The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. Diana K. Davis; The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science. Nathan F. Sayre

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. xxi and 271 pp., maps, photos, illustrations, notes, index. $32.00 cloth (ISBN 9780262034524).

Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. xv and 265 pp., maps, photos, illustrations, diagrams, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 paper (ISBN 9780226083254); $120.00 cloth (ISBN 9780226083117); $10.00–$40.00 electronic (ISBN 9780226083391).

It is a pleasure to introduce this book review forum on two related and complementary books: Nathan F. Sayre's The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science and Diana K. Davis's The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. These are important books for many different reasons, as detailed in the insightful reviews by Thomas Bassett, Simon Batterbury, Geoff Mann, and Paul Robbins in this forum. The books and the reviews also raise significant questions about changing knowledge regimes and changing practices for living sustainably in the drylands of our planet and perhaps beyond. Although there is much to be said about these two excellent books, I focus here on the role of knowledge, expertise, and science. Both The Arid Lands and The Politics of Scale are notable for the clarity with which they illustrate how knowledge production is shaped by material and social conditions, and how, in turn, this shapes the material and social. I point to three powerful shared arguments here to elucidate these strengths.

First, the very particular physicality of arid and semiarid lands, defined less by outright lack of precipitation than by extreme variation, is the cornerstone of both books. Davis and Sayre implicitly argue that this variability poses a particular challenge for modernist, scientific expertise, the strength of which lies in repetition, standardization, and predictability. Those strengths turn out to be intense liabilities in landscapes defined by radical variation—spatially, seasonally, annually, even decadally—in access to water, one of the most fundamental needs of all living things. Indigenous knowledge has been by far the better guide; the fact that your livestock and possibly your family will die if you misread the landscape has spurred the deep empiricism and intellectual flexibility necessary to parse arid and semiarid landscapes more accurately. Arid lands might have been designed by God to smack some humility into scientists, but it seems she failed to anticipate the impacts of colonialism and finance capital, which brings me to my next point.

Structural factors play a second lead role in these books, as arid lands ecology and range science were from the earliest days called into service for capital and the colonial state. One of the most important things these books do is shatter any illusions of academia's heroic past. Both Davis and Sayre debunk the myth, so common across university campuses today, that whereas science is now under attack by political economic forces, it used to be pure. As French historian of science Dominique Pestre has demonstrated so convincingly, scientists have never worked under circumstances of their own choosing, and those circumstances shape their research practice: the questions they ask (and those they ignore), their findings, and the way those findings have been put to work in the world (Pestre 2003). Both books demonstrate with painful clarity the ways in which science has always been a handmaiden of state and economic power.

In The Arid Lands, Davis lays out how the ideological need to justify colonization and the practical need to control the colonized drew many arid land ecologists into assumptions of deforestation and desertification, and of the inherent supremacy of European landscapes, property relations, and environmental management practices. Eurocentrism and racism play a similarly central role in The Politics of Scale, as do bureaucratic needs for uniform, standardized regulation. Here, though, the needs of finance capital come into the picture as well, as ranchers in the U.S. West required fixed leases and fencing to secure outside investment. In both books, the requirements of capital and the colonial state reinforce the power of particularly compatible received authorities and scientific lineages, focusing scientists' attention on some subsets of the physical world and blinding them to alternative explanations.

Thus both Davis and Sayre show us a science that is not disinterested and pure, but pushed, pulled, stretched, redirected, and spun around in circles by a constellation of physical and social forces. One of the strongest divergences between these authors, however, is whether they would add the word distorted to that list of verbs. Davis's position on this is unequivocal: Colonial science and its descendants today are profoundly ideological, and thus flat out wrong. There are dozens of places in this short book where she uses today's climate science and disequilibrium rangeland ecology as a hatchet with which to chop open and expose the interested, ideological biases that dominated arid lands ecology up through the 1980s. Sayre also draws on current understandings to reveal blind spots in earlier knowledge claims, but only rarely to debunk them; early range science is not portrayed as wrong, but as partial. Further, he does not seem to have a great deal more faith in disequilibrium ecology than he does in Clementsian ecology (this catholic skepticism is a notable departure from the political ecology norm, which has embraced the intellectual synergies of poststructuralism and disequilibrium ecology since at least the mid-1990s (Zimmerer 1994; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slater, and Wangari 1996).

The final key takeaway from these books is that arid lands ecology and range science, shaped by the needs of structural power and profoundly unsuited to the variability of arid landscapes, have in turn reshaped those landscapes in extremely consequential and heartbreaking ways. In The Arid Lands, Davis shows how a “standard package” of management techniques, including privatization of land, sedentarization, forbidding burning, and destocking (a technocratic euphemism for murdering vast quantities of livestock), has devastated pastoralist societies on five continents. Although The Politics of Scale touches more briefly on the social consequences of range science, Sayre's narrower geographical focus on the U.S. West allows him to demonstrate in more detail the profound ecological consequences and threshold changes created by U.S. range management. Both authors end by noting that these social and ecological consequences have provoked a radical rethinking of arid lands ecology and range science, which will in their turn produce new eco-social landscapes. Whether they will be ecologically or socially preferable to what came before them remains to be seen.

