By Birch Malotky

Senator Dylan Roberts might be one of the few people in the Colorado state legislature who has been interested in state trust land for years. This widespread but generally misunderstood type of land is often lumped in with public lands, but it has a specific and unique purpose that sets it apart from national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and so on. Trust lands—which the federal government granted to states when they became states—are managed to support K-12 schools and other public institutions, usually by making money to fund them.

Most state trust lands have been leased for agriculture, mining, and logging, but not all parcels—which are scattered all over Colorado— have good soil, or minerals, or forests. Roberts says there are “small tracts of land within cities and towns or along highways that aren’t going to be used for traditional leasing ever, and are not wildlife corridors or anything like that, so they’re not generating any economic value.” The senator, who represents a district with “some very high-cost communities that deal with significant housing challenges,” thinks that building affordable housing on these random bits of trust land could make good money for the schools while helping keep working families where they are needed.

He points to a quarter-acre plot “right in the heart of Denver that was state trust land and, for whatever reason, hadn’t been developed or sold.” The Colorado State Land Board, which manages state trust lands, built affordable housing on the parcel back in 2022, and “that became the model,” Roberts says. When he started looking at state trust land in his district, which spans much of northwestern Colorado and includes places like Vail, Aspen, and Breckinridge, he discovered several promising parcels “along already existing transportation corridors and near other residential and commercial development.” Through these efforts, one project is already moving forward in Dowd Junction, between Avon and Vail.

As the 150th anniversary of Colorado, and its state trust lands, approached, Roberts connected with a number of other legislators and organizations interested in exploring and expanding these kinds of creative uses of trust land. Together, they drafted and passed HB 1332 last spring, which instructs a working group to conduct an analysis of state trust lands and write a report with recommendations on opportunities to advance affordable housing, conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, recreation, and renewable energy.

The act, presented as a kind of sesquicentennial performance review, is the latest juncture in a long history of Colorado figuring how to make the best out of a group of lands that were designated for a certain purpose, but weren’t optimally designed to fulfill that purpose. Throughout that time, the scattered, widespread nature of the parcels has proven both challenge and opportunity, and has required creative thinking and a reckoning with the legal and moral responsibility of managing not only for this generation or the next, but for generations far into the future.

Most people have never heard of state trust lands. Matt Samelson, an attorney with Western Environmental Law Partners who helped advocate for HB 1332 and has been appointed to the working group, admits that it’s “a pretty weird little corner of the land world.” The Colorado State Land Board Director, Nicole Rosmarino, says that most Coloradans are not aware of the specifics of her agency’s mission. But that agency is the second largest landowner in the state—responsible for 2.8 million surface acres and 4 million sub-surface acres—and its mission goes back to the founding fathers, Manifest Destiny, and a desire to measure and divide the world into a uniform grid.

Before the Constitution was even adopted, a newly independent America turned to securing its claims to the western frontier, wanting to ensure that new territories did not try to split off from the young and fragile republic, and also that they would hold to the democratic ideals of the revolutionaries. Many saw public education as essential to preparing the nation’s citizens for their civic duties, but funding was a problem. The settled, eastern states had an established tax base, but yet-to-be-formed western states did not, and the federal government was in massive debt from the war.

Cash poor but land rich, the Continental Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which divided the West into square townships, among other things. Each township was made up of 36 sections of one square mile (640 acres) each. The 16th section, located at the heart of each township, was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within said township.”

This one provision laid the foundation for more than a century of land grants, from Ohio’s statehood in 1803 to Arizona’s in 1912. Totaling more than 80 million acres, the school land grants made during this period were nearly as large as those made to the railroads. So, this is where the question of a system designated for a purpose, but not designed for it, begins. Why were the grants made in this pattern? How, exactly, were these lands meant to support public schools? And why the 16th section?

It’s tempting to imagine that a central section was reserved for the purpose of actually hosting a schoolhouse, such that each township was organized around its civic core and distributed across the countryside with mathematical precision. It does seem to fit with the intellectual zeitgeist of the revolutionaries, who were enamored of rationalism and the idea of an agrarian democracy. But if that was the intent, realities on the ground rendered it more symbolic than practicable, creating a mismatch between how the lands were distributed and how they came to be managed that has created challenges for administrators ever since.

At the least, it seems the Continental Congress did intend for there to be a school in every 36-square-mile township in the West, which explains why the grant pattern was one parcel in each township instead of a single block of school trust lands. The evidence is in the way that the initial grants to new states were directed to township-level governments for the exclusive benefit of that township’s schools. The vision was not a statewide, state-administered school system, where land or a school in one township could support a broader area, but rather one characterized by self-sufficiency and local control.

This likely reflects, in part, post-revolutionary uneasiness with centralized government, but it was a fundamental flaw in both purpose and design. The reality of settlement and western landscapes meant that population centers formed around travel corridors, arable land, military outposts, and other strategic features, rather than the artificial boundaries of the rectangular survey system. This left plenty of townships lacking people, governments, and the need for a school.

In response, Congress changed to whom the grants were made, and for whose benefit. By the mid-1800s, it was granting land to state governments rather than local ones, for the support of schools statewide rather than exclusively for schools in the township where the land was located. But which lands were granted did not change, so the basic pattern of reserving a little bit of land all across the state persisted. This created a kind of checkerboard land ownership that people today sometimes call “the blue rash” because of the way that state trust parcels—light blue on many maps— pock the surface of many western states.

The scattered nature of these lands is the first challenge that trust land managers have had to contend with over the years. Smaller, discontinuous parcels don’t offer the management efficiencies that larger parcels do, and they are more vulnerable to impacts from the lands around them. “The checkerboard makes it hard to have consistent management,” Samelson says, “because the surrounding uses and surrounding ownership may just have a very different perspective than the state does.” For example, he asks, “How do you manage a little 640-acre parcel inside of a Wilderness Study Area? Are you actually going to generate money from that?”

In Colorado—which received sections 16 and 36 in each township “for the support of common schools”—the checkerboard mostly overlays the eastern plains, with far less state trust land appearing west of the Continental Divide. That’s partially because Colorado didn’t receive sections that were already spoken for, including a lot of the Ute reservation, which at that time covered roughly the western third of Colorado.

In today’s Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations, there are still no state trust lands—a sharp contrast to many states. A Grist report found that Utah, for example, claimed more than half a million acres, or 5.7 percent, of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, while the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota is nearly 20 percent state trust land.

In answer to the difficulties of the checkerboard, Colorado has, over the years, successfully traded away many of its trust parcels that were surrounded by Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, and pursued consolidation. It now holds title to several properties of 25,000 acres or more, including State Forest State Park and a number of ranches. But land exchanges can be complex and slow, and require a landowner who is willing to trade, so plenty of those 640-acre sections remain.

As to the question of how the reserved sections were meant to support schools, the 1967 Lassen v. Arizona Highway Department Supreme Court case implies that at least some of the granted lands were intended to be used as building sites for schools. Indeed, the Maxwell Schoolhouse in Buena Vista still stands today as a historic site on Colorado trust land. But the court also goes on to say that because “the lands were obviously too extensive and too often inappropriate” for “actual use by the beneficiaries…the grant was plainly expected to produce a fund, accumulated by sale and use of the trust lands, with which the State could support the public institutions designated by the [Enabling] Act.”

This practice of funding schools through leasing and sale was well-established in the colonies when the Land Ordinance passed in 1785 and is, for the most part, exactly what happened. The states created before 1851, like California, sold all or most of their state trust lands, with at least one case of granted lands being given to teachers in lieu of salary. The younger states tended increasingly towards retention and leasing. Colorado, which was formed in 1876, still holds 62 percent of its original granted lands, with older states retaining as little as 3 percent and younger states as much as 91 percent. For the states that retained their granted land, leasing reflected the primary industries of the 19th and early 20th centuries—farming, grazing, logging, and mining.

Most states also developed a permanent fund to house trust land revenue (from sales and leasing), the earnings from which could be distributed to schools. Colorado was the first state required to do so. Over time, administration of these land grants evolved into, and has been interpreted by courts as constituting, formal trust arrangements, in which the state (the trustee) has the legal responsibility to manage the land and the permanent fund (the trust corpus) with undivided loyalty, good faith, skill, and diligence, for the benefit of public schools and other named institutions (the beneficiaries).

In Colorado, 95 percent of trust lands benefit K-12 education, with smaller grants supporting public buildings, the penitentiary, and state universities. Another pair of trusts, called the internal improvements and saline trusts, benefit the state park system. This pair of trusts includes land within 13 of Colorado’s state parks, for which the parks themselves are the beneficiaries but have to contract with the State Land Board to use. Samelson calls this situation “perhaps unduly complicated,” and it’s part of why he and others first got involved with HB 1332.

Across all Colorado state trust lands, leasing generated $230 million last year, with the permanent fund producing another $50 million in interest. About half that went back into growing the permanent fund and half went to the Department of Education’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program. The program supports school construction and renovation, fixing things like boilers and roofs, particularly in rural Colorado where there is less of a tax base.

While many states, Colorado included, have at times taken their trust responsibility to mean maximizing revenue generation, this management strategy can be in tension with the duty to sustainably manage trust assets, such that they can continue to benefit future generations of schoolchildren in perpetuity. This tension came to a head in Colorado in 1996, when voters approved a constitutional amendment that asserts “that economic productivity of all lands held in public trust is dependent on sound stewardship, including protecting and enhancing the beauty, natural values, open space, and wildlife habitat thereof,” and instructs the board to manage state trust lands to “produce reasonable and consistent income over time.” Amendment 16 also created a 300,000-acre Stewardship Trust “to preserve the long-term benefits and returns to the state” by managing the lands specifically for their natural values.

