Word: rangeland
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...Mexico, about 150,000 ewes are shorn of their coats every year, yielding about $1 million worth of wool. It is a far cry from the 1 million ewes who grazed the state's rangeland 20 years ago. With fewer restrictions on predator controls, losses of lambs to coyotes and mountain lions have mounted in recent years, causing more and more ranchers to trade their sheep for cattle...
...thinking ahead - though it comes decades after overgrazing began - will be necessary to recover one of the world's largest and most endangered grasslands. Solutions have to sustainable, but more importantly, they have to be useful, says Jim O'Rourke, who is helping organize the International Grassland and Rangeland CONGRESS in Inner Mongolia next summer. "'Preserving' is a touchy word. Preserving might mean locking [the grasslands] up," O'Rourke says. This land evolved with animals and people living on it, and keeping it healthy will mean resisting the urge to turn it into a museum...
Highway 50 runs straight as a pool cue from Pueblo, Colo., through 23 miles of rangeland and piņon flats before offering an exit to the scruffy little city of Florence (pop. 3,795). Like Flint, Mich., or Orlando, Fla., Florence is a company town. The industry here is prisoners, and the company is the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Twenty years ago, the people of surrounding Fremont County ponied up $160,000 to buy some open land outside Florence, hoping to entice the bureau to build a prison complex as a way to boost the town's economy. Corrections...
...predicting the end of all meat eating. Decades from now, cattle will still be raised, perhaps in patches of natural rangeland, for people inclined to eat and able to afford a porterhouse, while others will make exceptions in ceremonial meals on special days like Thanksgiving, which link us ritually to our evolutionary and cultural past. But the era of mass-produced animal flesh, and its unsustainable costs to human and environmental health, should be over before the next century...
...girl named Mercy, daughter of a preacher whose church has been taken over by religious zealots. "If rain had come, things might have turned out differently," she says. "That is what I think now. But there were children in Outer Maroo who had never seen rain." Into this withered rangeland came a drifter who dressed in white and called himself Oyster, a random alias he had adopted while working with an aquaculture firm. In his new manifestation he was a religious con man, a charismatic spellbinder who had learned the trick of looking for long seconds into a listener...