Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic cattle industry.
Today’s modern cattle “range management” techniques like “adaptive” management” and “regenerative ranching” are, cattle industry boosters tell us, are informed by “range science.” And since science is truth and goodness (and it is), then any technique in the cattle or energy or coal industry with the word science attached to it — or shoved in alongside it — must do a body good.
The North Dakota State University (NDSU) website defines their “Range Science” syllabus this way:
Range Science is a unique program that blends ecology and management for the purpose of sustaining rangelands. Rangelands are important for the diverse array of products and services they provide, including livestock production, wildlife habitat, clean air and water*, and recreation to name a few. Rangeland ecosystems comprise over 40% of the earth’s land and include grasslands, savannahs, shrublands, deserts, alpine meadows, marshes and wetlands. Rangelands are comprised mainly of native grasses, forbs, and shrubs which are extremely productive and rich in biodiversity.* [*Bolding added – JG.]
This mishmash of sense and nonsense is a perfect example of the marketing and selling of pseudo-scientific monstrousness. This kind of science-y language can be found on most corporate websites, where the oil or gas company fouling the environment “partners” with an environmental non-profit. Both parties profit financially, but the ecology of our home planet suffers. (You may wonder if the folks behind these dirty deals for dollars breathe Earth’s air and drink Earth’s water.)
Watch Sky-Jack” Podcast (12.23.25) on this topic:
All this supposed ‘science’ of course and always ignores the millions of cow in the reading room. Dairy and beef cows shit millions of pounds of manure onto land (often publicly owned), thus polluting both land and waterways. And the bovine methane emissions (burps and farts) which trap heat in the atmosphere must be ignored. Instead the range “scientist” will focus on some modest gains of soil carbon sequestration. Or how cows have the same positive effect that wild bison used to — which they don’t. READ WHY.)
The modern, overbred-for-generations, domesticated cows-for-profit aren’t put out to pasture to “heal” or “restore” the land, despite what the industry’s “rangeland science” is trying to sell you. Cows today exist in vast number for only one purpose: profit. And even the profit is heavily subsidized by the bamboozled taxpayer, and the subsidies are hidden and lied about, as Point Reyes National Seashore, a hot topic on this website. Beef and dairy ranchers get millions more help to lower consumer cost than do brocolli and Brussels sprouts farmers.
Dairy and beef cows are bred, “ranched,” milked and slaughtered to make money from dairy and beef products we humans eat in excessive amounts. Confining and eating (and milking) animals has been going on for centuries of course, but what’s different today is the scale of this bloody business, and its increased industrialization and automation of its brutality. Brutality is the main reason the cow punchers lobby for “ag gag” laws to criminalize the filming and publicizing the mechanized killing going on behind the opaque walls of the slaughterhouse. (Paul McCartney is supposed to have said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”)
But that’s the animal welfare and ethical argument, for another blog, HERE: https://treespiritproject.com/veganism/largest-holocaust-ever-still-is/
Back to the NSDU science-dry definition above. The bolded phrase indicates the contradiction of implying that “livestock production” is not antithetical to “wildlife habitat, clean air and water…” The contradiction is addressed by just making a claim, and walking away from it. READ WHY cattle ranching is the enemy of “wildlife habitat, clean air and water…”
Today’s industrial range managers increasingly cloak their environmental degradation in scientific language. This includes “science-ing the shit out of” all cattle ranching, including especially the culturally romanticized “small family farmer/rancher.” He (and she), you are told, is “living on the land” and even treats cows more “humanely” than the factory operator does, insisting that that smaller-scale cow-slaughtering is different; kinder, even more noble.
And also — and here’s where “rangeland science” is hauled in and molested — better for the environment, to protect or “steward” or “restore” the land. Without mentioning that the land desperately needs restoring in the first place because of cattle grazing. (“Small,” “free-range,” “grass-fed” farms are actually worse for the environment; they use more land, more water, and produce more heat-trapping atmospheric gasses per dairy and beef cow than industrial feedlot cows do. READ MORE HERE.)
So (too) many of America’s 350 million citizens, and (increasingly) many of the world’s 8 billion humans, all want to eat lots of cow’s milk and meat products, and in large quantities. This is, simply put, not possible to do without exacerbating the ecological catastrophe already underway — not “sustainable” to use the industry’s own buzzword. This is what we are already experiencing with increasing heat waves, drought and larger, more frequent storms. Raising cows for human consumption is one of the primary drivers of global heating, warming oceans, weather disruptions and many more ecological collapses we’re only just beginning to experience. READ MORE: TreeSpiritProject.com/climatechange
The cow industry knows this, has known it for decades, and is always pushing back with new ads, new P.R., and, as here, with new “science.” The so-called “science” of rangeland “management” is merely the latest multi-billion dollar research, marketing, public relations and advertising industry battle for your mind, heart, and soul. The hard-working, honest farmer/rancher/cowboy who “works the land” to make a meager living is alive and well in this fantasy world, long after his demise in the real world of 21st century America.
This is the sobering big picture view relying on countless volumes of legitimate, non-cattle industry scientific reports amassed over decades, which the majority of mainstream media outlets soft-pedal or completely ignore, or else risk losing millions in ad revenue from these multinational animal-slaughtering businesses.
All the impressive, multi-billion dollar, ultra technological inventions with the impressive, accompanying jargon-filled terminology —including virtual fences, electronic shock collars, GPS and satellite mapping and “adaptive” range management — are all just elaborate deflections which, like the oxymoronic umbrella term, “regenerative ranching,” must never be seriously examined, because they disintegrate under actual scientific scrutiny.
The implicit, underlying, foundational assumptions, endlessly repeated, become gospel: that cows can, will, and should and must be raised for humans to eat and wear. To suggest otherwise, to even question this global societal and cultural (and business-as-usual) norm, is to be mocked, marginalized, ostracized, de-platformed, defunded, put out of business, and disgraced.
“Range science” harnesses tremendous intellectual and financial resources, but without ever questioning the underlying assumption that eating and wearing cows is necessary, practical or even possible without reaping the ecological whirlwind, including global warming.
Raising cows for human consumption is wildly expensive and a suicidally destructive environmental endeavor. It’s done today, on a larger, industrial scale then ever before in human history, merely for palate pleasure and to profit global, multinational, multibillion dollar businesses — which are necessary to produce the huge amounts of dairy and beef the Americas and the world are now consuming. “Rangeland science” has nothing to do with addressing or ameliorating it.