The ballot measure was a sharp rebuke to the maximization-focused management of the time, which had led to a series of high-profile controversies around proposed uses of trust lands—including what would have been the nation’s largest commercial hog farm, sited along the South Platte River near billionaire Phil Anschutz’s hunting lodge.

Amendment 16 was accused of violating the trust mandate, but the courts ultimately found that encouraging “sound stewardship” and “reasonable and consistent income” was not corrupting the purpose of the State Land Board, but rather providing guidance on a management approach for achieving that purpose—one that upholds the long-term health of the trust.

As to the final question of why the founding fathers reserved the 16th section specifically, the Supreme Court justices write in Cooper v. Roberts that it was meant “to plant in the heart of every community…grateful reverence for the wisdom, forecast, and magnanimous statesmanship of those who framed the institutions for these new States.” It would also promote “good governance and the happiness of mankind by the spread of religion, morality, and knowledge.”

Apart from this largely symbolic gesture, it was likely just as good a method as any other to systematically grant largely unexplored land to unknown future states. It still can’t be called optimal—while states ended up with some land that was excellent for generating revenue to fund schools, they also had plenty that was steep and dry, lacking trees or minerals, or too far away from roads, rivers, and towns to be useful. Congress did give more land to the more arid states (two sections per township and then four), but the disparate value of granted lands, in addition to their small, scattered nature, has remained a challenge through centuries of trust land managers trying to meet their constitutional obligation. For most western states today, a small percentage of the granted sections generate the majority of revenue, while the rest produce more marginal incomes, or in some instances, no money at all.

But Rosmarino, the Colorado State Land Board director, says we have to be careful about using too broad a brush on the issue. The distribution of trust lands is an advantage, she says, for the opportunity it affords to build relationships all across the state, with local governments and lessees that live and work close to the land. Isolated sections can be integral parts of larger projects, from multigenerational ranches and farms to new, utility-scale renewable energy projects. They can also, with creative thinking, support “projects with a pretty small footprint that have provided big results financially for the State Land Board,” as well as the community and the environment, she says.

For example, a sale of 400 acres of state trust land surrounded by development in Erie yielded $40 million for the state’s permanent fund. In southeast Colorado, the City of Lamar plans to purchase electricity from a solar garden being built on 30 acres of trust land. And there is that quarter-acre lot in the middle of Denver with the affordable housing development that inspired Senator Roberts.

Colorado also hosts some of the West’s only ecosystem service leases on state trust land. In one case, when a water utility needed to offset the impact a new reservoir would have on the federally threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the State Land Board restored and enhanced 222 acres of habitat on state trust land. This created the state’s first species conservation bank, which has generated around $750,000. In another case, a 200-acre floodplain on the South Platte River became a wetland mitigation bank that offsets gravel mining elsewhere in the watershed. That lease has generated more than $2 million for Colorado’s schools, on a property that was appraised for less than $200,000. For both the jumping mouse and wetland mitigation projects, grazing was able to continue on most of the property.

These kinds of projects can turn the challenge of the checkerboard into an asset, says Mindy Gottsegen, the conservation services manager who developed and runs the State Land Board’s ecosystem services line of business. That’s because a diverse land base can mean access to diverse markets, and the State Land Board is continuously expanding its leasing program to take advantage of that dynamic.

Of course, legacy industries remain integral to Colorado’s school trust—96 percent of land is leased for farming and grazing, and 82 percent of revenue comes from mineral extraction, particularly oil and gas development. But, Gottsegen says, “We have areas of the state where we think there’s no oil and gas, and it’s very arid. Now all of a sudden, we know that there are big helium reserves there, and we have access to that because of the checkerboard pattern.” All it takes is for a new market to develop, and a property that didn’t seem like it had much to offer 30 years prior is suddenly worth a lot more.

Amendment 16’s intergenerational outlook helps preserve these kinds of opportunities. By dialing down the pressure for immediate, maximized return, the amendment allows managers to forego near-term development and keep their options open on any given parcel of land. And the emphasis on sound stewardship has provided fertile ground to explore leasing for things that preserve or enhance the value of land while still making money for the beneficiaries, like regenerative grazing and wildfire restoration for carbon credits, which Gottsegen is currently working on.

The founder of a land trust and a former advisor to the governor, Rosmarino sees her position, and these kinds of projects, as “a great convergence of my background in conservation and agriculture, and also my interest in being really entrepreneurial in generating revenue for a good cause.” That’s why she welcomes working with the State Trust Lands Conservation and Recreation Work Group, which was formed by the passage of HB 1332 last spring. “We really see it as an opportunity to showcase how innovative we are trying to be,” she says, adding that “creative solutions can come from anyone and anywhere.”

Senator Katie Wallace, who co-sponsored HB-1332 with Senator Roberts and Representative Karen McCormick, says that “the goal of the working group is to see how state trust lands can support conservation, climate resilience, biodiversity, and recreation, while still honoring and uplifting the duty to generate reliable revenue for our public schools.” The bill’s proponents hope it can provide support for the State Land Board’s existing efforts and inspire new projects, particularly by “pulling in a lot more voices from a lot of different perspectives,” says McCormick.

The State Land Board is “a pretty lean organization, and because of its small size and the sheer amount of land they have, a lot of times they end up having to be reactive to proposals coming from outside entities,” says Samelson. They have still managed to do some really exciting and creative work, says John Rader, who was part of the coalition that advocated for the bill, but “there hasn’t been a comprehensive, holistic approach that gathers stakeholder input,” he says.

So, the bill establishes what Wallace and McCormick both call a kind of mind trust, featuring 24 members representing the trust beneficiaries, agriculture, oil and gas, conservation, recreation, affordable housing, and the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes, as well as experts in economics, law, and real estate. “We kept adding seats to the working group,” says McCormick, “which tells you that folks saw the importance of having their voices in the mix.”

The group, which only just convened for the first time in October, is instructed to inventory state trust lands for their potential to support these various goals—for example by identifying parcels that contain habitat for Colorado’s species of great conservation concern—and to analyze the various tools and mechanisms available to achieve them—like conservation leases and land swaps. They will present their recommendations in an interim report by March 16 and a final report by September 1, 2026.

The idea, Samelson says, is to create space to have a proactive conversation “outside of the pressure cooker of the capitol dome,” where a wide variety of folks can mull over all the different options and available avenues “and come back with a package that, hopefully, has been thoroughly poked at from different angles.”

All the bill’s sponsors and proponents emphasize that the intent of the group is not to displace or discount legacy users of state trust lands, but rather to look in the margins of what’s already happening for new opportunities to make the whole corpus of trust lands work for the beneficiaries. “How do we look at those parts of the corpus that aren’t oil and gas, or agriculture?” asks Wallace.

Samelson, for example, is interested in what he calls inholdings and edgeholdings—those tricky 640-acre parcels that can be hard to manage on their own. Rader, who is the public lands program manager for the San Juan Citizens Alliance, is also interested in inholdings, particularly in nearby Lone Mesa State Park. “That’s our small window into state trust lands,” he says, “and from there the conversation just started ballooning outward.”

The twist with those Lone Mesa inholdings, and state trust land in 12 other Colorado state parks, is that they’re part of the land grant that was made to benefit the state park system. So, you end up with a weird situation “where Colorado Parks and Wildlife [which manages state parks] is both the lessee and the beneficiary,” says Rader. Since it doesn’t make sense for Parks and Wildlife to pay rent that would be given back to the agency, they enter into beneficial use agreements, often short term, where no money is exchanged. On the state parks side, “that doesn’t give us a lot of certainty about longterm management for conservation and recreation,” says Rader, “and it doesn’t generate a lot of revenue for the State Land Board, so it’s kind of this double inefficiency.”

Thinking about creative management solutions for the lands that benefit state parks is one of the working group’s first tasks. Also intended for the interim report is a look at the Stewardship Trust that arose from Amendment 16. The amendment “says that the lands are supposed to be managed to preserve and enhance their natural values,” says Rader, “but it doesn’t really define natural values. It doesn’t tell the state land board how to manage for them. It doesn’t say what uses are compatible or incompatible with those natural values.” He’s hoping the working group can define some terms and establish clearer procedures. Beyond those specific trusts, Rader just wants to know what’s out there in terms of creative uses of state trust land, particularly when it comes to making money while conserving the land.

It’s a timely conversation, in part because “we are in a really tough budget situation and we have been for a really long time,” according to Wallace, “and that makes any revenue stream absolutely irreplaceable.” But more than immediate need, everyone seemed to feel that this moment—150 years after Colorado first received its trust lands, and 30 years after Amendment 16 established the twin pillars of sound stewardship and reasonable and consistent income—was simply ripe for reflection.

“There hasn’t been a comprehensive look at how we are using our state trust lands in quite a long time,” says Roberts, “and the practical reality of our state is changing. We’re struggling with issues like housing and wanting to promote more outdoor recreation and protect the environment, and this is a chance to get some of the best and brightest minds together to look at the opportunities to maximize the value of every state trust land—not just the big parcels, but the small parcels too.”

Birch Malotky is the editor of Western Confluence magazine and writes from Laramie, Wyoming.

Header image: Lowry Ranch. (Raquel Wertsbaugh)

By Temple Stoellinger

The Rock Springs Grazing Association (RSGA) represents one of the oldest and most complex grazing operations in the American West, born from a conservation crisis more than 100 years ago. The association operates across two million acres of southwest Wyoming’s distinctive checkerboard landscape—a pattern of alternating public and private land sections created by 19th-century railroad grants—which has provided both challenges and opportunities for innovative range management.

In the early days of westward expansion, grazing of public lands was unregulated, and first come, first serve. By the turn of the 20th century, nearly 900,000 head of migrant sheep swept through southwest Wyoming annually, leaving the country “like the top of a desk—nothing left,” as Schramm and Hay describe it. As local ranchers watched their rangeland deteriorate, they recognized that survival required organization and collective action. The fragmented ownership pattern, however, made coordinated management nearly impossible.

