Every now and then it occurs to me that I should document some of the hypotheses in my mind that might make interesting research questions at some indefinite point in the future. Here’s one:

If the historical reference community for a given site was a patchy grassland, with alternating dense perennial grass patches and sparsely vegetated patches (usually these are more or less linear or arcuate and perpendicular to the slope), grazing that is at a level that reduces perennial grass cover while still leaving perennial grasses dominant will also increase the size of both the grass patches and the sparsely vegetated patches (the latter, presumably, increasing more).

And another hypothesis, closely related to the above:

In an area with two ecological sites / topographic units, both having perennial grassland as the historical reference community but one typified by much denser grassland than the other (an example would be a draw surrounded by loamy plains), reductions in perennial grass cover caused by grazing will be greatest immediately adjacent to the more densely vegetated ecological site. This causes a long-term pattern in which what would have been a more or less bell-curve-shaped distribution of grass density in a cross section of the draw and its surroundings into a trimodal distribution, with a tall central peak and two small but broad peaks at some distance (presumably set by factors like terrain complexity, climate / water availability, forage availability relative to stocking rate, and so forth) from the draw. The tall central peak would be the next to diminish and eventually disappear. At one extreme, in a broad valley surrounded by low rocky hills, this can create a situation in which grass cover is inversely proportional to soil moisture; grasses remain on the rocky slopes where runoff is high and water-holding capacity relatively low while being eliminated from the more finely textured soils and shallower slopes near the valley bottom, and from the valley bottom itself.

As a result of this, utilization of grasses by livestock may be inversely proportional to grass cover, even in sites relatively near water with limited overall forage availability, if slopes adjacent to a drainage are steep or merely rocky. At the extreme of that phenomenon, you may have slight or no utilization of perennial grasses under heavy grazing pressure. This is the landform equivalent of seeing perennial grasses only within shrubs and can produce a map of forage availability and forage utilization that, read naively, would indicate minimal grazing pressure and relatively abundant forage.

In reading articles about current protests by Black Lives Matter and allied groups against police violence, triggered by the murder of George Floyd, I’ve noticed a particular rhetorical move that seems incredibly bizarre and counterproductive to me. My intent in writing this is not to discuss the relative merits of different political or moral positions regarding these protests (short version: I am sympathetic to the protestors). Instead, I feel I need to write down what’s rhetorically odd to me, here, but don’t want to do so in a forum where doing so would be likely to devolve into unproductive discussion in which a narrow disagreement with a particular rhetorical approach may be misinterpreted as a broader support for police violence or racism. In any case, here’s the article that prompts my interest at the moment, in the following text: “Would it not be better, Democratic strategist Greg Pinelo wondered, to talk about ‘police reform’ rather than abolition, given that the former polls at 80 percent approval and the latter at just 10? (‘It’s called branding,’ he smugly counseled, as though a call for justice were nothing more than a product launch.)”

Marketers care if something works and nothing else. It is entirely understandable that one wouldn’t want to be morally associated with them. However, suppose we have a social cause that is important to us and we want desperately for our efforts to be successful. Does this make it more, or less, important to use methods that work? It’s like saying that it is of vital importance that your car get you to Reno–therefore you’ll ignore the “check engine” light. Marketers take their cars to mechanics. I don’t think people are very good at switching between moral reasoning and pragmatism. Once we have a compelling moral cause and our minds are focused on the moral analysis of the situation, appeals to pragmatism become crass. You’re motivated by a feeling of righteousness, and there is nothing less righteous than logistics. Switching to pragmatic concerns requires, at least temporarily, letting go of that feeling. It feels like abandoning the moral high ground. Even if not immoral, as the association with marketers suggests, pragmatic concerns are always amoral. How well a car functions has nothing to do with the moral position of the driver. If it’s broken, you will not fix it by moral reasoning; you have to let go of any concern about morality and worry about mechanical and electronic matters. You have to abandon your morality, or at least put it out of your mind. Here’s the thing—that change in your mind, of itself, has absolutely no effect on anything outside of your conscious experience. The cause against police brutality is not lost because you aren’t thinking about morality for a while. You just don’t have that wonderfully addictive feeling of moral superiority in those moments. Do you value that emotional experience more than people’s lives?