These two new books on the arid lands, and the science and management that have shaped our understanding of them, are terrific additions to the political ecology shelf. The prose is crisp and the narratives move effortlessly, which means the authors have spent a lot of time honing their arguments.

Diana K. Davis's The Arid Lands is a concise and fascinating intellectual history of deserts, particularly their representation as wastelands. In 200 pages, she manages to survey the literature dating from antiquity to the present on how arid lands have been perceived and explained. Her environmental historical approach demonstrates that desertification discourses are relatively recent and closely tied to colonial histories.

When I opened the book and read the first chapter, “Deserts, Dogma, and Dryland Development Policy,” it all sounded familiar. The book was reading like synthetic work bringing together existing research on desertification. As I read the second and following chapters, though, I realized that the book was more than a synthesis. It quickly turned into an engaging environmental history that chronicles the origins of key ideas such as desiccation theory, which linked deforestation with climate change and ultimately desertification. In short, although the image of deserts as ruined, deforested landscape is relatively recent, its purportedly constituent processes have been discussed since antiquity. That is, desertification was not simply invented in 1928 by a French forester working in northern Africa. The idea has grown incrementally for millennia. The great strength and major contribution of this book is to trace that history in a clear and engaging manner. Students are going to love this book.

The Arid Lands also makes abundantly clear that one cannot talk about trees in Africa without also talking about ideas of desiccation and desertification. I would add “savannization” to the list. The French colonial forester André Aubreville viewed savannization as a precursor to desertification in the humid savannas of West Africa. It is a term that is still used today in deforestation studies and reforestation policies in the subregion.

What I found missing from Davis's desertification narrative are the perspectives of arid land users themselves. How do pastoralists view land degradation? Boutrais (2000) wrote that Fulbè pastoralists of the Adamawa plateau of Cameroon possess nuanced classifications of rangeland condition that significantly differ from range science assessments. Pastoralists prefer to graze their herds during the rainy season in pastures that ecologists consider in a state of progressive degradation. Boutrais noted that pastoralists do not hold this declensionist view of rangeland but instead see the pastures in a desirable state. Davis's narrative could be enriched by such contrasting interpretations of rangeland condition to illustrate both the politics of environmental knowledge and the power of Western science to exclude alternative views of arid lands.

Nathan F. Sayre's The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science analyzes the interrelationships between political and economic processes, especially the state's need to regulate rangelands, and the history of rangeland science, which evolved to fulfill those regulatory needs.

Sayre examines the emergence of rangeland science through the lens of land management agencies, rangeland experiments, and the underlying assumptions of scientists conducting rangeland research. These assumptions, such as the need for fencing, predator control, fire suppression, and the virtual elimination of herding, are recurring threads that he deftly weaves together to demonstrate the rise of succession theory as the foundation of rangeland science. Sayre shows how this science and its key concepts like original condition, carrying capacity, and stocking rates were coproduced with federal land managers and ranchers whose administrative and economic goals “conformed to and were ratified” by Clementsian succession theory.

Using the results of rangeland experiment station research, Sayre chronicles the monumental failure of these assumptions and practices and thus the limits of succession theory in the arid lands where nonequilibrium conditions, notably rainfall variability, exert the greatest influence on rangeland condition. He shows how the challenge to the Clementsian orthodoxy and the rise of nonequilibrium theory emerged incrementally through scientific research and innovative experiments.

The political economy of this transition is less clear, nor is it evident how U.S. rangeland science traveled overseas and took hold in places like southern Rhodesia, where British colonists set stocking rates and fenced in rangelands to the detriment of indigenous livestock producers. The integrated political economic and ecological analysis that guides Sayre's discussion of the coproduction of rangeland science and management in the United States is missing in the discussion of range science and management in southern Africa.

On a personal note, I took a range management course in the late 1970s while a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. We read Stoddart and Smith's (1943) classic Range Management in which they presented succession theory and stocking rates as foundational to rangeland science. I liked the book so much I packed it on my first trip to Côte d'Ivoire in 1981 to conduct my doctoral dissertation research. I was taken by the graphs showing the relationship between increasers, decreasers, and range condition, and the pragmatic albeit challenging notions of carrying capacity and stocking rates. I brought the book with me because I believed it would help me understand livestock raising in northern Côte d'Ivoire. In the end, the book wasn't helpful at all because the grazing lands of the West African savanna did not resemble the rangelands of the western United States. There were no fences hemming in cattle, fire was a common pasture management tool, and animal diseases and farmer–herder conflicts were major motivations for moving herds. That is, there were different political ecological conditions that produced a different sociospatial order about which Stoddart and Smith had nothing to say. When I discovered one day that termites had eaten a good part of the book, I was disappointed but not devastated. I hadn't opened it all year.