Out of these conditions, local ranchers in southwest Wyoming formed RSGA. Rather than competing for access to scattered parcels, local ranchers organized to lease entire blocks of private railroad sections while working to secure federal grazing permits on the interspersed public lands. This strategy gave RSGA control and management authority across large, contiguous areas that no purely private or public operation could achieve.

Within this area, RSGA established its own conservation-based management principles, setting livestock numbers based on carrying capacity rather than market demands and implementing rotational grazing practices to protect the resource. This local, cooperative approach to range management later influenced federal policy. When the Taylor Grazing Act was passed three decades later, the newly formed Grazing Service adopted similar ideas—such as locally administered permit systems and regulated stocking levels—to guide use and stewardship on public lands.

Today, RSGA continues to demonstrate how collaborative management across fragmented ownership patterns can balance conservation, agriculture, and industrial development in the modern West.

John W. Hay III is a fourth-generation Wyomingite and chairman of RSGA. His family has been integral to the development of Rock Springs for over a century—his great-grandfather, John W. Hay Sr., arrived in the late 1880s as a Union Pacific Railroad supervisor, married into the founding Blair family, and purchased controlling interest in Rock Springs National Bank in 1907. Before joining RSGA, Hay graduated from the University of Wyoming and served as president of Rock Springs National Bank.

Don Schramm retired from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) after 37 years as an engineering and operations manager, mostly in Wyoming’s checkerboard regions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in forest engineering from the University of Montana and is a licensed professional surveyor. Currently serving as land operations manager for RSGA, Don reviews, negotiates, and coordinates surface use agreements across nearly one million acres of deeded and leased lands in southwest Wyoming, managing everything from livestock operations to energy development and cell towers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Western Confluence: How does RSGA manage grazing across such a complex landscape where ownership alternates every other square mile between private and public lands?

RSGA: The checkerboard in the Rock Springs area of southwest Wyoming is roughly 40 miles wide by 80 miles long—about two million acres total. BLM comprises around 48 percent of that, so think of it as roughly a million acres of BLM and a million acres of private and other ownership. Within that private and other million acres, RSGA holds about 520,000 acres, while the other four major owners hold about 480,000 acres. It’s all known as the BLM Rock Springs Allotment—a common allotment encompassing deeded and leased land where we’re the sole holder of the BLM winter permit.

The private land ownership in this area of the checkerboard has become increasingly complex over the years. What was originally federal railroad grant land given to Union Pacific transferred to Anadarko, then Occidental, then Orion. Orion retained two entities: “Aggie Grazing” for everything except trona and “Sweetwater Surface” for the trona portion. Coal properties were sold to Wildcat Coal, while much of the oil and gas remained with Occidental/Anadarko Land Corp. Today, we maintain leases with Anadarko Land Corp, Aggie Grazing, Sweetwater Surface, and Wildcat Coal. There are also other landowners with independent BLM summer grazing permits in the checkerboard that we don’t lease from—the historical arrangement was winter use by us, summer access by them.

Despite this complexity, the key advantage is that we maintain control across the entire two million acres through ownership, lease, or permit arrangements. Managing these large, diverse areas allows us to take a flexible approach that many smaller operations cannot. Unlike some grazing associations that allocate specific use areas to shareholders, we don’t follow that model. We have range on both the north and south sides of the railroad and interstate, and winter conditions vary dramatically between these areas. If your allotment were fixed on the north side and deep snow came in, you’d be stuck. There’s no equitable way to assign fixed areas while ensuring equal opportunity for all shareholders.

WC: How does RSGA coordinate day-to-day winter grazing across the checkerboard?

RSGA: Members coordinate with our range rider, John Pierre Erramouspe. Folks call him to ask where the feed is and what areas make sense. Sheep, being herd animals, can go most anywhere that’s open; cattle aren’t herd animals and need to be in familiar areas where they know feed and shelter. So cattle tend to use parts of the lease they’re accustomed to, while sheep use whatever is open and accessible. Before coming on, most people tour the lease, then coordinate with John about who’s where and what’s sensible.

The lease opens December 1. There’s always a bit of a “race for grass”—people pass good feed to get to favorite spots. We have a fivemile rule that says once you set up in an area, others should give you about five miles of space. It works in concept, not always in practice, especially with cattle mixing. Everyone tries to respect each other, but neither sheep nor cattle read maps. It’s a work in progress every year, and Mother Nature ultimately dictates use. We think this is the best way to manage it so everyone has a fair shot.

WC: How complicated are the legal arrangements that hold this all together?

RSGA: Actually, less complicated than you’d think. We have straightforward lease arrangements with the private companies— basically updated versions of the old Union Pacific forms with some modifications over time. The BLM permit is standard, and we pay based on actual use, not acreage. For state lands, we pay based on their estimate of animal unit months in the leased sections. It could be much more complicated than it is, and it hasn’t changed much over the years.

It’s worth noting that when RSGA was created, there was no federal land control. That didn’t start until the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, which created the Grazing Service, a predecessor to the BLM. There’s a legend that John Hay’s dad knew Ferry Carpenter, the first director of Division of Grazing, and influenced some of the early rules to follow RSGA practices. That’s just legend, but it’s interesting to think about.

We think the real difference between then and now is in how decisions get made. Back then, local grazing advisory boards assisted the Grazing Service with grazing decisions based on actual on-theground conditions and needs. Today, decisions come from Washington DC, and local BLM offices appears to have very little authority. In our opinion, if you want to improve public lands management, you’d put decision-making back in local hands where people understand the specific conditions and challenges.

WC: What challenges or opportunities does the checkerboard present for your members?

RSGA: The alternating ownership gives us far more usable ground than if we only had private land. In most BLM permits, the BLM portion is the bulk of the ranch’s usable country. For example, in the Pacific Creek Allotment there are about 200,000 BLM acres and maybe 5,000 private, so we have very little leverage there. In the Rock Springs checkerboard, with something close to fifty-fifty ownership, we actually have a seat at the table. That said, our “seat” applies to grazing decisions, not to BLM planning processes, major oil and gas development, or other land-use decisions.

WC: This region has long been shaped by energy development— from coal and oil to trona and renewables. How has energy development intersected with grazing in the checkerboard, and how does RSGA navigate those overlapping land uses?

RSGA: This isn’t split estate like you see around Gillette, where you have private surface over federal minerals. Here, we call it “parallel estate”—federal surface with federal minerals on one square mile, private surface with private minerals on the next. When RSGA purchased the surface estate from Union Pacific, the railroad retained the mineral estate. Because of this pattern, you have to work together. No oil and gas unit can proceed without coordinating with other land managers.

Our philosophy is pro-development and multiple use, and it has worked well. Mineral-related income lets us avoid annual shareholder assessments. While we still charge for grazing, only about half of our shareholders actively run livestock; the others hold their shares for the dividends generated by mineral and surface-use revenues. Oil and gas activity has been extensive over the years, and while livestock numbers have declined, it hasn’t hindered grazing.

Renewables present different challenges, though. Solar requires fencing and becomes single purpose, which conflicts with our multi-use approach, so we say “no thanks” to solar. Wind has a much smaller footprint per megawatt and doesn’t interfere with grazing, so we’re open to discussions. But only with strict conditions that oil and gas development remains the priority, grazing continues uninterrupted, we retain access to all areas, and all existing uses continue. We’re currently negotiating with one company and may talk with another, but it’s challenging to draft agreements that protect our interests while meeting their development needs.

WC: How does RSGA balance livestock grazing with wildlife conservation and increasing recreational use?

RSGA: When the association formed, they thought the country could handle 350,000 sheep. Today, with drought and other resource conflicts, we’re far below that capacity. Deer numbers rose over time but are down now, while elk have jumped dramatically and are approaching wild horse numbers, making it important to manage them at levels the land can support without conflicts. Antelope had a hard winter in 2023 but should rebound; deer may not recover due to elk competition and chronic wasting disease. We meet regularly with Game and Fish on population numbers and targets, and they coordinate with BLM on infrared counts for wild horses and elk.

Conserving the range is the only way any of this works. We keep things in balance, and our livestock numbers aren’t the limiting factor. Remember, RSGA is a winter operation. Plants grow in summer, and we graze dormant vegetation in winter, so winter sheep grazing has negligible impact compared to the greater year-round impacts from wildlife and horses. If summer grazing by anyone overuses the range, that removes winter feed for everyone. We monitor wild horses and elk closely to ensure winter feed remains available for all species, including the pronghorn and deer that migrate through but aren’t here year-round.

On public access, many locals assume it’s all BLM land. To avoid liability, we don’t grant permission, but we don’t deny access either. People hunt and fish. Our private lessors don’t want hunters, though that’s hard to enforce. RSGA and Game and Fish have established management units on about 15 miles of the Green River that are open for hunting and fishing.

Recreation pressure has definitely increased with ATVs, side-by-sides, dirt bikes, cyclists, and backpackers. The numbers aren’t overwhelming, but they’re up. Tools like onX create confusion by showing “BLM roads” that aren’t actually guaranteed public access in our checkerboard, since BLM doesn’t hold easements and counties often don’t either. That’s been a problem, particularly with organized events. Anything commercial on RSGA land requires a permit and insurance, and we tell people to stick to main county roads, not every two-track.

WC: Looking ahead, what are you watching for? What are the biggest challenges facing RSGA?

RSGA: In grazing, ranchers running sheep face major challenges with labor availability and cost. Department of Labor wage requirements now make it hard for operations to pencil out, so I expect sheep numbers will decline from current levels. Statewide, we’ve gone from around six million sheep in 1910 to maybe a quarter million today. This is excellent sheep country but less ideal for cattle in the winter, since cattle aren’t herd animals.

