ABSTRACT
Editors’ note With this chapter we shift the scale and focus of attention. William Beinart is concerned not with climatic change per se, nor with a global perspective. He is concerned with a case study of how during this century different actors-government officials, scientists, white farmers, black herders, apartheid politicians, and post-apartheid politicians-have interpreted environmental change in the rangelands of the Karoo of South Africa. This is the human lifetime scale at which some people believe they can detect environmental degradation, and seek to find the causes. But as Beinart points out, the evidence is very contradictory, and there are unspoken assumptions about what is right or good in the first place-mostly that, despite the use of the rangelands for stocking, somehow they should remain the same, in some undefined equilibrium, and further that white settlement meant progress, even if it had a few managerial hiccoughs along the way. The Karoo also happens to be the kind of area about which Neil Roberts wrote in Chapter 2: low latitudes where there could be great swings in precipitation and where landscapes might be far from biological and geomorphological equilibrium. Beinart’s view that what we should be concerned with is change and the management of change should chime with both Jean Grove’s and Max Wallis’s views, expressed respectively in Chapters 3 and 5.
