Starrs, Paul F.

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Starrs, Paul F.

PERSONAL:

Education: Attended Deep Springs College, CA, 1975-77; University of California, San Diego, B.A., 1980; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1984, Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno, Mailstop 154, Reno, NV 89557; fax: 775-784-1058. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, geographer, and educator. University of Nevada, Reno, associate professor of geography. Worked as a cowboy.

WRITINGS:

(With David R. Stoddart and Phil Hoehn) San Francisco Bay: Its History & Development in Maps (exhibition catalogue), Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 1993.

Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1998.

(With Peter Goin) Black Rock, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics, edited by Richard L. Knight, Wendell C. Gilbert, and Ed Marston, Island Press (Washington, DC), 2002; Sagebrush Vernacular: Rural Architecture in Nevada, edited by Stephen R. Davis, Nevada Humanities Committee (Reno, NV), 2003; and Western Places, American Myths, edited by Gary Hausladen, University of Nevada Press (Reno, NV), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Paul F. Starrs is a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches cultural and historical geography. Starrs's academic works focus on the geography of the "New West" encompassing Nevada, Colorado, and other western mountain states, noted a biographer on the University of Nevada, Reno Department of Geography Web site. He regularly writes articles, reviews, and other works on topics such as the online world, everyday landscapes, migration, urban geography, and more. Starrs's academic work and research covers areas such as regional geography, natural resources and population, graphic representation, and the American West. His research also encompasses the woodland areas and the human population of Mediterranean Europe, the Web site biographer stated. As an educator, he teaches a wide variety of courses in geography and related areas, including cartography and graphic representation, geography and film, North American geography, European geography, geographical research methods, and the history of geography. Though Starrs was born and grew up in an urban environment, much of his personal and professional life revolves around rural areas and the outdoors in the American West.

Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West contains Starrs's detailed examination of the long-standing conflict over land use between Western cattle ranchers and the American government. A former cowboy himself, Starrs perhaps enjoys a greater connection to the topic of his book than might other scholars. He divides the book into three parts. In the first part, he looks at the history of the conflict, covers the nature of Western ranching and its interaction with federal land policy, discusses the various laws and policies that have evolved over the years, and establishes the land-use situation as it currently stands. Starrs concludes that the federal government has not understood the practical aspects of large-scale cattle ranching, and that has led the government to create land-use rules, laws, and policies that are not suitable to ranching. Cattle ranching in the West requires access to large amounts of land, but the government has not allowed ranchers to use public lands for these purposes. The Western land grants resulted in farms that were too small and thus inadequate for successful ranching. Starrs notes that a land-grant system such as that used by Hispanics in the southwest would have been better, since that method of land use recognized the needs of ranchers and adjusted the size of the land grant to the type of agricultural use planned for the land.

In the second part, Starrs presents case studies of the actual practice of ranching in five Western regions: Rio Arriba, in New Mexico; Deaf Smith, Texas; Cherry, Nebraska; Sheridan, Wyoming; and Elko, Nevada. He offers detailed assessments on how different types of ranching have affected land use policies and the physical and geographical conditions of the landscape in these areas. He lauds Texas as an example of an effective system when the state retained, then sold, public tracts of land large enough to support ranching in the rugged and arid region. On the other end of the spectrum, Starrs portrays the Nevada system as ineffective because it restricts ranchers' access to the wide swaths of public land necessary to successful grazing of cattle.

Finally, in part three, Starrs looks to the future of ranching in the American West and offers numerous reasons why ranchers should be permitted access to public lands. Throughout the book, Starrs "combines clarity and elegance in his writing, a rare gift which enables him to connect the varied parts of his story, from place to issue and back again to place, seamlessly and with sensitivity," remarked Marshall E. Bowen, writing in the Journal of Cultural Geography.

In a Library Journal review, Stephen H. Peters called Starrs's work a "solid and well-written book." Geographical Review contributor Owen Ulph expressed admiration for Starrs's writing and his "faultless adherence to the rigid rules of scholarship while permitting inspired insights to be expressed in a distinctive efflorescent style." The book is "copious with detail and information and well-researched," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who added, "The story is so fascinating and such a part of us all that the reader is quickly drawn in." Bowen observed that Let the Cowboy Ride "is a good book, and an important one." He concluded, "What Starrs has written is well worth reading, for it can serve as a credible basis for sensible discussion of the future of our western rangeland."

In Black Rock, Starrs and university colleague Peter Goin explore, in words and pictures, the diverse landscapes of the Black Rock region in northwestern Nevada. Goin, also a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, contributes eight photographic essays on the region, while Starrs offers eight full-text chapters on the geography, culture, and residents of the area. Together, Starrs and Goin "have produced an elegant piece of work that captures the essence of the Black Rock Playa and the mountains, meadows, and desert valleys that surround it," commented Marshall E. Bowen in the Geographical Review. In addition to his text, Starrs also contributes several maps he created especially for the book, supplemented by a number of historical maps taken from the classic 1885 volume Geologic History of Lake Lahontan by Israel Cook Russell. For Starrs, maps also serve as indicators of an area's culture and identity, Bowen noted.

"Starrs has a special knack for expressing complex ideas in exquisite but unambiguous prose, and nowhere is his ability better demonstrated than in this book," Bowen stated. He writes on technical subjects such as the "uplift and cutting of alluvial fans," Bowen noted, but makes the science accessible to the general reader. He describes the troubles encountered by travelers to California as they experienced the blazing heat of the flatlands. He contemplates the cultural significance of the well-known Burning Man festival that takes place every year, drawing more than 30,000 people to the Black Rock region. Starrs finds an inseparable connection between the environmental phenomena and cultural events that occur at Black Rock, each illuminating the other in ways that could not occur separately. Starrs and Goin's efforts result in an "engaging blend of perspectives that brings the area's past into sharp focus, explains what it is like today, and hazards an educated guess about what lies ahead for this remote corner of the Great Basin," Bowen remarked.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Agricultural History, summer, 1999, D. Clayton Brown, review of Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West, p. 360.

American Historical Review, October, 1999, Richard W. Etulain, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 1313.

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, May, 2001, Ray Huffaker, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 483.

American Studies, fall, 1999, Jim Hoy, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 212.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, December, 2000, John B. Wright, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 806.

Choice, September, 1998, P.D. Travis, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 204.

Environmental Politics, summer, 1999, Peter Jowers, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 201.

Geographical Review, April, 1998, Owen Ulph, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 304; April, 2006, Marshall E. Bowen, review of Black Rock, p. 327.

Journal of American History, March, 1999, Martin Ridge, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 1610.

Journal of Cultural Geography, spring-summer, 1999, Marshall E. Bowen, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 137; spring-summer, 2007, Joe Weber, review of Black Rock, p. 109.

Journal of Historical Geography, July, 2001, William Wyckoff, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 454.

Journal of the West, winter, 2006, Jessie L. Embry, review of Black Rock, p. 105.

Library Journal, April 1, 1998, Stephen H. Peters, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 106.

Pacific Historical Review, August, 1999, Peter Iverson, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 488.

Publishers Weekly, February 23, 1998, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 61.

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, July, 1999, J.A. Wilson, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 125.

Times Literary Supplement, July 10, 1998, Hugh Brogan, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 14.

Western Historical Quarterly, autumn, 1999, Daniel Tyler, review of Let the Cowboy Ride, p. 380.