A retired Chadron State College professor who was a world leader in range management, Dr. Jim O’Rourke, died early Tuesday, March 5 at the Chadron Community Hospital of a heart attack. He was 81. A celebration of life will be in June at the family’s ranch south of Chadron.
O’Rourke taught range management at Chadron State 14 years before retiring in 2002, but was deeply involved in range activities long after that and still had an office at the college. He had served as a range consultant in at least 25 nations and had worked with landowners to conduct rangeland health assessments and grazing management plans on more than 100 ranches in Nebraska.
He was a member of the Society of Range Management for nearly 60 years and was president of both the Nebraska and the international organizations. He received many SRM honors, such as the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Frederick G. Renner Award, its highest honor.
When his term as the SRM president ended, he was one of three representatives from North America on the Continuing Committee for the International Rangeland Congress, a world-wide organization.
At that convention in Durbin, South Africa, in 2003 he anticipated he would be leaving the governing board because his eight-year term was expiring. But the Congress leaders voted to suspend the rules and elected him president. That put him in charge of the next convention, which was in Inner Mongolia in 2008.
He made trips to Mongolia annually prior to the convention to help with the arrangements. He also helped lead the 2011 convention in Argentina.
O’Rourke also was instrumental in getting the United Nations to declare 2026 as the International Year of Rangeland and Pastoralists to stress that grasslands must be protected since they cover more than half of the earth’s surface.
O’Rourke’s roots were deep into western Nebraska soil. While he was born in California and grew up at Buffalo, Wyo., both sets of grandparents, Frank and Jerene O’Rourke and Jack and Alice Moeller, lived most of their adult lives in Chadron. Both of his parents, Joe and Jean, attended Chadron State College.
In choosing range management as a career, O’Rourke was following the footsteps of his grandfather and father.
His grandfather O’Rourke was a cowboy on the famed Spade Ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills dating back to 1908 and later wrote magazine columns and a book called “Retracing Old Trails” about those experiences. Jim’s father was a range specialist for the U.S. Forest Service for nearly 40 years, mostly in Wyoming.
O’Rourke received his bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University and his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Arizona.
Prior to joining the Chadron State faculty in 1988, he had spent eight years as a range management specialist in several African countries. After arriving at CSC, he led the way making range management the primary focus of the college’s agricultural curriculum. For more than a decade, CSC’s number of rangeland management majors has been among the nation’s top five.
O’Rourke also was a member of the Nebraska Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education in the early 2000s. He received CSC’s Teaching Excellence Award in 1996.
O’Rourke’s wife, Lora, also was a rangeland management specialist and worked out of the Nebraska National Forest Service office in Chadron for 23 years. She was president of the Nebraska Section of the Society of Range Management in 2001. The couple had lived in Nigeria two years before coming to Chadron. The couple’s twins, Shannon and Seth, are among his survivors.