There are a number of cross-cutting themes in the Davis and Sayre books that make them excellent companions for upper division and graduate-level courses. Salient themes include (1) the devaluing of local knowledge and technologies of resource management (e.g., mobile livestock raising), (2) the coproduction of science and policy, (3) the power of value-laden terms such as “original condition” and “desirable state” that serve as baselines for measuring land degradation and improvement, and (4) the relevance of nonequilibrium ecological theory to explain the failure of past policies and development interventions. Regarding the latter, Davis and Sayre view nonequilibrium ecology as critical to moving beyond the impasse of failed dryland development schemes. Davis is optimistic about the prospects of building on environmental variability in charting a more sustainable and just future in the drylands. Sayre concludes his book on a more cautionary note with reference to the difficulties of modeling “threshold changes involving non-linear interactions across multiple scales” (p. 215) and formulating polices at these scales among actors with different abilities and interests. In the end, both books stand out for their focus on ecological theory and its intersection with political economy and policy. The systematic integration of the ecological and political makes these works exemplary political ecologies.

Diana K. Davis's The Arid Lands and Nathan F. Sayre's The Politics of Scale are in some ways radically different books. They are both fascinating, well-written, and based in impeccable research—these characteristics they share. The former, however, is a history of our “knowledge” of deserts and drylands, focused largely on landscapes outside of the imperial core of global political economy. The latter is a focused history of our “knowledge” of arid and semiarid rangelands in North America, with particular focus on the U.S. West. Given the vast differences of culture, history, and ecology between the empirical terrains of the two works, it is perhaps unsurprising that they complement rather than compete with each other.

Yet, that complementarity emerges not only because they fit together to give us a more comprehensive coverage of global drylands and the history of their science and management. It also emerges because they both make it clear that in the drylands, as Sayre puts it, the nation-state, science, and capital meet their limits. In other words, to say that drylands are defined by their marginality is to make two points simultaneously: Not only are these landscapes marginal in the not-very-productive, not-at-the-center-of-attention sense; they are also marginal in that they mark one of the limits of modernity. Beyond the well-watered, the world is much less subject to the defining modes of modern political, economic, and epistemological organization.

This is not to say that the triad of the nation-state, capital, and science has figured everything out everywhere but in the arid zones. Nor is it to say that the variation in the landscapes Davis and Sayre study, both ecological and cultural, is ultimately insignificant in the face of the triad. There is, of course, extraordinary variety, even within jurisdictions (that between the deserts of Davis's account and the rangelands of Sayre's being of particular note; one might say, roughly, that the rangelands of the western United States are distinct from deserts in that they are still deemed profitable, however “marginally”). It is to say, however, that the multiple ecosystems the two books cover share a common feature that is, perhaps, the root of their resistance to the forces of European-American imperial modernity: They have all evolved in the context of ongoing and extraordinary environmental variability. The drylands are, as Davis puts it, “a nonequilibrium world saddled with an equilibrium mindset” (p. 19). Science, capital, and the state have, with only very few exceptions, absolutely refused to acknowledge this. In their efforts to somehow produce a world they can know, manipulate, and render productive and secure, they have engendered more than two centuries of “policy-induced desertification” (p. 5).

In a manner that recalls the agrarian question literature that lies, usually tacitly, at the very base of both books, Davis and Sayre show how endlessly troubling for capital the “mismatch” between its expansionary demands and the variability of drylands has been. This dynamic is particularly central to The Politics of Scale, centered as it is on the U.S. experience and the centrality of particular forms of private credit to the development of U.S. agriculture. In combination with genocide, theft, extinction, and militarization, which emptied the range of its antimodern human and nonhuman populations, ballooning credit made the range “productive”—but as recent experience confirms, credit is never just a one-time “input.” Credit finances itself on future indebtedness. Once finance capital is involved, expansion is the only way forward: more land, more productivity, more profit. The level of variability in drylands, though, meant that consistent and reliable “growth” was impossible, even after the elimination of Indigenous peoples and predators.

Both books show how dryland science came to the aid of racist-colonial capitalism in its time of need. In The Arid Lands, Davis lays out in great detail the way the “desiccation theory” that masqueraded as the “truth” of desert ecology aimed to overcome aridity, and manage the landscapes, their peoples, and their cultural practices so as to “return” the desert to its “natural” productive state via (among other things) privatization, forced sedentarism, and nothing less than astonishing projects of socioecological reengineering. The failure of these efforts has been calamitous—but so, of course, would have been their success. Indeed, among other things, The Arid Lands convinced me that if the whole apparatus had succeeded (i.e., if the equilibrium mindset had overcome the nonequilibrium world), there might be no one left in the countryside of North Africa but U.S. oil firms. In The Politics of Scale, Sayre argues convincingly that the entire history of U.S. range science is inseparable from the effort to save the capitalist range (or better, to make it even imaginable). In both accounts, the principal agent behind these efforts was the colonial state, both in “official” European colonies and in the colonized U.S. West and the U.S. imperial sphere.

Indeed, both books are so full of stories of glaring state capital and science-induced environmental and social destruction that one of their shared conclusions—that the separation between the forces the triad names is not much of a separation at all—is incontrovertible. Moreover, perhaps most striking is the fact that almost all of the efforts to manage or even just plain understand drylands have failed, again—unsurprisingly, I suppose—from the vantage point of the market, science, or policy.

