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Show 89 Range. If Dr. Dwyer hadn't been so kind, I might have gone off somewhere else vihere there viere more kids. He told me about the department, and the jobs vihich would be available to me if I majored in Range." Though Jan knew l i t t l e about i t at the time, h% of the earth's land surface is classified as rangeland. It includes the tundra of Alaska, the steppes of Russia, the savanna and veldt in Africa, the outback of Australia, and most deserts. In the United States, "range" describes such differnt kinds of land as the grassy Great Plains and the dry Mojave Desert. Range is land vihich is generally not suitable for agriculture or timber production, but which can be grazed by wild and domestic animals. When mankind f i r s t learned to domesticate animals, there seemed to be an unlimited supply of forage for c a t t l e , sheep, goats, reindeer, and camels. If herds ate a l l the vegetation in a particular area, nomadic herdsmen moved their flocks to a new location, unconcerned about the barren ground they had l e f t behind. More than a thousand years ago, after the mighty cedars of Lebanon had been cut to build ships and houses, no second grovith of trees took their place because flocks of goats chevied the seedlings dovin to the roots. Even today in North Africa, animal herds overgraze the thin vegetation, turning grazing land into desert. Each year the e a r t h ' s deserts increase by as many as 27,000 square miles. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the tvientieth centuries in the United States, large numbers of homesteaders settled in the Great Plains region. They planted wheat, and fought gun b a t t l es |