schindler and colleagues, and comparable work by Steve Carpenter and associates, independently demonstrated the shortcomings of microcosm studies and how small studies cannot be scaled up to larger environments. However, the approach has remained commonplace in ecology.
- 22.
A senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Jornada Experimental Range—the premier range ecology research unit in the Southwest—once told me that I would never get meaningful results by working at such large scales, there was simply too much “noise.” My response was that if one cannot detect patterns through the noise then it’s likely that one’s results may be statistical anomalies or simply artifacts of experimental design. Though harder to publish and certainly less productive in terms of paper generation than conventional approaches favoring microcosms over macrocosms, the whole idea was to see what emerged from taking a “crude look at the whole.”
- 23.
The Gray Ranch was recently renamed the Diamond A Ranch and expanded by half again in size. The Gray Ranch was The Nature Conservancy’s first metaproject in the West begun in the 1980s. TNC still holds the easement on the ranch that was purchased by the Animas Foundation in the early 1990s.
- 24.
In a contrast mimicking the debate over “simple” versus “systems” theorists of the 1960s, the bias toward precise, rather than accurate, answers remains. Ironically, some of the harshest critics were from a local land grant university whose mission was to be relevant, illustrating how deep these biases extend. Senge (1990) made the additional point of the significance of lag effects in these systems, another factor that is missed in simple and short-term studies.
- 25.
In addition to Gottfried and colleagues’ 1999 state of the knowledge review, Curtin et al., 2002, provided an overview of the conservation value of ranching across the Intermountain West. Also see Curtin, 2008; a monograph of the initial results of a decade of experimental studies in the borderlands.
- 26.
See National Research Council, 1994; Brown and McDonald, 1995; Curtin, 2002b; and Curtin, 2008. But also see Jones, 2000, for a different perspective.
- 27.
Curtin, 2008, documented the role of pronghorn in influencing vegetation composition and the disproportionately large role even relatively rare native grazers can have in sustaining vegetation diversity.
- 28.
In addition to research from McKinney Flats, much of the evidence comes from a Mexican National University team led by Rurik List, who documented widespread bison populations prior to settlement, indicating that large grazers were a significant contributor to desert grasslands (List et al., 2007).
- 29.
See work by Cable, 1965, and related studies. For a good review of fire in desert grasslands, see McClaran and Van Devender’s 1995 book on desert grasslands from University of Arizona Press, especially Guy McPherson’s excellent chapter on fire effects. The work is interesting in that it comes just prior to the paradigm shift to considering fire as healthy in desert grasslands, but provides an extensive review of the literature and a good summary of the pre–paradigm shift perspective.
- 30.
See Curtin, 2008, and associated papers. In our studies even intensive grazing had little or no impact on grass, invertebrates, and small mammals.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Through what are euphemistically called “patty counts,” the amount of cattle manure can be quantified as a rough index of relative use of a given area.
- 33.
See Curtin, 2008. Especially striking were the direct and indirect impacts of pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and their interactions with fire. Even in small numbers, pronghorn were able to flip the climate-fire interactions.
- 34.
See Truett et al., 2001. Truett, a biologist who spearheaded prairie dog restorations for the Turner ranches, noted this pattern himself and uncovered nineteenth-century accounts of prairie dog populations crashing with the loss of bison, or increasing with the introduction of cattle.
- 35.
Again see Curtin, 2008, for a review of the process in action. These are just the initial results of continuing data analysis.
- 36.
For example, early on in my work for Cascabel, I found that the mammal sampling I was conducting, intended to be compatible with that of McKinney Flats by studying the effects of rodents on vegetation, wasn’t working; the rodent population was too small to attain effective samples on the higher elevation site. I suggested we discontinue the mammal research and instead use the funds to analyze existing data and create more synergy with other parts of the borderlands research program. Mam-mal sampling was accordingly stopped. However, the newly liberated funds were simply redirected into intensive vegetation sampling undertaken by colleagues of the principal investigator (PI) (a separate program using the same property) that was redundant to our other ongoing experiments. One morning, my colleagues and I arrived at our site to find the entire research area festooned with the PI’s fresh ribbons and markings, making it nearly impossible for us to locate our own research plots. Instead of sufficiently supporting a single line of vegetation sampling, the ForestService decided to add a second sampling protocol right on top of the existing one. This meant that both Cascabel and the PI never had the resources to fully analyze the data, nor could we make the best use of the resources we had. Though perhaps a reflection of the PI’s approach, the same general pathologies have been seen in federal programs across the borderlands, where there was frequently little continuity in the science.
- 37.
The expression “doing the wrong things, righter” is a reference to the wonderful piece on failed governance approaches by Australians Ison and Collins, 2008.
- 38.
Though federal taxpayer funding is supposed to be transparent and open to public review, the reality of the way the books are kept makes it very difficult to determine how funds were actually spent. Rough estimates suggest the yearly cost of Cascabel must have been at least twice that of McKinney Flats, so Cascabel probably incurred well over a million dollars of expenses in the decade of the project.
- 39.
Curtin, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2010; Curtin and Western, 2008.
- 40.
Keep in mind that although the Cascabel experience is pretty typical, it does not represent all federal science. Many federal research projects are extremely effective at generating cutting-edge research and promoting broader understandings.