As his title suggests, Sayre builds much of his argument concerning these failures—and the attendant bureaucratic, accumulative, and theoretical shifts they have helped spur—on a critique of the concept of scale, in the ecological and consequently the political economic sense. (As an aside, it is worth mentioning that Sayre's examination of the problem of scale is, to my knowledge, unsurpassed in the contemporary human geography and political economy literature. It merits a deep engagement from anyone interested in the question.) He shows how shifting but usually tacit assumptions about scale have been central to every pebble in this slag heap of failed efforts to turn the drylands into profitable, stable, appropriable, and enclosable spaces: what is the “right” scale for this nature and these enterprises and these activities.

A similar problem attracts close attention from Davis, especially in her examination of the program of rangeland privatization in Africa. This imposition of an “appropriate” socionatural scale has caused massive degradation—a result that will not surprise any political ecologists, but much of the importance of political-ecological work like this is that it does the tough multipronged research to uncover these processes in politically relevant ways. Both books show, for example, how because of variability and nonequilibrium dynamics the inescapably scalar problem of landscape “carrying capacity” (the “right” herd size), has proven meaningless from a management perspective.

The question that both books point us toward—but cannot answer conclusively, because of the very variability they emphasize—is how we can restructure our relations with drylands (and in many cases, with their Indigenous and nonhuman residents) differently. The coordinated state–capital operation we call privatization, for example, has been a disaster, but as Sayre's examination of the United States shows, clearly the mere maintenance of drylands as “public” land is not, on its own, a solution. Similarly, although we might seek some wisdom in so-called nonequilibrium approaches to modeling and ecological theory, it remains the case that an “equilibrium mindset” is the sine qua non of modern science—both social and biophysical. A true nonequilibrium science would, in the end, deconstruct the generalization—the possibility of nonlocally and nontemporally specific knowledge—that is arguably what science is all about. Despite what both books tentatively suggest, the recourse to “disequilibrium” theory in the effort to escape the inevitable empiricism that would accompany a true nonequilibrium approach is a dead end: To posit a system as perpetually “out of equilibrium” is always to posit the existence of that equilibrium as a fixed if empty locus around which the system oscillates, however unpredictably. The corollary is that there is no equilibrium state, but if everything were perfectly as it should be, then equilibrium would hold.

I suppose there is a way in which this is a marginal improvement on the successional theory both books critique. Certainly successional ecology is in some ways the most powerful variation on the same speculative theme that has dominated the study of drylands in its almost theological rejection of the reality in favor of a conception of the world that refuses this reality by positing a tendential, or developmental dynamic that humans (especially Indigenous humans) hinder. If God or nature were unfettered, it says, the world would be radically otherwise, and radically better. Science therefore becomes the means by which to diagnose and fix the failures or sins of this world or particular sets of its inhabitants. Although Davis does not emphasize it, on this account successional theory is merely a more recent instantiation of an older worldview she says was structured by a “biblical time frame” (p. 74).

These are the problematic conclusions of a worldview structured by the capital–state–science triad struggling to wrestle cultural-historical and biophysical dynamics that mock our equilibrium mindset. Equilibrium, even when it is absent, haunts scientific thought, as science itself is almost unthinkable without it: Even a nonequilibrium system is defined by what it lacks. In fact, I would argue that although nominally erased in the term nonequilibrium, equilibrium is usually smuggled in the back door in the guise of “ecosystem function.” Inevitably, it seems, our generalizations are based in attempts to identify patterns that are in the most basic sense “normal”; that is, characteristic of an equilibrium. I am not so sure this will in any meaningful way enable our escape from what the economist Dymski (2017) called “equifinality”—in other words, although not by any means hopeless, it seems the “biblical timeframe” still structures our thought (50).

At the start of the 1990s, when I was just entering graduate school to think about working in arid lands, two things were humming in the air, electrically setting a new agenda for political ecology. The first was the revelation that stable state (equilibrium-seeking) ecosystem dynamics did not prevail in many contexts, especially arid lands and range lands. This was hugely exciting, because it busted a dominant discourse that had, on many occasions, been put to use to disenfranchise and disempower whole groups of people, including and especially pastoralists. This was an ecology that was clearly political. Savory's (1988) Holistic Resource Management and Behnke and Scoones's (1993) Range Ecology at Disequilibrium perched themselves on countless bookshelves of that era.

The second revelation was epistemological. It was increasingly becoming clear that science was never innocent of its conditions of production. Specifically: colonial societies (like ours) create colonial sciences that, unsurprisingly, reproduce colonialism. By doing genealogies of scientific knowledge, you could unmask their colonial origins, especially in the field of natural resource conservation (Grove 1990; Blaut 1993).

That these two revelations, one ecological and the other epistemological, were linked, seemed to go without saying. Even so, it is remarkable to me that it took almost three decades for comprehensive accounts of this relationship to emerge. As it turns out, it was worth the wait, as we now have not one, but two terrifically rigorous, beautifully written, and thoroughly compelling accounts of how and why the arid lands were structurally driven to be misunderstood for centuries.

In The Arid Lands, Davis demonstrates her formidable historiography, in two languages, to trace the deep roots of “crisis narratives” in arid lands. Tracking in particular the French forestry traditions of the nineteenth century, she shows the way declensionist views of arid lands have consistently held local producers, especially herders (and especially Arab herders) culpable for the aridification of whole sections of the Earth. As a tool to extend colonial power, such forms of knowledge, which stressed the need for greening the landscape and especially tree planting, became inscribed in management regimes around the world, and even persisted into the postwar development machinery of international aid. Their pernicious shadow, Davis shows, continues to this day, in the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. This is an account that seamlessly links knowledge and power.