With fewer grazers and more shareholders holding for dividends, we have to work closely with industry—oil and gas, coal, trona, and renewables—so there’s a reason to hold the stock while protecting the resource. Think of RSGA as a large land trust and Wyoming asset where development must be done right. There’s talk of rare-earth mining now. Wind farms can be “here today, gone tomorrow,” so we need solid longterm agreements.

Our current BLM permit is winter only, but if cattle numbers grow and sheep decline, longer seasons in fall and spring might make sense, though that could conflict with summer inholders. We don’t have a perfect scheme worked out yet. We want grazing to continue, though the model may need to change. Some people joke, “maybe we should graze buffalo,” but they’re hard to control and people insist on petting them.

Temple Stoellinger is an associate professor of environment and natural resources and law at the University of Wyoming.

By Katie Hill 

It took all night to drive hundreds of miles from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwestern Montana to the shores of Yellowstone Lake, a trip that Dr. Cecily Costello spent in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. Hitched to the truck was a large, tubular trap containing a young, male grizzly bear, previously tranquilized but now wide awake and sporting a fresh GPS collar. 

With a team of researchers, Costello, a bear biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP), helped haul the culvert trap onto a boat. Then, the seaworthy crew and the federally threatened apex predator steered to a southern arm of the lake. When they struck land, they had to figure out how to release the bear into the wilderness near the shore. 

“We rigged it up so that we could pull a long rope to open the trap from the boat out on the water,” Costello says, noting that her team has been pleased with the success of the 2024 relocation. “The male stayed remarkably close to where we left him. He made one little interesting movement in the fall just before denning, but he’s pretty much staying put inside the park.” The hope is that the NCDE transplant will introduce some genetic diversity into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s (GYE) grizzly population, which is currently one of the criteria for delisting the species under the Endangered Species Act. 

In some ideal version of the future, it wouldn’t take traps, tranquilizers, trucks, boats, and ropes to get grizzly bears from the NCDE to intermingle with those in the genetically isolated GYE and produce healthier, more resilient bears. Instead, bears dispersing from their home territories would traverse the slim margin of range between the two recovery zones on their own. The two populations, which have exceeded their recovery goals, are already bleeding out into more lowland riparian areas and valleys between the towering mountain ranges, but they haven’t yet spanned the gap. According to recent research by Costello and Dr. Sarah Sells, the assistant leader of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit and a US Geological Survey ecologist, some of the most likely, but perhaps surprising, dispersal routes for grizzly bear connectivity lead straight through checkerboarded lands. 

The checkerboard usually refers to an alternating pattern of square-mile parcels under federal and private ownership, which is left over from a time when the federal government awarded railroad companies every other parcel along the tracks to incentivize transcontinental railroad construction. In Montana’s Boulder Mountains, for example, which is one of the rugged ranges separating the northern grizzly populations from Yellowstone, the US Forest Service manages the public parcels, while a series of livestock companies and other individuals own the private parcels.  

A different kind of checkerboard connects the Scapegoat Wilderness and surrounding Helena National Forest to the Sheep Creek and Sleeping Giant Wilderness Study Areas at the north end of the Big Belts. This region features alternating private lands and state trust lands, which were awarded to Montana when it became a state and are constitutionally required to generate revenue for Montana’s public schools and other community resources. 

From a 10,000-foot view, checkerboarded lands seem like they should be heavily manipulated, chopped-up landscapes. Only European settlers would think to carve lands up and hand them out to various owners in such a manner. The roster of landowners and managers ranges from the state of Montana and three different federal agencies, to absentee landowners and fifth-generation working ranchers. Logic dictates that such a level of human involvement in a landscape would drive grizzlies and other wildlife away. After all, grizzly bears in the Lower 48 survived near-extinction in the late 1800s by retreating into deep, dense habitat, as far away from human influence as possible. 

“But our simulated bears don’t know anything about land ownership,” says Sells of her and Costello’s work modeling potential dispersal pathways between the NCDE and GYE grizzly populations. Instead, they used GPS collar data from real grizzlies to model how bears moving through a landscape respond to its overall greenness, terrain ruggedness, density of riparian areas, density of buildings, distance to secure habitat, and distance to and density of forest edge. “Secure habitat,” per the US Fish and Wildlife Service, means habitat on state, federal, and Tribal lands that is 500 meters away from nearby roads. 

Then, “these bears take a walk in our simulations,” choosing a path “based on how the model from their data showed them choosing between these [variables],” Sells says. With a long list of known grizzly bear deterrents between the NCDE and the GYE—Interstate 90, growing population centers, new real estate development, sprawling road networks, heavily pressured public lands, and natural resource extraction projects— “most bears tended to select for areas with greater greenness value, closer to secure habitat, higher densities of riparian areas, and generally close to forest.” 

Between many bears taking many simulated walks, the model “strings together this pathway that tends to [have] lower building density, higher riparian density, be closer to forest edge, and be farther away from roads. So that’s where you see these rivers of blue that indicate where bears are most likely to travel,” Sells says. 

It turns out that this combination of factors foreshadows bears moving through checkerboard, a sign that these areas possess a higher proportion of intact, desirable habitat than the surrounding lands. 

That’s largely due to the work of private landowners, according to Heart of the Rockies Initiative partnerships manager Jim Williams. “Working families produce food and, at the same time, protect the spaces between blocks of protected public land,” Williams says. “[Most] of the connectivity habitat within checkerboarded matrices of public lands is on private agricultural lands in the transboundary Northern Rockies, here and in British Columbia and Alberta.” 

Take the Hibbards, one of countless landowning families who live, work, and play in a checkerboard matrix between the NCDE and GYE. Cooper Hibbard grew up on the ranch owned by Sieben Live Stock Company, not to be confused the nearly Sieben Ranch, owned and operated by his cousins. Although he is now the fifth generation to work it, he is the first generation to experiment with novel, selective grazing techniques to improve the soil’s water and carbon retention and has been widely recognized in the sustainable ranching community. 

While the Hibbards hold a more contiguous tract of land than most, they neighbor parcels held by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the state of Montana, and other private landowners. Apart from I-15 snaking northeast from Helena to Great Falls, this area is remote. The closest town is Cascade, population 600, about 20 miles northwest as the crow flies. 

Compared to large, intact tracts with more proximity to major population centers, these rural parcels in their 640-acre increments have far less to offer real estate developers. So, they’ve largely escaped development. Those who do build on heavily timbered, checkerboarded parcels often opt for cabin-style dwellings, which tend to be less disruptive for wildlife habitat than suburban style homes with lawns. Meanwhile, the public lands within the checkerboard have often lacked reliable public access, meaning they aren’t as pressured by outdoor recreationists seeking backcountry adventure, hunting, or otherwise spending time on the landscape. 

Instead, both public and private parcels in the remote checkerboard between the NCDE and the GYE are more heavily used for livestock grazing, which can help maintain healthy landscapes, and potential resource extraction. While something like timber cutting does disturb the natural condition of an area, its impacts are still less permanent than those of a subdivision. Some studies even show that bears might select regenerating clear-cuts and other restored extraction areas for their renewed food sources and cover. 

In other words, the West’s growing recreation pressure on intact public lands and growing development pressure on intact private lands has made the checkerboard into something of a de facto last best place for wildlife. 

But, it’s not without its own issues. Conflict between bears and the people stewarding the land is part of the reason why grizzly bear connectivity is such a touchy subject in the rural West, particularly in areas where landowners and government entities border each other. 

Hibbard first encountered the aftermath of hungry grizzly bears on his family’s ranch in 2017. Eleven dead calves littered the rangeland sandwiched between the Big Belts and the Adel Mountains, almost perfectly equidistant between Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. When Hibbard woke up the morning after the grizzly attack and stepped outside, something in the air he’d been breathing since infancy was different. 

“It immediately changed the feel of this place,” Hibbard says. “Not for better or worse, but it changed the feeling. You aren’t just going to walk out the door with kids without being prepared. That was when the shift truly happened, when we knew this place was going to continue to be different.” 

Hibbard is probably the first in his family to have to coexist with grizzly bears, except maybe his great, great grandfather, Henry Sieben, who arrived from Illinois in 1864 when the species was already in immense decline. “This grizzly question is a big deal. But I also see them as a small ingredient in the big stew,” Hibbard says, mentioning that range riders and other adaptive techniques for grizzly coexistence might be part of the near future of Sieben Live Stock Company. 

Supporting landowners by providing funding for these kinds of adaptations is part of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative’s work, says Williams, who worked with MFWP for 31 years as a wildlife biologist and program manager and helped develop grizzly bear conflict monitoring programs in the NCDE. Range riders and electric fences can cost tens of thousands of dollars—money that ranchers rarely have just lying around—so as long as grizzlies remain a federally protected species, coexistence will cost some serious cash. 

Now, Williams works on a program called Keep It Connected, which funnels private philanthropic dollars to working-lands families seeking perpetual conservation easements through nearby land trusts. “When a land trust comes to us with a project that lists wildlife connectivity as a primary component, on top of keeping a working agricultural family on the land rather than growing homes, we review it,” he says. “If it’s a match, we bring it to our board for approval. Then, philanthropic donors can search through our list on our website and close the funding gaps on projects depending on what species and locations they’re interested in. It’s almost like online shopping.” 

The program is needed, Williams says, because the pace and scale of development continues to climb and to reach further into what was once considered less desirable land. More than half of new houses built in Montana from 2000 to 2021 were built outside of incorporated areas, and 41% were built in subdivisions where individual lots exceeded 10 acres in size, a report from Headwaters Economics shows. Around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residential property has increased 132% since 2000, according to a documentary by the Western Landowners Alliance called “Grizzlies and Grazing.” 

