general poverty rate is a gross measure of social stratification that indicates the extent of poverty within a county or local area (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). The greater the concentration of poverty (e.g., a higher percentage of a given population in poverty) the less likely it is that the population has the resources necessary to adapt to ecological and socioeconomic changes. Such increased social stratification, then, is related to a reduced ability to sustain counties. A lower capacity to adapt to changes implies a lower level of sustainability.
The presence of private sector non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is considered to be an indicator of professional administrative capacity for conceiving, implementing, and managing community projects relating to rangeland sustainability or restoration that otherwise would be unsupported by government agencies. It is also an indicator of how strongly such groups feel about the importance of natural resources in an area.
Public perceptions, intentions, and behaviors influence cultural, legal, and public policy decisions toward the management, consumption, and preservation of natural resources. In order for rangeland management decisions to be socially sustainable (especially on public lands), they must achieve and retain some minimum threshold of acceptability with citizens. This indicator would provide for regular measurement of preferences, attitudes, and intentions with respect to rangelands (and potentially other natural resource-based lands such as forests).
This indicator measures the extent to which laws, regulations, guidelines, institutions, and organizations provide opportunities for public access to information and public participation in policy and decision-making processes relating to rangelands. Public participation ensures that policy and programs are vetted by a cross section of the people who are affected. Public participation can foster political support for sustainable management. All steps in the management decision process – problem identification, data collection, analysis, alternative formulation, and choice – must be open to public participation. Public involvement is thus a complex, dynamic, interactive process of bargaining, negotiating, and mediation among and between constituents and managers. Engaging the public does not ensure sustainability in itself. It does, however, inform participants about the issues involved, conflicting laws, resource limitations, and what other people and groups want.
This indicator is envisioned as a way to address a problem inherent in simple measures of recreation use: rangeland sustainability is influenced by the ecological and social impacts of recreation use, and these impacts are not necessarily correlated with user density. Biophysical impacts of recreation typically follow a curvilinear pattern where marginal changes in impacts (e.g., soil compaction, change in plant species composition) become smaller as use levels increase. As a result, changes in visitor numbers may or may not indicate loss of additional value at the site level, depending on whether use is already low, moderate, or high. Social impacts of recreation – crowding, conflict between user groups, and depreciative behaviors (vandalism, littering, rule violation, etc.) – are more dependent on characteristics of the use and users than on simple numbers of users.
This indicator relates to the intensity of concern over, and pressures for management of, cultural and spiritual resources, which are assets valued by particular groups of people. It is assumed that when spiritual or cultural values are threatened by activities on rangelands, citizens will suffer loss of value from those rangeland uses and may act to protect those values in ways that might decrease the value of other resources (e.g., by restricting livestock grazing or recreation access—either by legislation or regulation).
This indicator measures the years of formal education of the population of rangeland-dependent communities. It is an important measure of the human (and to a lesser extent social) capital available for sustaining a social group. Moreover, communities whose populations have higher levels of education may tend to have increased ability to recognize and respond to problems on local rangelands.
