THE RANGE—NATURAL PLANT COMMUNITIES OR MODIFIED ECOSYSTEMS? *

Range research and its application in the United States have been primarily in the area of ecology. The guiding principle developed is that the natural plant communities (the climax vegetation) provide the best guides to forage production potential. A careful study of man's history from the Ice Ages to the present reveals the fact that man has progressed by modifying his environment. In fact, the ability to do so is one of the significant differences between man and other animals. During the last 10,000 years man has been in turn a collector and hunter, a cultivator and domesticator, and finally an industrial agriculturist. The transition has been a slow, laborious process. The mixed‐oak forests of the Mediterranean and Europe were cleared by felling and burning the trees and cultivating the cleared ground by crude flint hoes. In his migrations man learned of differences in soils and adaptations of cultivated plants. He learned to work with nature, but he also learned how to overcome some of nature's limitations. Agriculture, then, is man's attempts to overcome nature's limitations so that a desired crop can be grown and harvested. By this modification of the environment the crop supersedes the pattern of natural vegetation. There is no intrinsic difference between range and intensive agriculture, since both involve factors inherent in climate, soil, plants and harvesting. Ecologists working in the field of range management must be willing to accept ideas and principles that have put more science in the “science and art” of farming, if the “science and art” of range management is to progress suffiientiy to make possible the realization of the vast potential of our ranges and wild lands.