OOS 50-3 - Human-Nature relations like Life depends on them: Using rangelands to reimagine who we are to one another

Rangeland social-ecological systems support vibrant forms of biological and cultural diversity globally and sustain vital working knowledge supporting humanity’s ability to coexist with highly variable and complex ecosystems. Seen as both workinglands and wildlands, rangelands are managed for multiple goals. These include social wellbeing, climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and livelihood goals for local resource-dependent communities, and increasingly, for broader publics seeking recreation, conservation, and other cultural and material benefits from rangelands. Managers trying to balance trade-offs among these many goals are challenged by climate, land use, governance, economic, and rural community change, and livestock-wildlife conflicts across public and private lands. Therefore, sustainable rangeland management precludes siloed social, animal science, and ecological disciplinary approaches to knowledge development and praxis, and push us to explore relational, transdisciplinary and collaborative methods. Here we provide an example of how rangeland science offers ecologically and socially responsive methodologies to better understand and re-design our relationships with one another and with natural systems. The Rangeland Collaboratory at the US Sheep Experiment Station in Idaho and Montana seeks to conduct locally-relevant, multifunctional, and participatory research that actively reduces social and social-ecological conflict in order to enhance livelihood and conservation goals. The project draws from lessons learned from ARS’s flagship participatory grazing experiment, the Collaborative Adaptive Rangeland Management (CARM) project in Colorado (est. 2012). The Collaboratory (est. 2022) is a place-based project that brings together 1) collaborative adaptive management, 2) peace-building sociological theories and methods, 3) animal nutrition and genetics, and 4) herbivore and plant community ecology with the goals and knowledge of local ranchers, conservation organizations, public agencies, and rural community members. In this way, the project advances theoretical and methodological tools that researchers, managers, and communities in other systems can adopt to advance social and ecological goals.