Sayre's Politics of Scale similarly traces the roots of bad ideas, their relationships to institutions, and their instantiation on the land. Specifically, Sayre delves deep into the history of range science, an applied body of knowledge, emerging especially in the United States and Australia. Here, he documents how specific institutions, especially experimental range stations, developed to embolden ideas that fit poorly to conditions. Notions of equilibrium in ecological systems, most notably, tied to a Clementsian vision of succession dynamics, are an incredibly poor match to rangeland dynamics, which are marked by instability and variability. The ideas and institutions, Sayre further shows, evolved along with the cattle industry, its needs, and the territorial systems of capitalist accumulation that followed westward settlement. This is an account that seamlessly links knowledge and power.

These two books, together, fulfill the promise made in 1991, to show how a mismatch between ecologies and ideas come into being and persist, through institutional, economic, and political processes. In this sense, the two books should be read together.

Two questions hover over these works, however, one empirical and the other epistemological. First, it is striking how much of Davis's narrative focuses on trees, losing them and getting them back. The obsession of French forestry with afforestation is clear, as is the inherited power of that narrative, which pervades contemporary land management policies throughout the colonial subtropics. Tree planting in arid lands across Africa and south Asia is the ongoing obsession of range managers, a regrettable fact that is reinforced by the new obsession with carbon forestry. Although stocking rates are a twin obsession (shared by Sayre's Forest Service officials), Davis's book is very much about trees.

Sayre's book, conversely, has little to say about afforestation (or reforestation). Indeed controlling shrub encroachment and various forms of woodiness is the converse obsession of Sayre's range scientists. This is puzzling. Is it the manifest ecological differences of U.S. and Australian rangelands from African and Asian contexts that drive the differences in scientific emphases on woody species? Is sand dune control simply a materially distinct practice from restoring range grasses, such that different policies would stray in such different directions? Or is it a difference in the intellectual lineage of the traditions of forestry science and range science? Put differently, if the French had colonized the U.S. West, would the range science history look significantly different?

A second question is epistemological. Both The Arid Lands and The Politics of Scale do a formidable job of showing how specific contributions to science in arid lands were skewed by institutional context. Whether it is Cadet de Vaux at Davis's Museum of Natural History, irreversibly linking forestry to climate, or scientists adopting Clementsian theory at Sayre's Santa Rita and Jornada Experimental Ranges, both books attend closely to the political and economic conditions that impinge on the production of knowledge. Indeed, both books are, at bottom, detailed histories of how we can get things so “wrong.” This is the twin magic of these books that makes them major contributions to the history of knowledge.

Conversely, neither book does much in the way of explaining how, and under what conditions, we get things “right.” Surely if knowledge and power are intertwined, then it should be symmetrically possible to explain the emergence of, and swift adoption of, new ideas in arid lands science and management. How and when do old paradigms get overthrown? If such paradigms are bolstered not only by the weight of evidence (and the evidence against old arid lands and range sciences is truly immense and has been for a long time), but also by colonial political economy, what political economy makes space for new ideas when they arrive? Should we not hold in suspicion the new ideas of arid environments (championed by both authors) insofar as they might simply be convenient for a different form of capital, power, and accumulation—say, ecotourism or real estate development?

Indeed, Sayre's hindmost chapters document the incredible rapidity with which equilibrium thinking gave way to disequilibrium thinking, as Brian Walker, Mark Westoby, and Imanuel Noy-Meir ride to the rescue of the hapless range management community, introducing a chaotic new theory of diversity, variability, and path dependency, the uptake of which was incredibly fast.

Conversely, Sayre dedicates two lonely paragraphs on page 206 to explaining this epistemological upheaval. He suggests, timidly, that the scientific shift paralleled a decline in ranching itself, and the rise of multiple use and amenity demands on range lands. I find that explanation plausible, but its brief treatment is unconvincing. Much more would have to be documented about how institutional conditions bend in new directions and push new ideas to the fore.

Similarly for Davis, only on pages 169 to 173 do we see new emerging forms of knowledge. For example, Davis provides examples of farmer knowledge, intertwined with new thinking in international development agencies, coming to grips with the power of foresters in Niger and making room for real forest recovery exactly where experts have the least power. Even here, however, there is little hint about the conditions that allow such farmer knowledge to become “true.” We are told that where the state loses power, better knowledge prevails, which is again compelling but still somewhat incomplete.

We might chalk these silences up to the simple fact that writing one book at a time is enough for anyone. The main purpose of this work is a critical account of oppressive regimes. I would argue, however, that there is something more at work. The asymmetrical critique of old and new forms of knowledge, and its tacit progressivism, is more likely a product of epistemology. Both Davis and Sayre are soft constructivists, critical realist scholars who believe in a universal ecological truth. Bad ideas must be explained, and good ideas are “facts.” That is a fine place to leave it, perhaps.