This rapid landscape transition means that any version of grizzly bear connectivity will rely, at least in part, on open space preservation and private land stewardship. And conservation easements, which allow ranchers to monetize their open space and wildlife habitat without disrupting their livestock operation, are one way they stand to benefit from a grizzly bear’s presence on a landscape, Williams explains. With the bulldozer threatening both the rancher and the grizzly bear, then the “enemy of my enemy” adage must apply in some way. 

While the federal government oscillates over the status and management of Ursos arctos, one thing remains clear: bears will continue to find refuge from a growing, urbanizing West in the kinds of landscapes that rural landowners have long occupied, worked, and stewarded, especially those interspersed with public parcels where habitat remains intact. As long as these checkerboarded areas have water, food, cover, and distance from major population centers, they will continue to be fair game for grazing and grizzlies alike. 

“We can adapt,” Hibbard says. “We’re building enough resilience into this system that we can roll with these punches, but we can’t be lackadaisical about it. We have to be proactive.” 

Katie Hill is a freelance journalist, writer, and editor based in western Montana. Her writing about wildlife science, conservation, public lands issues, and hunting has appeared in a variety of publications. 

Header image: Grizzly bears in Yellowstone (Sarah Sells)

By Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto and Sukhchuluun Gansukh

Editor’s Note: In this story, authors Mazzamuto and Gansukh imagine the lives of Tserendorj (Цэрэндорж, meaning bravery and wisdom), a herder on Bogd Khan Mountain, and his daughter Tuul (Туул, named after the Tuul River, symbolizing flow and life), who studies wildlife conservation. Inspired by the authors’ colleague—a fellow wildlife biologist who comes from a herding family—Tserendorj and Tuul are composite characters. Their experiences and voices are grounded in an in-person survey the authors conducted with residents of Bogd Khan Mountain and the authors’ firsthand experiences on the mountain.

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As the sun rises over Bogd Khan Mountain, Tserendorj watches from the doorway of his ger, the round, felt-lined home that has been part of Mongolian life for centuries. The golden light washes over the forested slopes where Siberian larch, pine, and spruce meet the green and yellow steppe of the valleys. This is the place Tserendorj has known since childhood, where he and his ancestors have guided their horses and cattle, along with some sheep and goats, across sacred lands for as long as anyone can remember.

But something feels different. The hum of distant construction breaks the morning stillness, and Tserendorj can see the outline of a new road coming up the mountainside. Tserendorj sighs, reflecting on the changes that have come so quickly, as if the mountain itself is shifting under his feet. “This place has always taken care of us,” he says, “but now I wonder how much longer it can.”

For centuries, Bogd Khan Mountain has stood as a symbol of resilience, a natural fortress towering thousands of feet over the vast Mongolian steppe. It’s not just any mountain; it’s sacred. One of the world’s oldest protected areas, revered and cared for by the Mongolian people since the 12th century, the mountain became a special protected area almost 100 years before renowned sites like Yellowstone. Generations of monks, nomads, and wildlife have coexisted on its slopes, the mountain shielding them from the rest of the world.

But even this sanctuary is not immune to the tides of change sweeping through Mongolia. At the foot of Bogd Khan, Ulaanbaatar, once a small city in the steppe, has transformed into a bustling capital home to nearly half the country’s population. As its influence creeps up the mountain, the pressures of urbanization are being felt most acutely by people like Tserendorj, whose nomadic lifestyle and spiritual traditions have helped keep the balance between human and nature for centuries.

Tserendorj, now in his sixties, remembers the stories his father and grandfather told him as a child. They spoke of the mountain’s spiritual importance, how monks once lived in the Manzushir Monastery on the southern slope, and how prayers for the mountain’s protection were a daily ritual. For the nomads, the land wasn’t just a resource; it was a living being, revered and respected. “For us, the mountain is alive,” Tserendorj says, watching his herd of horses and cattle grazing nearby. “It has given us everything we need, and in return, we have always been careful not to take too much.”

This delicate relationship between people and nature was central to Mongolian life. Buddhism and traditional shamanistic practices fostered a deep respect for the environment, ensuring that the mountain’s resources were used wisely. Nomadic herding, in particular, allowed the landscape to rest and regenerate between seasons, leaving little trace of human impact. With the herders’ light touch on the land, Bogd Khan’s ecosystems thrived, supporting deer, wolves, and the elusive Pallas’s cat, all living in the mountain’s high altitudes since time immemorial.

But now the city feels uncomfortably close. Tserendorj’s daughter, Tuul, travels back from the city each weekend, where she studies wildlife conservation at the university. She often speaks of the new roads, the ever-growing skyline, and the recreational trails winding up the mountain. The city, she says, offers new opportunities and new conveniences. But Tserendorj is uneasy.

“When I was young, we had the mountain to ourselves. This road, the buildings, they were never here,” he says, looking toward the forest where new trails for hikers have appeared. “Now there are people up here all the time, leaving behind trash, scaring wildlife.”

Indeed, Bogd Khan has become a hotspot for outdoor enthusiasts. Hikers and cyclists frequent its trails, while pine seed collectors and mushroom gatherers venture deeper into the forest. Roads and construction projects further fragment the landscape, threatening the habitats for all wildlife.

“It’s not just the people; there are also more horses, more cows,” Tserendorj explains. His own herd has grown larger, not because he wants more livestock but because the pressures of modern life demand it. When Mongolia was a satellite state of the USSR and everything was collectivized, herders had only as many animals as they needed to live. But after socialism fell in the early 90s, herders took ownership of their own livestock. Now, everyone is focused on growing their herds to secure their future.

The market for meat, wool, and especially cashmere has surged, making livestock one of the few ways to ensure a stable income in rural Mongolia. “People say it’s our way to survive the new demands,” Tserendorj adds. Yet, there’s another reason, too: the climate. Harsh winters—known as dzuds—can wipe out entire herds, so herders are building up their numbers to protect against those losses. “It’s like a safety net,” he says. “If we lose animals, we still have more to fall back on.”

As Tserendorj’s herd has grown, so has the strain on the land. Overgrazing has stripped the once-lush meadows, and the herding dogs that accompany larger livestock populations have started to chase off and prey on the local wildlife. “It feels like there’s not enough space anymore,” he says. “We need to feed our families, but the mountain can only give so much.”

Tuul listens intently to her father’s concerns. She knows all too well how the pressures of modern life are straining the balance that herders like her father have maintained for generations. But she also sees hope in her studies, hope in the possibility of finding new solutions that can protect both the mountain and their way of life.

One evening, Tuul approaches her father with an idea. She’s been learning about new technologies that could help manage livestock and protect wildlife at the same time.
“Father,” she says gently, “we can’t stop the changes that are happening, but maybe we can adapt. There are ways to protect the land and your herd without overusing it.”

Tserendorj looks at her, skeptical but curious. “What do you mean?”

Tuul explains that remote sensing can track the movement of livestock and wildlife, ensuring that herders avoid overgrazing in certain areas. She also suggests that by rotating grazing locations more carefully and reducing the number of livestock, they could allow the land to regenerate more effectively. Tuul speaks passionately, her words a blend of her academic knowledge and the deep respect for the land her father has taught her. “We could also work with conservationists and administrations to set aside protected areas for wildlife,” she says. “The mountain needs space to breathe, just like our herds.”

Tserendorj listens, nodding slowly. Bogd Khan is more than a mountain to him; it is part of his identity, his past, and, he hopes, his future. The old ways have always worked for him, but he sees the wisdom in what his daughter is saying. Perhaps this new generation, with its mix of tradition and science, holds the key to protecting the mountain and their livelihood.

He imagines a future where his grandchildren walk these same slopes, herding livestock as he once did, while also benefiting from the knowledge and tools of a changing world. “I’ve always trusted the mountain,” Tserendorj finally says, “but maybe it’s time we trusted new ways too.”

It’s that deep connection to the land, combined with a willingness to embrace change, that offers a path forward. After all, this mountain has stood the test of time—and with the right care, it can continue to stand for generations to come.

Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto is an adjunct faculty member of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming specializing in wildlife conservation. She has integrated ecology, animal behavior, and conservation biology into her wildlife research, providing a comprehensive understanding of ecological processes, species dynamics, and ecosystem functioning. Over the past few years, Dr. Mazzamuto has been at the forefront of several impactful projects in Mongolia, particularly within the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of Bogd Khan Mountain. In collaboration with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, she aims to implement conservation actions to protect small, medium, and large mammals in this region.

Sukhchuluun Gansukh is the head of laboratory of mammalian ecology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biology. His research focuses on community ecology, rodent physiology, and biodiversity conservation. He currently leads research on mammalian diversity and species interaction in the protected area of Bogd Khan Mountain Biosphere Reserve and non-protected areas around the capital city of Ulaanbaatar that are under human pressure.

Header image: At Manzushir Monastery on Bogd Khan’s southern slope, prayers for the mountain’s protection were a daily ritual. (Arabsalam/Wikimedia Commons)

By Francesco Bisi

The first wolves to enter the Alps in nearly a hundred years found themselves in southeast France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. Like the area’s glacial lakes, Bronze Age rock carvings, and “perched villages,” the wolves were a relic of a time past. Once abundant and widespread, centuries of organized extermination had whittled down Eurasian wolf populations to nearly nothing, and had eliminated them entirely from the Alps by the early 1900s.

But wolves did not go extinct across Europe, and in the last 50 years, relict population have naturally spread back into parts of their old range. Their return has sparked conflict, and with it, the need to bridge social, administrative, and disciplinary boundaries. At least, that’s what partners of LIFE Wolf Alps EU —an interdisciplinary, multi-national project I supported as a researcher—think is the key to moving towards coexistence, rather than returning to a time of hatred and fear.

