homes on the range: COOPERATIVE CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE ON CALIFORNIA'S PRIVATELY OWNED HARDWOOD RANGELANDS

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Alagona, Peter S

By 1920 federal agencies and private corporations had completely reorganized California's rural geography. Industrialized farms covered the state's valleys, federal parks and forest reservations encompassed its mountains, and privately owned cattle ranches had settled in the foothills. Grazing of course continued in the forest reservations for those cattlemen who successfully secured a permit. But the livestock industry, which once had enjoyed open seasonal access to rangelands throughout the state, already had begun to shift to a more sedentary system. Year-round grazing would now would take place primarily on the hardwood rangelands-the in-between spaces below the belt of valuable timber and above the fertile lowland soils. From this point forward, ranchers in the region would face the daunting task of eking out a viable animal husbandry industry on arid and degraded lands that no one else seemed to want.

In 1922 Arthur Sampson accepted a position as the first professor of range management at the University of California (UC). As a young man Sampson had studied under Frederic Clements at the University of Nebraska, and worked with Gifford Pinchot at the U.S. Forest Service. While at the Forest Service, Sampson had witnessed the destructive consequences of overgrazing on once fertile lands in the intermountain West, and his writings helped to define the agency's grazing policies.12 A true conservationist, in the early-twentieth-century sense of the word, Sampson argued that the goal of range management was to maintain "such a nutritious forage cover as will be consistent with a maximum use of the lands."13 Yet his notion of maximum use differed from the version embraced by many of his colleagues, who took it quite literally to mean consuming every blade of grass right down to the dirt. Throughout Sampson's career he advocated approaches, such as rotational grazing and the maintenance of oaks as "shade trees and shelterbelts for the comfort and protection of livestock," which he believed would reconcile intensive livestock use with the natural rhythms of the vegetation and thus allow for the recovery of the range.14

Shortly after arriving in Berkeley, Sampson began to push for conservation not only of the state's national forests, but also of its privately owned hardwood rangelands. In 1923 he proclaimed that, for the "attainment of success, no business is more dependent upon the broad application of the sciences than is that of producing livestock on range and pasture."15 At first, many ranchers remained skeptical about the ability of academic theories to improve their businesses, and they balked at the idea of collaborating with government bureaucrats. But Sampson was a savvy politician.16 In most other western states, a federal agency called the U.S. Soil Conservation Service had emerged as the primary government apparatus for official consultation and support on privately owned rangelands.17 In California, however, Sampson realized that the university's prominent and extremely popular agricultural extension program could provide an attractive alternative. In addition to its research and educational capacities, the university could act as an intermediary, coordinating resources from the local, state, and federal governments, as well as private corporations.