What is good for the goose is good for the gander, though. If ecology is the “science of empire,” as both authors insist, and neither colonialism nor capitalism have given way to some alternative political economic form, how do we account for innovations in thought? Surely we don't succumb to a heroic vision of progressive science, wherein we simply await better scientists (Latour 1993)?

As an alternative theory, one might hypothesize instead that a science, like that now emerging in the arid lands, that stresses variability, uncertainty, and diversity of conditions, might itself be very convenient to a certain kind of capital, investment, and state form. Regrettably, these otherwise excellent works adopt an epistemology that makes even asking such a question impossible.

These two books were a pleasure to read. They tackle the history of ideas about regions deemed “marginal,” and the ideas and practices that have kept them so. Sayre and Davis deal, respectively, with misperceptions held about the marginal and arid U.S. West, and global arid lands (with a focus on the Sahara and its fringes). Having lived and worked in southern Arizona, central to Sayre's book, and in the West African Sahel, featured in Davis's work, I can see links between the two volumes, although they target different audiences. They both revolve around the consequences of misconstruing the nature of environments and the actions of peoples in arid lands, power-laden scientific assumptions, thwarted development aspirations, and human responses to aridity.

Sayre has worked in, or studied, the U.S. West since 1986. His aim is to tell the story of “rangeland science,” which applies ecological theory to understand soils, vegetation, fire, and other characteristics of “rangelands” (the term denotes social rather than biophysical marginality, as a “residual category”—p. 3). Historians of science have not covered this field in any depth at all, so this is a pioneering work—and wisely it is published as an affordable paperback. Sayre shows how the intensity of scientific efforts to understand the arid U.S. West in an “inward-looking, U.S.-centric discipline” grew in the early 1900s, accompanying a realization that grazing cattle on the arid rangelands produced value for investors as meat and hides, and offered decent livelihoods for ranchers expanding westward and displacing Native Americans. There was a ready market for their cattle as the urban population grew.

Rangeland science was commissioned and officially supported when ecological variability began to challenge the sustained economic viability of open and unfenced grazing (p. 7). In other words, there was a widespread assumption that cattle were degrading the range. Early scientific efforts to determine optimal stocking rates and the effects of fire were partial and often incorrect, led in the early years by an overbearing ecologist, Frederic Clements, with his controversial theory of plant succession. He suggested climax plant communities were not being attained due to overgrazing (his theory worked better in the Great Plains, but not, it turned out, in the arid West). Related work by his student, Arthur Sampson, was misapplied to advocate and enforce fixed stocking rates on public lands. Suppression of fire, fencing, and killing off wolves resulted. The West's first two experimental ranges, however, Jornada and Santa Rita, yielded data that challenged climax theory and “carrying capacity” calculations, even though alternative theories were slow to arrive. The counternarrative of nonequilibrium rangeland ecology, in which we now believe climate rather than ruminant actions has the largest influence on vegetation, was only widely understood and recognized by the 1970s, through the work of Ellis, Swift, and Sandford, among others. It demonstrated unpredictable ecological variability as a norm in drylands, dismissing the idea of climax vegetation.

The problems faced by rangeland science over the decades are attributed not only to false starts in the advancement of scientific knowledge, but also to its control by key individuals and the “bureaucratic division of scientific labor.” Scientists largely ignored generations of native knowledge of the drylands, and research was oriented to the needs of private ranchers. Science helped government efforts to tame and control rangelands, and to increase their productivity and profitability. Although Clementsian theory was exported elsewhere to attack “overgrazing” by the world's pastoralists, Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” did so even more effectively from the late 1960s. Sayre does detail some of the traffic in rangeland science between the United States and other dryland regions, although his account is focused on the U.S. West. Australia shared “marginal” arid conditions (and displacement of the Indigenous population to accommodate cattle), but its scientists later played a strong role in developing nonequilibrium models.

Whereas long leaseholds and private property were features of the U.S. West and arid Australia, the areas grazed on the margins of the Sahara generally lacked private property, and this is still the case today (see Bassett's earlier commentary in this forum). As Diana K. Davis shows based on her long engagement with North Africa, African pastoralists also occupy land considered “marginal” by colonial scientists, and even by sedentary African farmers. With highly advanced sensitivities to grazing quality and seasonal rainfall, nomadic societies like the Fulani and Bedouin traveled with their herds, sometimes oscillating around fixed settlements or between fixed points depending on pasture conditions. Potential clashes with other herders or ethnic groups were traditionally negotiated, although not always without violence. Their major problem was the colonial powers, who deemed nomads to be troublesome and ungovernable (which meant, hard to tax—p. 128). Various large “pastoral development projects” were established to offer livestock health programs and watering points, allowing better colonial surveillance. There were also demonstration farms, and North African sheep were crossbred with European breeds. In addition, irrigation projects and boreholes facilitated agriculture where rainfall was insufficient or unreliable.

In some regions, access to land or water for herders was constrained. As France's colonies encircled three quarters of the Western Sahara, accusations continued. Davis provides one of the clearest accounts in English of the origins of this colonial discourse in nineteenth-century France. Flahault and his students identified “natural” vegetation they believed to be disturbed by degradation or overuse (most important, affecting tree cover; see Robbins's commentary earlier in this forum). Links to Clements's later work are clear (p. 125). As in the United States, ecological knowledge developed in North Africa was exported, inappropriately, south of the Sahara. Fears of desertification appeared in francophone literature and in colonial policies. Pastoralists found themselves sedentarized, forbidden from burning pastures to regenerate them, and denied access to forest reserves by the 1930s. As in the United States, it was overgrazing (controllable) rather than the weather (not controllable) that was thought to determine the outward spread of the Sahara.

