Kill The Cowboy: A Battle Of Mythology In The New West - Hardcover

Russell, Sharman Apt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 020158123X ISBN 13: 9780201581232

Publisher: Basic Books, 1993

Synopsis

Argues that the mythology of the cowboy should be replaced by new icons reflecting the realities of the modern West, including water shortages, overgrazing, and the need to protect western wildlife and wilderness

About this title

About the Author

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of When the Land Was Young, also available in a Bison Books edition. She lives in the Mimbres Valley in New Mexico.

From Kirkus Reviews

Take the cowboy, please, and send him packing, along with all his mythological baggage--or so argues Russell (Writing/Western New Mexico University) in this provocative and iconoclastic study. Huge tracts of public range are beginning to go lunar: badlands-scale erosion; dry and degraded stream beds, void of wildlife. Livestock overgrazing is much to blame, Russell says, and greedy, land-rapacious ranchers are the culprits. ``Greedy'' because this public land could support and benefit from a moderate grazing regimen--except that ``moderate'' isn't part of the stockman's vocabulary. Government institutions such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management--along with the powerful rancher's lobby in Washington--seem intent on keeping the status quo, while a wide array of groups and individuals have taken up opposition. Russell documents the struggles of these ranching opponents and their visions of a different land use, from Quaker to Earth First!-er. Much is afoot on public rangeland--from possible wolf-reintroduction and holistic resource-management to the loss of almost all riparian ecosystems due to cow-stomping and the poisoning of wildlife by ranchers who don't like the competition- -and Russell samples from all these waters. How can we restore degraded land? asks Russell. How can we have healthy systems of soil and water? How can humans fit into the landscape? The author, meanwhile, is aware that ranchers are in a predicament: How can they change their ways and still avoid economic ruin? The final chapter finds her in a philosophical mode, ruminating on Judeo- Christian ethics, biodiversity, Gary Snyder, and Native American attitudes toward the land. Russell takes a cultural icon and, in one bold stroke, brings it full circle from myth to menace. The West needs a new image, and she's given us many to choose from. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 020158123X
• ISBN 13: 9780201581232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 217