Wolves have been systematically trapped, hunted, poisoned, and bountied for over a millennium, from England and Scandinavia to the Balkans and Bavaria. In France, Charlemagne institutionalized the practice around the year 800 when he created the “louveterie,” an elite corps of hunters tasked with eradicating wolves. More than a thousand years later, France killed its last wolf in the 1930s.

But, as wolves became less of a threat to livestock and life in a rapidly industrializing world, and with the growing popularity of new environmental ideals, the fervor for extermination faded before the job was done. In 1979, when the Bern Convention made wolves a strictly protected species throughout Europe, about a hundred wolves remained fragmented in the Apennine Mountains—which run from toe to calf along Italy’s boot. A few more sheltered in the most remote parts of Slovenia’s Dinaric Alps, with diminished populations elsewhere in eastern Europe. These have been the most important source populations for the species’ natural recolonization of the Alps.

In addition to new protections, wolves benefitted from the decline of traditional rural economies and gradual depopulation of the mountains—particularly the most remote regions—as pastoralists and others sought better services and opportunities at lower elevations and in cities. This opened up habitat not only for wolves, but also deer, boar, and other prey species, making the Alps a lower conflict place with better food than they had been in centuries.

Over the course of two decades, the Italian Apennine wolves made their way towards the Alps, finally reaching France in 1992, the same year that the species saw further protection in the European Union (EU) under the Habitats Directive. From there, they have continued to expand through the crescent-shaped range, first reaching Switzerland in 1995, Italy in 1996, and Austria in 2008. In more recent years, wolves have also entered the Alps from southern Slovenia, the Karpathian mountains (Slovakia), and the central European lowlands (Germany, West Poland, Czech Republic). In each country, breeding pairs and resident packs lagged well behind the first wolf sighting, in some cases more than a decade.

The returning wolves face a world that has largely forgotten what it was like to live alongside them, but has not forgotten how to fear them. While those first Mercantour wolves found what National Geographic calls “the last terre sauvage in the Alps,” the range as a whole is not wild. The Alps still support 14 million people across 6,000 settlements, and a deep tradition of agriculture is bound up in both the culture and the landscape. Wandering shepherds and their cattle, sheep, and goats are iconic to the region, and their grazing maintains high alpine meadows and other distinctive ecosystems that support rich biodiversity and endemic species. Many see wolves as an existential threat to this precious and delicate system, raising questions about the feasibility of human-wolf coexistence.

The LIFE WolfAlps EU project believes that such a sprawling, complex issue needs to be addressed at the same scale—with a coordinated, population-level outlook rather than fragmented management limited by administrative and disciplinary boundaries. Spanning France, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, the team has worked for the last decade on a two-part approach. First, establish a solid baseline understanding of the wolf population and its spread in order to develop unified, scientifically-grounded information and messaging. Second, work along nine different “axes of intervention,” to foster understanding and reduce conflict between wolves and people.

Part one began in Italy and Slovenia in 2013 with a focus on “knowing before acting,” meaning years of data collection on the wolf population, human attitudes, livestock depredation, poaching, and more. Wolves typically occur at low densities in rugged terrain, making basic monitoring a challenge. A lack of consistent methodology adds to the difficulty, especially when trying to compare data between administrative authorities in multiple countries. The WolfAlps team addressed this issue by training 512 participants—including volunteer associations, professional researchers, and public authorities—to collect standardized data through snow tracking,
wolf howling, genetic analysis of biological samples, and camera trapping.

During this time, I was in charge of wolf monitoring in the Lombardy region in the central Italian Alps. Most of the activities took place during winter, and for the first time during a snow-tracking activity, I came across evidence of a deer killed by a wolf. This discovery made me realize that I was not alone in the wilderness. However, the most significant aspect was that, while I was out there looking for tracks in the snow, many other operators were conducting the same monitoring efforts across the Alps.

These shared and scientifically collected data were the first step for researchers and managers to speak a common language over such a broad landscape, which aided credibility and coordination. Sharing this information took many forms, from a Wolf Alpine Press Office to newsletters, social media, conferences, an interactive, traveling exhibition, a theatrical show, art contests, a children’s book, and more.

Overall, the first project laid the foundation for a broad network of stakeholders and partners working together on a shared and coordinated conservation program. Other early activities included assessing the threat of dog-wolf hybridization, supporting preventative measures, and implementing anti-poaching efforts.

Rucksacks full of scientific knowledge, listening to people became the next most important step for conservation. The second project, which began in 2019, expanded to include France and Austria and made improving human-wolf conflict its primary focus. Particular attention was given to understanding the needs of those most impacted by the wolves’ natural return and working with them to share knowledge and explore solutions for coexistence. In this project, I continued to coordinate the monitoring activities in the Lombardy region and participated in numerous meetings with shepherds, hunters, and environmental protection associations to discuss the wolves’ return to the Alps and what it meant for them.

Shepherds have perhaps the oldest and most persistent reason to resent wolf recolonization—livestock depredation. A 2023 report by the EU estimates that wolves kill at least 65,500 head of livestock each year, nearly three quarters of which are sheep and goats. The report also notes that wolf-killed sheep comprise just 0.065% of the EU’s total population of 60 million sheep, but at a local level, livestock loss can be unbearable.

Depredation rates are typically lower in areas where wolves never disappeared. For communities where wolves were absent for nearly a century, however, herders have largely lost the habit of coexistence with predators, including constantly accompanying free-ranging livestock and the use of guard dogs. Adapting their herding practices can mean increases in cost, work, and stress for farmers who are already struggling, and solutions like electric fences are not always feasible or sufficient. Capacity and expertise also vary widely between professional herders with large flocks and hobby farmers.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, researching, supporting, and experimenting with best practices, particularly through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, can contribute to making Alpine pastoralism more sustainable, thereby preserving a unique cultural institution, rural livelihoods, and important habitat. Talking directly with people about these options, I noticed, tended to be more effective than simply giving them money to buy prevention tools or as reimbursement for livestock predation.

Hunters are another stakeholder group that have expressed concerns over wolf recolonization, seeing them as competition for game species. Rather than dismiss these concerns, WolfAlps designed a series of participatory studies that involved hunters throughout the process of investigating the wolves’ impact on wild prey, particularly red deer. Researchers found that the impact of wolves on game populations is minor compared to hunters themselves, but hunting management may need to be adjusted in some areas where wolves have returned.

The project has likewise taken seriously the rural Alpine residents who fear for their safety, discussing potential risks (like improper food management and uncontrolled domestic dogs) and holding an International Conference on Bold Wolves. In the last 40 years, there have been very few cases of wolves attacking humans in Europe. None of them were fatal, and they were mainly caused by habituated wolves. The 2023 EU report concludes that “the risk of people being attacked by wolves is incredibly low in the modern world.” However, I often heard people claiming the opposite, possibly influenced by media misinformation.

By creating regional dialogue platforms where people could express their concerns and feel heard, WolfAlps has perhaps not fully changed minds, but at least opened a door to greater trust and understanding. In my experience, even the people who shouted at me during meetings would sometimes come up afterward and thank me, not because I solved their problem, but because I listened to them.

These conversations have also revealed an opportunity for the wolf to shed light on a much broader context. Local community meetings often ended with the idea that wolves are not themselves the whole problem, but rather the straw that broke the camel’s back; people use the time to talk about other challenges for farming and rural living. In this sense, the wolf becomes their microphone.

I also saw how in regions where wolves have been present for 30 years or more, both wolves and humans have been able to coexist, even though the conflict has not been entirely resolved. In these areas, the greatest challenge is not pushback from the public, but rather administrative fragmentation that complicates effective conservation and management.

These stakeholder engagement platforms are just one part of the project, which also includes Wolf Prevention Intervention units, a host of trainings, hybridization prevention, development of eco-tourism, an Alpine Young Ranger Program, anti-poisoning dog teams, and more—almost too much to keep track of. But “the complexity of this project is its strength,” says one final report, and I agree. As human beings, we are integral parts of ecosystems, and our interactions with nature—wolves, in this case—take many forms. Therefore, it is crucial to consider all these aspects comprehensively.

As of 2023, wolves have been detected in every EU country except the islands of Ireland, Cyprus, and Malta. The population was 20,000 and climbing. Given wolves’ legal protection and unassisted spread, the Alps will probably never be wolf-free again. Which means it will probably never be conflict-free, either. But hopefully, through a multi-pronged effort happening at the same time all over a huge region, the Alps will learn how to live with wolves in a way that protects the region’s ecological, social, cultural, and economic values. And it may even be that wolves can become a bridge that forces people to think beyond boundaries.

Francesco Bisi is a zoologist and research fellow at Insubria University in Italy. An expert in alpine vertebrate monitoring, his research focuses on wildlife conservation and human-wildlife interaction and he teaches a course on sustainable use of wildlife. During the LIFE WolfAlpine EU project, he has been responsible for wolf monitoring activities in the central Alps for the Lombardy Region and has been involved in stakeholder engagement through sharing information about species distribution and wolf population dynamics.

Header image: The first wolves to step foot in the Alps in nearly 100 years appeared in France’s Mercantour National Park in 1992. (JP Valery/Unsplash)

By Annabella Helman  

In Kenya’s Rift Valley, a pride of lions begins to stir as the sun descends to the horizon and the air grows still. A pastoralist with his 60 cattle, alert to the night’s dangers, begins to usher the herd inside of a large enclosure called a cattle boma. The boma, a centuries-old conflict mitigation tool typically made of branches from the acacia tree, creates a thorny barrier to keep out lions, leopards, and spotted hyenas that might eat, injure, or harass the cattle. Today, some communities use more effective, metal-fenced bomas to protect their livestock from depredation overnight.

