Ohio State professor addresses issues facing pastoralists, rangelands

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Ohio State professor addresses issues facing pastoralists, rangelands

Annual meeting part of year-long education effort

A common misconception about deserts is that they are barren wastelands. According to Mark Moritz, professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University, this couldn't be further from the truth.

"Deserts, rangelands, savannas, they have a beauty in and of themselves," Moritz said. "They're not empty spaces; they're not marginal spaces. They're different spaces. There's a lot of wildlife there. Lots of specialized plants and animals live in those environments and they have value."

Moritz is passionate about rangelands like deserts, savannas and tundras, as well as the people who live and work on them, known as "pastoralists." These are people,as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "whose livelihoods rely on domesticated and semi-domesticated animals that graze and browse predominantly on rangelands with varying degrees of mobility."

"The desert is super cool," he said. "Sometimes you see pictures of the desert and think that nothing can survive there. But people live there and they live there well, with their animals."

Rangelands can be found on every continent and represent the largest global land-cover type. Pastoralists and the 1 billion animals they manage worldwide - camels, cattle, sheep, yaks, reindeer, even ducks - play a significant role in maintaining the biodiversity of these spaces. They also produce animal products like milk, meat, hides, wool and more.

2026 was declared the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) by the United Nations, thanks to a decade-long lobbying effort by volunteers around the world. The intention is to raise awareness about the needs of pastoralists, as well as to celebrate their vibrant cultures and combat stereotypes about the same.

Each month has a theme, ranging from infrastructure and services for pastoralists to mobility, land and water security. Moritz spoke about the latter topic in an IYRP panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Range Management.

"I've been working on land rights for a long time as an academic scholar," Moritz said. "I often joke that only two people read my articles.

"My research focuses on how pastoralists manage land and resources," he said. "Freedom to move across lands is really important for sustainability."

Land that supports this type of movement is referred to as "open access" or "commons." When rangelands are bound either by national borders or owned privately, it limits pastoralists' ability to move freely.

"Pastoralists move where the grasses are," Moritz said. "They cannot stay in one place. The system is not productive if they do that."

While Moritz's work has a global focus, it has implications for Ohio as well, he said. Ohio was once home to pastoralists.

"We have a long history of raising livestock and early farmers in Ohio were basically agro-pastoralists," he said. "The way we raise livestock currently, it's not very sustainable. The lessons of small-scale farmers, of these agro-pastoralists, are relevant here. If we're thinking about sustainable development in Ohio, there are lessons from how pastoralists across the world are raising livestock."

In addition to studying anthropology, Moritz also considers himself a "wicked scientist," and serves as a faculty lead for Ohio State's program that trains students to tackle "wicked" problems - that is, problems that are complex and political and require a transdisciplinary approach.

He considers land rights for pastoralists to be a wicked problem.

"I cannot just be an academic now. I have to use my expertise," he said. "One of the things about the wicked science program is that we don't just focus on knowledge and skills. It's also an attitude. Let's see if we can tackle this problem and improve the lives of pastoralists."

Speaking at the Society for Range Management annual meeting was an easy choice because of this.

"When I got the opportunity to participate, to work with others and to translate my academic work to reach broader audiences," he said, "I felt like I had the obligation to do it. Because otherwise, if I just write papers for my fellow academics and I don't translate that into policy, there's no point to what I do."

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