Abstract:
Despite the rapid urbanization of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, cattle ranching continues to play a major, if increasingly contested, political, economic, and ecological role in the region. Unlike other industries, technological manipulation has failed to increase productivuty in the range cattle industry. The constraints of aridity and climate variability have not been overcome. Ranchers on both sides of the border therfore need access to large tracts of land to secure the natural forage their cattle need. Spain and Mexico both recoginized communal as well as private forms of tenure, even though neoliberal reforms are weaking comunidades and ejidos. the United States, in contrast, has no communitarian tradition, and the U.S. homestead laws never allowed individuals to preempt enough of the public domain to support a cow outfit. Instead, graizng allotments on both federal and state lands prvide ranchers with exclusive rights to forage. Those rights are increasingly challenged by some environmentalists, who want cows off public lands. Faced with rising land prices, unstable markets, an unpredictable climate, enormous estate taxes, and increasing political uncertainy over thier access to public lands, many ranchers choose or are forced to sell their private land to real estate developers or subdivide it themselves. The resulting fragmentation of the landscape and increasing densities of people deplete water resources and make large-scale ecossystem managemnt, including the preservation of wildlife and the reintroduction of fire difficult, if not immpossible.
Source: Cows, Condos, and the Contested Commons: The Political Ecology of Ranching on the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands by Thomas E. Sheridan.
Reports and other documents about Sonoran Desert ecology, management, and conservation. Curated by the not-for-profit Altar Valley Conservation Alliance (AVCA) located outside Tucson, AZ.