Essays of a Peripheral Mind

Abstract

He didn't get it right. He came close, but then tried to be too pragmatic. Not that anyone at that time could have been expected to identify the correct solution. fact that he even tackled the problem exceeded any expectation. Just the process took him several years, typically riding in a wagon or on horseback. He covered the entire Territory of New Mexico, over 78 million acres at the time, or an area, as he described it, the size of the New England states, with New York and New Jersey thrown in. He spoke with and interviewed hundreds of people, took untold number of photographs, and employed his extensive skills as a botanist and a naturalist to characterize these landscapes. Then, in about 12,000 words, a long book chapter for today's reader, he summarized his observations into 46 pages of text and figures. Most importantly, who he wrote for was, as he described, the average citizen, the people directly interested in the development of this Territory. One hundred years ago, in April 1908, Elmer Ottis Wooton (photograph), at the time a professor at the New College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, published his treatise on the problem of overgrazing across New Mexico's rangelands at the beginning of the 20th century. He titled it The Range Problem in New Mexico (see: http://usda-ars.nmsu.edu/biblio/pdf/001.pdf). It was a fascinating synthesis of this environment at that time. late 19th century had been a time of extreme use and distur bance, one that was well-documented, and was not unlike the periods of stress and disturbance that other rangeland environments have gone through at some point before or since. And, it was not a period of denial. Wooton and the people he spoke with were fairly blunt and honest in their assessments of this resource at the start of the 20th century. His 1908 report was simply a plain statement of the situa tion, a situation that was known to the people living on the land, and a statement Wooton wanted to communicate more broadly to the public. situation was that ...much damage has been done to the range... (p. 19). Our litera ture has other classic assessments of the western rangelands that reached similar conclusions during this time period. It seems that these impressions are well accepted, and there has been little revisionism over the subsequent years to create a less harsh and less honest assessment of those times