| OCR Text |
Show Utah 60 Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters the vanishing point. Conversely, rodents of various kinds. including jackrabbits, ground dogs and porcupines now constitute a plague that further the depletion of the vege table cover of deserts and mountains. These are only a few of the stern biological realities that have followed in the wake of our own civilization. Why have these retrogressive changes taken place in a single century? A partial answer to the query lies in the fact that biological communities depend for their perpetuation on an extremely intricate- set of interacting factors, including climate, soil, plants, and animals ex isting together in a delicate biological balance. The elimination of one form of life or the ascendancy of another initiates a series of successional trends that often changes completely the original nature of the bioligical community. The rate of these successional changes depend on several factors, including degree of use and climatic influences. It is well known that destruction of native vegetation and virgin soil takes place much more rapidly and re covery is infinitely slower in arid regions than in regions of heavy rainfall. Thus Gilbert reported that the grassy foothill areas in many valleys of Utah were transformed to shrubby types under the grazing influence instituted by the Mormon pioneers within the amazingly short period of twenty years after settlement. ... While no extensive transformation of mountain vegetative types has yet occurred as a consequence of a century of grazing use, all of the plant formations have suffered a decrease in the quality of their forage. Palatable' shrubs, grass and other her baceous plants have in many areas been replaced by plants of lesser forage value, and the grazing capacity of many of our ranges has been seriously impaired. .... Thirty five years of research conducted chiefly by the For Service on Utah range and forest lands has yielded a wealth of information on the basic principles of land resource manage Much more research is needed, but sufficient data are ment. already at hand to explain the serious decline of our water, soil and forage wealth, and what is more important, these same facts point rather plainly to the type of management necessary for the maintenance and rehabilitation of these land resources still left .... ... est .... to us. do we permit a continued dissipation of our wealth and blandly fiddle on while Rome burns? There are several answers to this question, the first and most important of which is an appalling lack of public information on conserva Why, then, resource . .... tion matters. Why should our students or adults be alarmed over the mis management of the resources that sustain us, if they have never .... been sensitized to the evidence of resource waste? |
