These guidelines support a harmonized international approach to assessing the impacts of livestock on biodiversity. The livestock sector is a major user of natural resources (land in particular) and contributor to pollution (causing nutrient losses and increasing greenhouse gas emissions), which makes it a sector with a high impact on biodiversity. However, livestock production is one of the few sectors with not only negative but also positive impacts on biodiversity. The sector can therefore pull two levers to improve its biodiversity performance - mitigate harm and maximise benefits. Yet many environmental assessments of the livestock sector have not addressed biodiversity because of its intrinsic complexity. These guidelines, developed by the Technical Advisory Group on biodiversity - a team of 25 international experts in ecology, biodiversity indicators, agronomy, and environmental science - strive to include biodiversity in such assessments, to improve understanding of livestock's impact on biodiversity and to reveal possible synergies or trade-offs with other environmental criteria and the Sustainable Development Goals.

In this book on Indian cattle ranching, Peter Iverson describes a way of life that has been both economically viable and socially and culturally rewarding. Thus an Indian rancher can demonstrate his generosity and his concern for the well-being of others by giving cattle or beef to relatives, or by feeding people at a celebration. An expert rider possesses a skill appreciated by others. A rancher who raises prime cattle demonstrates that Indians can compete in an activity that dominates the surrounding non-Indian society.

Focusing on the northern plains and the Southwest, Iverson traces the rise and fall of individual and tribal cattle industries against the backdrop of changing federal Indian policies. He describes the Indian Bureau's inability to recognize that most nineteenth-century reservations were better suited to ranching than farming. Even though allotment and leasing stifled ranching, livestock became symbols and ranching a new means of resisting, adapting, and living--for remaining Native.

In the twentieth century, allotment, leasing, non-Indian competition, and a changing regional economy have limited the long-term economic success of Indian ranching. Although the New Deal era saw some marked improvements in Native ranching operations, Iverson suggests that since the 1960s, Indian and non-Indian ranchers alike have faced the same dilemma that confronted Indians in the nineteenth century: they are surrounded by a society that does not understand them and has different priorities for their land. Cattle ranching is no more likely to disappear than are the Indian communities themselves, but cowboys and Indians, who share a common sense of place and tradition, also share an uncertain future.