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

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Alagona, Peter S

Range management began on California's hardwood rangelands in the 1930s, when the state's influential stock growers' associations called for official aid in combating the overgrowth of woody brush that they believed was increasingly clogging their lands. The University of California's College of Agriculture responded in 1932 by organizing a Committee on Brush Range Management. It also helped to form a cooperative range improvement program, which included the California Department of Forestry, California Department of Fish and Game, federal Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, and a variety of industry groups.18 By the end of the decade, coordinated range improvement efforts, designed to control the spread of woody vegetation into valuable annual grasslands, had taken place in fifty-five out of fifty-eight California counties.19

Cooperative range improvement programs became commonplace on California's hardwood rangelands during the 19303 and 19403, but for the most part their goals remained modest and techniques traditional. Throughout this period, ranchers and range managers focused on the problems of inhibiting shrub growth and stimulating forage productivity. The chief method for achieving these goals, seasonal controlled burning, lent itself particularly well to cooperative programs. Coordinated efforts tended to reduce the risks associated with fire, and render more efficient results than haphazard burning by individual ranchers. The state did not begin keeping records on and requiring permits for prescribed fires until 1945, but anecdotal evidence indicates that in the preceding decades ranchers burned hundreds of thousands of acres of brush rangeland.20 Between 1945 and 1969, the State of California issued permits to individual ranchers and local cattlemen's associations for burning more than 2.4 million acres.21

The situation on the hardwood rangelands contrasted with the events unfolding on California's national forests, where the U.S. Forest Service had committed itself to a program of fire suppression. Forest Service officials hoped to protect valuable timber from wasteful incineration, but they wound up creating a tinderbox understory composed of many of the same shrubs that the ranchers were intentionally burning just a few miles away on the hardwood rangelands. Environmental historians often have attributed fire suppression programs to cultural ideas about nature and ideologies about the maximum use of the land on the scale of entire societies. This argument does not hold for California's hardwood rangelands, where economic and ecological factors encouraged an altogether different management approach. The same conservationist ethos that informed fire suppression programs on the national forests resulted in coordinated burning programs on the neighboring hardwood rangelands.

By the end of World War II, Arthur Sampson and his colleagues had successfully enrolled most of the ranchers on California's hardwood rangelands in cooperative conservation programs. Yet the version of conservation that arose there differed from the one that Sampson himself had helped to establish in the U.S. Forest Service. Most Forest Service officials regarded forage productivity as a secondary concern compared to the more important goal of timber production, and their efforts to protect trees through fire suppression allowed woody shrubs to flourish in the forest understory. The hardwood rangelands contained little marketable timber, and livestock production remained the most important economic activity. As a result, conservation efforts there focused on prescribed burning and reseeding programs intended to reduce the prevalence of unpalatable woody shrubs and stimulate forage productivity. This arrangement continued until the 1950s, when new economic opportunities once again transformed California's livestock industry.