Like many ways that people deal with human-wildlife conflict, these bomas work by creating barriers to separate property from wildlife. This method has greatly reduced the immediate problem—large carnivores killing livestock—but new research indicates that cattle bomas have an unintended consequence that threatens the Jackson’s hartebeest, a unique and rapidly declining antelope in central Kenya. Rather than addressing this decline by advising against the use of this crucial human-wildlife conflict mitigation tool or reducing lion numbers, conservationists in Kenya have an opportunity to strategically leverage the cattle boma to conserve lions and their wild prey.

As human populations and affluence escalate, human-wildlife conflict is increasing in both frequency and severity. Direct conflicts, like predators killing livestock and people, get a lot of attention; most solutions, including compensation schemes and predator removal, focus on these unambiguous situations. Indirect conflicts often go unnoticed but can have profound impacts on both wildlife and human communities.

In Laikipia County, located in central Kenya, local people’s main economic activity is herding goats, sheep, and cattle. From the 1950s to 1980s, pastoralists and ranching businesses often killed lions to suppress predator population numbers and their perceived threat to the local cattle economy. But as wildlife tourism in Kenya gained popularity and offered an additional or alternative way to earn a living, local people saw the value in maintaining populations of large predators to encourage tourist dollars. This led to the restoration of lions in the late 1990s.

Concurrently, the growing popularity of multiuse landscapes in conservation, which aim to maintain wildlife populations without disrupting human activities, means that pastoralists are herding livestock on the same landscape where tourists will have their first lion sighting. The increased overlap of wildlife and human activities means more conflict—predominately between livestock and wildlife—which has led to a reliance on cattle bomas across multiuse landscapes.

Recent research has discovered that these bomas create a legacy of impact on the behaviors of wildlife long after they are rotated to new locations or abandoned. In the months that cattle spend their nights fenced inside the bomas, their manure accumulates and fertilizes the area. After the cattle and bomas are gone, the rich soil gives rise to glades—lush lawns of highly nutritious grasses. The grass attracts grazers, especially zebras, that will gather in large numbers within the glades. Lions, who appreciate predictability when hunting, will then seek out these gatherings of zebra for a better chance at their preferred meal. This dynamic, where cattle bomas create hotspots that attract zebras which subsequently attract hungry lions, has an unfortunate consequence for hartebeest.

Jackson’s hartebeest, a hybrid between Coke’s hartebeest and Lelwel hartebeest, only occurs over a small range in central Kenya and is one of the fastest declining antelope species in this region. Researchers have historically attributed this rapid decline to a combination of disease, habitat loss, and predation pressure. Recent work linking predation pressure to bomas and glades could change the way the antelope is conserved.

Dr. Caroline Ng’weno and her team found that when hartebeest, a territorial species, have cattle bomas rotated within 500 meters of their territories, they suffer significantly higher predation rates compared to hartebeest that don’t have cattle bomas near their territories. That’s because hartebeest are fairly easy to hunt, so if they are present at a glade, lions will often favor killing them over the zebras that first drew the lions in.

This finding highlights the unintended consequences of human activities on wildlife, even when those activities are aimed at reducing direct conflicts. It also demonstrates that efforts to mitigate conflict may miss dynamics like these when not taking a holistic view, focusing on single species, and not including humans in the conversation of ecology. The irony lies in the fact that cattle bomas, initially intended to minimize clashes between livestock and wildlife and to reduce retaliatory killing of predators, are inadvertently contributing to the decline of a particularly vulnerable antelope.

However, because this dynamic originates with human intervention, there may be a way to leverage cattle bomas as a tool for conservation. If pastoralists are strategic in planning boma locations away from hartebeest territories, they could help concentrate lion hunting away from this sensitive species, thereby offering a spatial refuge.

This approach would not only engage pastoralists in conservation efforts but also contribute directly to the protection of the rapidly declining hartebeest population in central Kenya. Moreover, this method offers a promising alternative to the traditional approach of reducing predator populations to alleviate pressure on threatened species. By manipulating natural predator-prey interactions, we have the potential to conserve both lions and their prey, striking a balance between the needs of humans and wildlife in shared landscapes. Taking this more holistic approach, which accounts for both direct and indirect impacts of human activities, opens the door to creative solutions grounded in coexistence, not conflict.

Annabella Helman is a PhD Student in the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming under Jake Goheen. Her research focuses on methods of promoting human-wildlife coexistence in Laikipia, Kenya with an emphasis on local-led conservation efforts. Her work will implement an informed boma placement strategy to conserve hartebeest in Kenya.

Header image: Cattle bomas reduce human-wildlife conflict by creating barriers to separate people and their property from wildlife, but a more holistic understanding of the situation indicates that people might leverage their impact on the landscape to support healthy populations of both lions and hartebeest. (Anabella Helman)

By Shaleas Harrison 

It’s 8 am as the sunlight moves across the foothills of Carter Mountain, the longest mountain in the Absaroka range and east from Yellowstone National Park. Ronee Hogg loads Callie, her gray corgi, into her pick-up truck and we head down the road to inspect some newly built fences on a part of her ranch that is leased for wildlife habitat.  

The lease spans miles of rolling hills, ravines, creeks, and native grasses. As we traverse the hillsides, pronghorn sprint to cross the road in front of our truck. We stop to check a wildlife-friendly fence—built with funds from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)—that has a smooth bottom wire for pronghorn to crawl under and a low wire at the top for elk and deer to easily jump. Nearby, small clumps of cows with nursing calves congregate on the green grass still remaining in July. Hogg makes sure that all the nursing cows have calves. Otherwise, she notes, “There’s a good chance that a grizzly got to them.”  

Hogg and her two sons operate Hogg’s Black Diamond Cattle Company, which has been in the family for over a hundred years. Like many other properties in the region, the ranch supports more than just the Hoggs’s 250 Angus-cross cattle and small herd of Angus bulls. It also furnishes essential winter habitat for the thousands of deer, elk, and pronghorn that migrate between it and the high country of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem each year.  

Hogg’s habitat lease is part of a new program, known as the Migratory Big Game Conservation Partnership, that the USDA launched to better support landowners like her who provide wildlife habitat for migrating big game. What’s unique about the initiative is that rather than creating novel programs, the USDA prioritized existing resources in key areas of big game habitat and tweaked the delivery of programs to work better for private landowners. These focused adjustments to USDA programs have amplified the impact of conservation investments and helped protect migrations on a landscape level.

​​​​​This attention to wildlife habitat on private lands is driven, in part, by relatively recent advances in documenting wildlife migrations in the West. Over the past decade, GPS technology has helped biologists demonstrate that wildlife migrate across land ownership boundaries and that private lands indeed provide critical habitat to these herds.  

It’s no accident that some of the best habitat today is private. It was settled because it holds the elements necessary for life in Wyoming’s harsh climate—water, wetlands, and high-quality vegetation on flat land. It also tends to be lower in elevation with a milder climate. That makes ranches like Hogg’s ideal places for big game in the fall and winter, where they can find optimal seasonal forage and refuge from deep winter snow.  

But landowners like Hogg face many challenges keeping their properties intact and economically viable due to development pressures, market conditions, and family succession issues. Supporting wildlife can add to the strain, through damages to crops and fences, diminished grass and hay production, and loss of livestock to carnivores.  

Across the country, an estimated 14 million acres of rangeland ​​​​were lost to development between 1983 and 2017. Between 2017 and 2022, Wyoming lost just over 200,000 acres of farm and ranch land to other uses—some of which was once valuable habitat for wildlife. Without support, the working lands that account for 30% of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will continue to fragment and their important ecosystem services could disappear. 

The Big Game Partnership, which began in 2022 when Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack signed a Memorandum of Understanding called the USDA-Wyoming Big Game Conservation Partnership, aims to address this issue. It reorients conservation dollars and incentives to these places, regarding the producer and their working lands as essential to conserving wildlife and migrations. 

In the years before the big game partnership’s rollout, USDA leaders did their homework. First, they identified four priority areas that were productive landscapes valuable for wildlife and littered with private working ranches and farms rearing cattle, bison, sheep, and commodity crops. Hogg’s ranch is in the Absaroka Front; the other three areas are the high desert sagebrush steppe of the southern Wind River Range, the tribal lands of Wind River Country to the north of the range, and the grasslands surrounding the Medicine Bow National Forest. 

Then, USDA representatives made strategic visits to Wyoming to meet with leaders and landowners to better understand the challenges that producers face to stay operational. “Landowners consistently asked for the ability to enroll in multiple USDA programs and to be paid fairly for feeding wildlife,” says Laura Bell, a facilitator for the East Yellowstone Collaborative. Bell helped convene landowners and agencies in the years leading up to the big game partnership, along with several other organizations including Western Landowners Alliance. (Disclosure: The author is employed by Western Landowners Alliance.) 

The USDA heeded landowners’ input. Within the big game priority areas, the USDA increased payment rates for an existing habitat lease program, allowed producers to sign up for multiple conservation-oriented programs on the same land, and released more money for conservation easements. Now, families like the Hoggs, and the wildlife they support, are reaping the benefits.  

A habitat lease is an agreement between the landowner and a federal, state, or private entity that provides payment for maintaining wildlife habitat. Within the USDA’s existing programs, the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, or Grassland CRP, functions most like a habitat lease. But enrollment in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had been virtually non-existent. To conserve migratory big game habitat, it needed some improvements to make it work better for landowners. 

To start, the USDA established a minimum rental rate of $13/acre to more fairly reflect the cost of habitat to landowners. Previously, rates in Wyoming were often as low as $1/acre. The USDA then offered an additional $5/acre payment incentive for counties within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The initiative also made it easier for people like Hogg to enroll by ranking priority area applications higher, which helped them enter the nationally competitive program.  