- 41.
This perspective is opposed to the narrow focus on species or economic or legal interests still typified by many conservation agencies and organizations at the time and which continues to be a large part of conservation biology.
- 42.
See predictions by CLIMAS (Climate Assessment for the Southwest) based out of the University of Arizona (http://www.climas.arizona.edu/) or the recent fine analysis undertaken by Patrick McCarthy (2006) and collaborators at The Nature Conservancy and related organizations.
- 43.
Note that these actions are in stark contrast to those of managers of many of the West’s large ranches, which welcome research. The Turner ranches are a case in point, where researchers are an asset to be cultivated, not a problem to be mitigated. As one Turner ranch manager noted, “It’s free information, who would not want it?”
- 44.
A 1998 letter from the Animas Foundation stated the intent to sustain the experimental program on McKinney Flats for “decades,” and that the work was the cornerstone of the organization’s goals for science-based management.
- 45.
The Gray Ranch was a pioneering effort by The Nature Conservancy in promoting science-based ranching. Although limiting access by outside people and the widespread use of fire have restored much of the range, there seems no question that the project has fallen well short of its potential. The changes on the Diamond A not only compromised the MBG’s mission, they raised larger questions about the long-term efficacy of conservation-minded ranching. The establishment of the Animas Foundation to manage the Gray/Diamond A Ranch had once been viewed as a best-case scenario for conservation, and the Animas Foundation as a flagship organization in promoting science-based stewardship and the use of ranches to promote science and conservation.
- 46.
As demonstrated in the pioneering work of Aldo Leopold, trapping predators is rarely effective. The trapping on the Diamond A was especially flawed, because many areas they trapped were immediately adjacent to Mexico, so predators still flowed in from adjacent landscapes. The relationship between pronghorn survivorship and predators was never documented and not supported by most wildlife managers.
- 47.
Ranch records from the time of ownership by Mexico billionaire Pablo Brener showed a sophisticated livestock management approach with extensive rainfall and vegetation monitoring.
- 48.
However, we also realized that this is a ranchers’ organization and to grow and sustain the organization required greater rancher engagement. Not all the ranchers understood the significance of the science or shared Bill McDonald’s and President Reese Woodling’s enthusiasm for it.
- 49.
Though most dictionaries define science as research involving experimental, hypothesis-driven approaches, across the West, the term has been diluted to mean essentially any form of data collection, a process that is vastly different from the peer-review-quality research envisioned at the start of the program.
- 50.
The reasons for this are numerous. After a decade of research we came to realize which procedures yielded the most information, and the reduction in startup costs led to increased efficiencies in monitoring. As biologists gained experience, their salaries tended to increase, and there was a reluctance to abandon previous protocols, even when they had been shown to be ineffective. Partly this results from the need for continuity in data collection. But much of it was also just a reflection of a reluctance to critically evaluate the effectiveness of existing protocols.
- 51.
A monograph by Gottfried et al., 1999, summarized the early research in the borderlands in support of conservation and management.
- 52.
The findings of a blue-ribbon panel on rattlesnake conservation that addressed issues concerning rare rattlesnakes and fire were taken into consideration for prescribed fire planning processes in 2003. This constituted a good example of how effective this approach could be.
- 53.
The group periodically engages scientists from the USDA Jornada Experimental Range and similar experts. Although the researchers are globally recognized authorities in range management, they are still relatively local and long-term collaborators of the group. This process is different from engaging a series of experts from outside who view the system through entirely fresh eyes. The problem is that so much of the review comes from people who in one way or another have a stake in the process, well meaning as it may be, and this influences the type of insights one receives from the process.
- 54.
A case in point is a paper by one long-time borderlands researcher who called into question the effectiveness of recovery following certain kinds of management actions. The conclusions, though perhaps not distributed in the most politically astute manner, caused a sharp backlash by the ranchers, who were used to having science work consistently in their favor. However, the researcher was only doing his job.
- 55.
As advisors came on they tended to “go native,” either focusing on their own interests or saying what they thought the ranchers wanted to hear. This left independent scientists, such as myself in the position of frequent naysayers, when all we were trying to do was live up to our ethical responsibilities and give the group sound advice as we had committed to do at the outset of the project.
- 56.
The savanna managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Cascabel Project, which showed such promise in complementing the lower elevation grassland project of Mc- Kinney Flats quickly became a political football that drew energy and resources away from the core Malpai science program. The Cascabel experience poignantly highlights the importance of broad external oversight and how a systematic yearly review of all the programs could have prevented poor management and waste of resources.
- 57.
The very use of the terms ”ecosystem management” and “scientific uncertainty” in the title suggests the author did not know that the whole point of ecosystem management is to embrace and learn from uncertainty and promote relevant science. See the classic papers on adaptive management by Holling and colleagues cited later in this volume, and the discussion in chapter 5 (Holling, 1978; Lee, 1993; Gunderson et al., 1995).
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Charles G. Curtin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Curtin, C. (2015). Experiments in Post-Normal Science in Southwestern Rangelands. In: The Science of Open Spaces. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-205-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-205-1_2
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-59726-534-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-205-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)