The Etiology of Rangeland Degradation in Northern New Mexico: a Critique of Establishment Explanations

This article examines the history of rangeland management on the El Rito District of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. The area became part of the U.S. Forest Service system in the late nineteenth century, when Mexican land grants in the area were not confirmed by U.S. courts. In the 1940s, the Forest Service implemented a series of grazing restrictions in the district. The article links these grazing reductions to both neo-Malthusian theories of naturalresource use that delegitimized local subsistence agropastoralists and to early rangeland-ecology models of herbivory impacts in semi-arid environments that privileged capital-intensive, market-based livestock production. Range-science models of ecosystem processes defined restoration as the application of practices ultimately benefiting commercial operations. Such an approach offered a rationale for restricting agropastoralists. Environmental histories of the region blamed environmental degradation on local cultural traits that constructed Hispano agropastoralists as ignorant of economically and ecologically sound management principles.