That was the science of the day, but Davis's argument is that the colonial period saw “accumulation by desertification” (p. 167)—from the 1920s, accusations of bad local management permitted the extension of commercial irrigated cultivation of cotton or groundnuts and some trophy hunting, at the expense of local populations well adapted to an unstable desert-edge regime. Davis also claims that the United Nations, attached to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, retains a suspicion of “overgrazers,” despite the research findings of nonequilibrium ecologists and new evidence about the ebb and flow of biomass and climate signals on dryland regions.

The two books demonstrate the magnitude, and the power, of coalitions of policymakers and scientists in influencing the fate of the drylands in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A failure to unpack the variability of dryland ecosystems, attributing degradation almost exclusively to human actions, resulted in inappropriate structures and policies that affected the lives of millions across the world's drylands. The books raise the pressing issue of whether the marginality discourse represented by “desertification” language has really changed today. Whereas many organizations and individuals try to nudge Western scientific knowledge of drylands toward coexistence with the refined understanding of ecological and social dynamics held by dryland peoples, both of these books hint at the need for a fuller coproduction of rangeland and arid lands science. Unfortunately the conditions faced by dryland peoples—including pastoralists in Africa and ranchers in the U.S. West, Australia, and elsewhere—leave them as minor players in the environments they inhabit (Filipová and Johanisova 2017).

It is a rare privilege to receive such careful and constructive commentaries on one's work, especially from scholars whose own work I admire and have learned from so much. I want to start by thanking Rebecca Lave, Thomas Bassett, Simon Batterbury, Geoff Mann, and Paul Robbins, as well as Maria Fernandez-Gimenez—who also participated in the Authors-Meet-Critics session at the 2017 American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in Boston—and Diana K. Davis, who led the effort to convene the session and to convert the session into this book review forum.

I readily concede the point, made by Bassett, Batterbury, and Robbins, that The Politics of Scale shifts abruptly between chapters 5 and 6, when it turns from the development of rangeland science in the United States to the overseas travels and travails of the resulting model. My primary goal was to explain the former, which as Batterbury notes had not previously been done, and the latter was quite simply too big a topic, spread over too many countries, continents, languages, and institutional-environmental contexts, to address in anything like a comparable degree of detail. I took heart in the fact that many articles and monographs had already been written about the failures of “pastoral development” on the U.S. range-and-ranching model, and I hoped instead to fill in something of a lacuna in many of those works; namely, where had this model—which when viewed from overseas seemed so patently flawed as to defy explanation—come from to begin with? I was further heartened when I read The Arid Lands and found that it encapsulated the longer overseas history so beautifully.

This might also serve as a partial response to Robbins's criticism that The Politics of Scale does not sufficiently investigate the conditions that enabled the post-Clementsian, nonequilibrium model to coalesce in the 1970s and 1980s into a viable alternative to successional range science. This is why chapters 6 and 7 had to be in the book, despite their differences in scope and epistemology: because the export and forcible imposition of the range-and-ranching model overseas was not only a disaster for pastoralists, but also served to smash open the previously closed world of range science, whose hegemony in post–World War II development circles was entirely derivative of U.S. dominance in the halls of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and associated institutions. It is also the case—as I attempted to summarize in the two paragraphs Robbins alludes to—that several of the domestic circumstances that had made successional theory so exigent in earlier decades had eroded by the late 1970s, such as the political hegemony of ranchers in the West (which I simply asserted to be true, admittedly) and the institutional monopoly over range-related science by the U.S. Forest Service (which I had detailed in the preceding chapters). The core point, vis-à-vis Robbins's concern, however, is that “new” knowledge does not emerge simply or necessarily when scientists observe or “discover” it—plenty of scientists at the Jornada and Santa Rita Experimental Ranges had tried to give voice to nonsuccessional insights for decades. Rather, extrascientific events in the world can help to demolish “old” knowledge by making its flaws too obvious (and in this case too expensive, obscene, or dare I say tragic) to ignore, and thereby helping to create opportunities for alternatives to gain traction.

Moreover, as Lave and Bassett correctly note, I am not (yet) persuaded that the nonequilibrium model of rangeland science is right where the successional model was wrong, and although I consider it premature to pass judgment one way or the other on empirical grounds, I share the theoretical doubts expressed so well by Mann in his commentary. Rangeland ecologists continue to debate the geographical and ecological limits that distinguish equilibrium from nonequilibrium settings or systems, but they rarely even pose Mann's question, let alone try to answer it. Like carrying capacity, equilibrium is an idealist concept disguised as a scientific “fact” about the empirical world; its underlying normative aspirations cannot be excised by methodological refinements or sophisticated statistical analyses. Moreover, if, as Mann puts it, there is no real separation among the components of the state–capital–science triad—and this is perhaps the fundamental point that motivates The Politics of Scale—then it becomes rather unclear what “soft constructivism” even means as an approach to science. In other words, Robbins is absolutely correct to ask whether nonequilibrium ideas subserve the needs of newly ascendant forms of capital accumulation and state territoriality—but they probably can only do so if the deeper contradictions that afflict the triad in relation to the world's people and landscapes remain obfuscated, euphemized, and misrecognized (as, for instance, in the concept of resilience).

