Too Much Science in Ranching, Farming, Forestry, Public Lands
| Author | Craig M. Pease |
| Position | Ph.D. scientist and former law school professor based in New England |
| Pages | 17-17 |
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 | 17
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, September/October 2021.
Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Science and the Law
President Biden has made science
advisor Eric Lander a member of
the Cabinet, a rst. e Bureau
of Land Management now touts it is
“listening to the science.” ese devel-
opments are good news, of course, after
four years of science denial. Yet like all
tools, science has its limits.
Good science almost invariably pro-
motes strong environmental protec-
tion. Yet sometimes, good science will
never be available, as with the potential
harm to the great-great-grandchildren
of those exposed to nanoplastics.
Rotational grazing pioneer Alan Sa-
vory has enjoyed unparalleled success.
He recently said, “People coming out
of a university . . . , you take them into
the eld and they literally don’t believe
anything unless it’s a peer-reviewed
paper. It’s the only thing they accept.”
His words are not hyperbole. I once got
into a heated dispute
with an accomplished
biostatistician who
simply could not be-
lieve that rotational
grazing worked.
If one denes good
science as the theories
and their supporting data and statistics
that one can publish in a peer-reviewed
journal, then the best ranching, farm-
ing, and forestry being done today does
involve good science. But agriculture in
an era of climate adaptation involves
complex ecosystems. Science, and sta-
tistics in particular, both have limited
applicability to complex systems.
We live in a milieu of complexity.
A smudge of dirt might contain over
5,000 species of microorganisms (bac-
teria, fungi, protozoans), and around
10 billion individuals, one individual
containing some three million proteins.
A diagram of a bacterium’s biochemi-
cal pathways looks like Escher painted
a bowl of spaghetti. Scaling up, a 100-
acre ranch might have over one billion
pounds of topsoil and a multitude of
native plants, insects, mammals, and
birds, embedded in complex political-
social-economic and climate systems,
topped o with a dollop of cows.
e limits of statistics trace back to
its very origins. Ronald Fisher and the
other statistical pioneers of the rst
half of the 20th century specically
wanted to increase yields in farming
and ranching. eir genius took in-
credibly complex agricultural systems,
and, using randomization, replication
and controls, gathered data on one or
a small handful of variables, holding all
else constant. ose data can then be
analyzed with statistics.
We face a dilemma. ere is a sort
of complex systems uncertainty prin-
ciple: e more successfully we isolate,
rigorously study, and manage one vari-
able in a complex system, the less we
learn about and manage that complex
system as a whole. It’s worse. When we
demand good science
when it is not appro-
priate, the limits of
science induce serious
pathologies in the very
structure of our insti-
tutions.
ough most en-
vironmentalists will be horried, I’d
argue that the agricultural institutions
most explicitly grounded in science are
those of factory farms, corn monocul-
tures, glyphosate herbicide, and pro-
cessed food at the supermarket as the
end product. Industrial agriculture
focuses on one specic variable profes-
sionals can measure and manipulate-—
pounds marketed per unit inputs of
water, fertilizer, pesticides, and labor.
e corps of agribusiness scientists
maintains the intellectual heritage of
the statistics pioneers, which heritage of
rigor has now summoned forth a veri-
table catastrophe in the health of eco-
systems and human consumers.
ere are striking and disturbing
parallels between industrial agriculture
and science-based environmental liti-
gation on public lands. e 2015 Sage
Grouse Plan is grounded in a tremen-
dous amount of science, and it protects
millions of acres of high desert sage-
brush. It originally arose to avoid the
certain adverse political fallout from
listing the Sage Grouse as threatened
under the Endangered Species Act.
It remains unlisted. Originally under
President Obama, the plan withdrew
many acres from gas and mineral de-
velopment, which Trump attempted to
undo, and Biden is now attempting to
reinstate, per the government’s response
to a March 2021 court order. e Sage
Grouse Plan’s focus on one particular
species within a complex ecosystem
looks a lot like industrial agriculture.
Savory, the grazing pioneer, man-
ages ecosystems in ways science cannot
capture, but humans can comprehend.
He is the intellectual heir not of formal
science and statisticians, but rather the
land management of indigenous peo-
ples and medieval peasants.
January past, incoming President
Biden sent Lander a letter posing ve
Panglossian questions, including the
inevitable genuect to progress. Nary
a mention of limits to science, nor the
disadvantages of technology. No hint
that most all the economic, scientic,
and technological progress of the last
century would never have happened
without fossil fuel consumption, which
Biden has pledged to restrain.
Good science requires we recognize
and respect its limits. Especially in
ranching, farming, and forestry, sci-
ence is often ill-suited, or even coun-
terproductive.
Too Much Science in Ranching,
Farming, Forestry, Public Lands
Success in land
management needs
more knowledge,
less science
Craig M. Pease is a Ph. D. scien-
tist and former law school professor
based in New Eng land. Email him at:
pease.craig@ gmail.com.
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