2016 MALPAI BORDERLANDS GROUP SCIENCE CONFERENCE TRANSCRIBED PRESENTATIONS
Introduction by Ben Brown, Science Coordinator:
Ben: “Thanks everyone for coming I am really gratified by the good turnout. The weather could have been better but we have a lot of good folks here and a good program lined up for you. Last year we dedicated our meeting to Charlie Painter who was a herpetologist with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. He was their endangered species herpetologist. Charlie passed away last year after a long struggle with cancer. There is a Charles W. Painter Memorial Fund. You can make donations to that fund in Charlie’s honor. There are three different entities that benefit from this fund. One is the Chiricahua Desert Museum, another is the Southwest Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, and the third is the New Mexico Artists Blacksmiths Association. Charlie, in addition to being a very good scientist, was a very good blacksmith. He grew up in a family of blacksmiths and he continued that.
We actually have two keynote speakers. We couldn’t decide which one we wanted to be the keynote so we just decided to have two of them. The first speaker this morning is Doctor Nathan Sayre. He is a professor and department head at the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley, but he is pretty well known to folks down here. He wrote our 10th anniversary account of the Malpai Borderlands. He has written a number of other papers on ranching and particularly the economics of ranching. He is going to talk to us this morning about things from his new book, which is basically a history of grazing in the western United States.”
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