To benefit from scholars whose brilliant work has inspired me for many years and whose generous comments here continue to provoke new questions and new ways of thinking is very precious, an uncommon privilege. I am very grateful indeed to Rebecca Lave, Thomas Bassett, Geoff Mann, Paul Robbins, and Simon Batterbury, as well as Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, for their close reading of our work, their thoughtful and stimulating commentaries, and for participating in the Authors Meet Critics session at the AAG meetings. I am especially grateful to Lave for her insightful introduction and to Bassett for deftly chairing our session. Nathan F. Sayre is an outstanding colleague and I am grateful to him for being such an incisive coparticipant in the session and helping to put together this forum.

The embarrassment of riches contained in these reviews makes it difficult to respond to them all in the words allowed here. Thus I have chosen to concentrate on a few overlapping themes that emerged for me from these meditations. First, though, I would like to acknowledge my large debt to both Afghan and Moroccan pastoralists with whom I have worked because it is their profoundly intimate knowledge of their environment and their animals, and their sophisticated understandings of drylands that led me to ask the questions that resulted in this book. As Bassett rightly points out, the book would have been richer with the addition of these kinds of indigenous knowledges, but as I had published on this elsewhere I felt that I should use my limited number of words for this book in other ways.

As with most of the founders of nonequilibrium ecology who worked with pastoralists for a great many years in Africa and elsewhere, I was pushed to think differently based on my experiences with pastoralists in Afghanistan and Morocco. For most of these dryland denizens, variability and unpredictability are the “norm” and not something somehow defined compared to “equilibrium.” In this sense, I believe that many pastoralists “think outside the constraining box” of the equilibrium-based triad of state–capital–science laid out by Mann, and thus have much to teach us. As both Lave and Batterbury point out in their reviews, the coproduction of the science of rangeland and arid lands ecology would benefit from more engagement with Indigenous, or nontriad, understandings of the ways drylands work and how to sustainably live in them.

Although I am cautiously optimistic, as Bassett notes, that we might be able to build on new understandings of variability in the drylands for a more just and sustainable future, this is not to say, as Robbins hints, that I believe in a “universal ecological truth” as somehow revealed by disequilibrium ecology. Knowledge is continually changing; the key is to understand how it is changing and why, who wins and who loses. The power for me, in moving beyond equilibrium thinking in science and other sectors, is that it facilitates a clearer understanding of “how we got things so wrong” in the past as Robbins notes, and helps us to be able to “undo” old harms. I think it likely that disequilibrium ecology is simply one step on a long route of “trying to get it right” that will never reach “perfection.” How can we construct or imagine a way of life that is “universally” socially and ecologically just and sustainable? Whether we can construct a future ecologically or socially preferable using these new understandings, as Lave suggests, remains to be seen, depends on multiple and complex factors, and is deeply political.

Robbins asks, in essence, how will we know when we finally get things “right,” whether with disequilibrium thinking or some other body of knowledge. This is an important question, but involves ontology as much as epistemology in my view. I have been tempted to hope that the inherent disequilibrium and unpredictability of the drylands might somehow tame the state–capital–science triad and become some of the “roots of resistance” as Mann puts it. I agree with Robbins that it is more likely, however, that the triad will find new ways to drive accumulation in the drylands despite their variability, a “disequilibrium fix” if you will.

Accumulation by desertification has long been accomplished with various land dispossessions justified with faulty (neo)colonial narratives that blame local peoples for land degradation. New and related narratives, however, many based on the alleged biological worthlessness of drylands, are driving new enclosures by the triad in the form of, for instance, huge solar arrays like Nur-Energie (to power Europe) in North Africa and various national large solar farms like that in southern Morocco, which dispossess local peoples and fences off large areas of former grazing land. Wind farms as well as petroleum prospecting and production, including shale and gas, have also resulted in new waves of enclosure and dispossession in the drylands. At the moment, these activities are somewhat restrained by the current technologies to store and transmit energy. Ecotourism and “green grabbing” with national parks and other protected areas, usually driven by the triad in some form, are further restricting local land uses and resource access in the drylands around the globe. As Mann makes clear, once finance and capital is involved, as it is in these examples, expansion is the only way forward. The new dryland enclosures are beginning to work around the inherent variability in dryland regions to facilitate the consistent and reliable growth necessitated by capitalism. Future developments, especially in battery and energy transmission technologies, will facilitate this expansion and the dispossession that accompanies it. Epistemological and ontological revolutions, not equilibrium-based “adaptation” and “resilience building,” will be required to change this trajectory and help to build the resistance. As Sayre hints in his response, disequilibrium ideas might help us to begin to dismantle the obfuscation, euphemization, and misrecognition of the triad's contradictions that have long resulted in a great deal of social and ecological harm.

ORCiD

Simon Batterbury https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2801-7483