Book Review

The Western Range Revisited provocatively proposes banishing anthropogenic herbivory from America's traditional rangelands to effect landscape-level ecosystem rehabilitation. Donahue repudiates the standard defenses of grazing as an economic mainstay of local communities and cultural receptacle of rural lifestyles. Historically, her proposition rests on a fundamental refashioning of the "incongruity thesis" of Progressive historian Paul Wallace Gates. Having masterfully synthesized thirty years of "New Western" historiography and interdisciplinary environmental studies emergent since the 1968 publication of Gates's Public Land Law Review Commission report, Donahue problematizes this seminal theory with two original notions.

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First, the author concurs that a heritage of federal legislation underwriting public domain disposal unsuccessfully willed the arid regions of the West beyond the hundredth meridian to propagate Jeffersonian and Turnerian visions of a fee-simple, yeoman republic. However, Donahue diverges from her predecessors, contending that cultures of pastoralism fostered by the Taylor Grazing Act (TGA) proved as inherently antithetical to this desert landscape as the agrarianism promoted by the Homestead Act. According to Donahue, the extensive grazing of exogenous, domesticated ungulates within the context of commodity markets and corporate capitalism culminated in a chronically overstocked range, with concomitant ecological consequences and an overarching species composition trend toward biohomogenization.

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