CATTLE GRAZING AND CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION: Local environmental knowledge and public lands management in the US West

Climate change mitigation and adaptation require difficult conversations about trade-offs between global solutions and local realities. If solutions formulated by scientists and policymakers fail to account for local environmental knowledge and people’s cultural connections to landscapes, they may fail to acknowledge societal trade-offs from proposed solutions, fail to get local buy-in, and miss important traditional approaches to dealing with climatic variability. Cattle grazing on rangelands in the western United States offers a case study to illustrate the complexities of land-use decisions under climate change and how local environmental knowledge informs adaptation. This chapter describes the interdisciplinary social science field of local environmental knowledge as a framework for understanding ranchers’ views and experiences related to climate change. Three ranchers’ stories offer insights into adaptations including vertical transhumance, in which ranchers move livestock across a large mountainous landscape according to seasonal and annual variability.