Since she enrolled in the Grassland CRP, Hogg has received two annual payments in exchange for maintaining forage for wildlife and not developing the land or turning it into row crops. She follows a conservation management plan developed with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which stipulates grazing regimes that benefit wildlife. Her lease will run for 15 years.  

“We use our habitat lease payment for buying hay,” she says, referring to the payment she receives from the USDA. “We don’t have much hay ground, so we need to buy around 200 tons a year to feed the cattle in the winter. The cost of hay ranges from about $145-285 per ton, so the extra income helps with these types of operating costs.”  

Hogg is also able to enroll in NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) while receiving Grassland CRP payments. EQIP helps landowners cover the cost of conservation practices or expensive infrastructure like wildlife-friendly fences, water developments, weed control, or habitat restoration. For example, replacing an old fence with a wildlife-friendly fence can cost more than $3.80 a square foot, or $95,000 for twenty-five miles of fencing. EQIP helps offset these costs and encourages landowners to integrate conservation measures they may otherwise be unable to afford. Hogg used EQIP to help pay for the wildlife-friendly fences we spent the morning inspecting.  

When I ask Hogg about conservation easements—the third prong of the Big Game Partnership—she says she is considering it. A conservation easement is the sale by a property owner of his or her development rights, usually accompanied by other promises which maintain the property’s conservation values. Most working farms and ranches are able to continue their current land use practices after the sale of a conservation easement, so selling a conservation easement can prevent fragmentation of agricultural lands and be a valuable tool for intergenerational succession planning.  Although ​​Hogg’s ranch does not have a conservation easement, other ranches in the region do. In the first year of the Big Game Partnership, the USDA dedicated over 10 million dollars in Wyoming for its Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. 

Embedded video: Wildlife friendly fences—like those Hogg was able to install with EQIP funding—have a bottom wire high enough for animals to crawl under and a top wire low enough for animals to jump over. (Tanner Warder/Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit)

Beyond the USDA tools, Wyoming Game and Fish has a dedicated Big Game Coordinator to help agencies, NGOs, and other partner groups work together to help landowners access the programs. The USDA also granted the University of Wyoming nearly a million dollars to provide technical and scientific support to the NRCS, Game and Fish, and other partners. With those funds, the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources is evaluating the initiative’s implementation, and Jerod Merkel’s lab is creating science-driven mapping tools to direct conservation practices like wildlife-friendly fences and invasive annual grass treatments.   

Regardless of these small but innovative changes, the initiative is not for everyone. For some landowners, the payments for the Grassland CRP are still not enough to justify complying with the management plan. Other landowners don’t have the time to apply and jump through the hurdles required to access the programs, which can take three to five years, for example, for an agricultural conservation easement. These challenges, and many more, may limit the federal government’s capacity to conserve private land on a landscape level. But the USDA has taken a first step and initial results indicate widespread success. 

In 2023, the Grassland CRP enrolled 61,149 acres in designated Big Game Priority Areas—a 264 percent increase from the ​​​​previous two program enrollment periods in 2021 and 2022. With the additional funding for agricultural conservation easements, land trusts supported landowners in forever conserving over 11,830 acres of working lands and big game habitat across the state. The initiative in Wyoming proved so successful in its first year, the USDA expanded it to Idaho and Montana in November 2023. Now, producers in those three states can also benefit from the package of opportunities available through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.  

Preliminary research indicates that the Big Game Partnership has plenty more room to grow. A recent survey of nearly 800 Wyoming landowners, many of whom live within big game habitat, revealed that 85% of survey participants were unaware of the programs and benefits offered through the Big Game Partnership. Despite this lack of awareness, 55% said they might participate in the initiative if they were eligible. “This shows tremendous need and potential for partners and agencies to get the word out,” says Hilary Byerly Flint, a Senior Research Scientist at the Haub School who is leading a multi-year project to track how landowners are responding to these large-scale public investments in conservation. “The goal of our research is to better understand landowner experiences so that programs can meet landowner needs and achieve conservation goals at the same time,” she says.  

Never before has there been such a galvanized approach to supporting working lands and migrations within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, especially one that involved landowners so closely in the development. Bell, of the East Yellowstone Collaborative, says, “We commend the USDA for listening to the landowners. This improved approach to working land conservation has increased partnerships and trust with the very people who steward the land. This little bit goes a long way.” 

Shaleas Harrison is the Wyoming Resource Coordinator for the Western Landowners Alliance, which advances the policies and practices that sustain working lands, connected landscapes, and native species.  

Header image: Through the USDA Migratory Big Game Initiative, Hogg leases part of her ranch for habitat through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program and is also able to enroll in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to help fund things like wildlife-friendly fencing. (Shaleas Harrison) 

By Tesia Lin 

In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock. As chief veterinary officer for the Kenya Wildlife Services at the time, Kock became involved because a virus called Rinderpest was a suspected cause of the antelope’s rapid downturn. The veterinary department was a new feature of the young agency, as was an emphasis on community-based wildlife management. Kenya’s declining wildlife, including hirola, had spurred the reorganization of government conservation agencies and a growing focus on including different stakeholder perspectives in order to better regulate and meet management goals. The changes, within Kenya and broader African conservation communities, were not smooth ones, Kock recalls.   

An early test for the new agency came when Elders of the Somali ethnic group sought the agency’s aid in their stewardship of the hirola antelope. “They were saying, ‘We really like this animal, and we don’t want it to get taken away.’ They felt that they had a right, in a sense, to decisions made with this animal, as it was sort of sacred,” recalls Kock. But the team didn’t at first listen to their suggestions, reasoning that state authorities had rights over the antelope, not local people. “Being sort of arrogant conservationists, we thought, ‘Well that’s a nice idea, but we’re thinking something else instead,” says Kock. Suspicious of the motives of local people, the team instigated relocation of a substantial number of hirola to Tsavo National Park to reinforce a small, previously translocated population. Without seeking further advice from the Elders, this created tension.  

While places like Kenya are scientific meccas for foreign researchers hoping to work with “exotic” wildlife, people trained in other parts of the world are no match for the wisdom that local and Indigenous communities provide when it comes to cultivating or stewarding the land and its resources. Because these communities have persisted for centuries among eastern African wildlife, their understanding of the balance between people, wildlife, and the land is both deeper and more expansive. 

Thus, when the Somali Elders requested assistance with a fenced-in sanctuary that would protect the hirola from predators, Kock recounts the idea as contrary to (what was then) best practice. “Their requests went against some [Western] principles of conservation,” he says. Fences cut animals off from the rest of their habitat, creating barriers to migration routes and reducing access to water and other resources. This can be particularly problematic in arid ecosystems like those in eastern Kenya, where water and good forage are already scarce.   

But the team didn’t have many more promising options. Captive breeding had been fruitless and expensive in other countries and was considered unsuitable for this shy antelope. National parks and reserves had worked for other large mammals, including predators, but that success made them unlikely to support hirola. The sandy-colored antelope are highly visible in today’s grasslands, herd in small numbers, and leave their young relatively unprotected, all making them easy prey. Putting them in parks where predators were thriving could hurt the hirola numbers or stall population growth. Expanding national parks to encompass the hirola would also displace local people, whereas moving the hirola to existing parks isolated them from a beneficial environment alongside deeply invested protectors—the Somali community.  

The Somali people have lived alongside hirola “since time immemorial.” The antelope, which Kock calls “living relics,” are thought to have existed in Kenya for almost 7 million years. As recently as the Pleistocene (which ended around 12,000 years ago), populations roamed from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s southern tip. However, as the climate changed, so did the vegetation. Open, desert-like land that previously sustained the hirola dwindled and fragmented, pushing them closer to pastoral communities, where the antelope found benefit in cohabitating with cattle. Cattle sites were better fertilized, resulting in more grass for consumption, and humans were protecting their livestock from predators, which increased hirola survival rates too. 

Rather than see this as a conflict, Indigenous communities observed connections between the hirola, livestock performance, and land fertility. Only nourished land was capable of sustaining both hirola and cattle, and the presence of hirola suggested healthy cattle, since the two are vulnerable to droughts and the same diseases. The hirola presented no harm to cattle and instead became tied to cattle well-being.  “They became a symbol of good things, achieving a sacred value among the people,” says Kock.  

As Kock and his team learned more about the depth of this relationship, they also realized the infeasibility of Western conservation ideologies. Echoing a need for change during this same time period, the hirola was re-classified into its own genus, Beatragus, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to elevate the species to critically endangered. This re-classification not only generated more interest and resources for conservation efforts, but it built momentum for the team to re-evaluate their approaches to restoring hirola populations. They began to accept that the Somali Elders—strong and committed in their efforts to save the hirola—had knowledge integral for maintaining hirola populations and that overlooking their advice would be data missing in the conservation effort. Kock says, “We didn’t have to work with the people, but it was the sensible thing to do to manage the species, so we eventually felt it was important to more concretely give them our support.”  

As the millennium turned, a new community-based organization, the Northern Rangelands Trust, was set up out of the Lewa Conservancy (which Kock directed at the time). Partially motivated by the tension and misunderstandings surrounding previous hirola translocations, this innovative trust developed to address the growing need for involvement of local and Indigenous communities with wildlife related issues on a local level. Unlike government-owned national parks and reserves, trusts and conservancies tend to be smaller community programs that actively incorporate local people into stewardship. The trust worked with the Somali ethnic community to fulfill the Elders’ suggestions for a fenced refuge, and in 2004 laid the framework that became the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. This conservancy is owned and managed by local, Indigenous people and is focused on empowering the pastoralist communities. Given the opportunity to sustainably manage both their rangelands and hirola populations, the conservancy has since begun to see the recovery of the antelope. 

“Problems at home need a home-grown solution,” says Dr. Abdullahi Ali. Ali is an Indigenous Kenyan, founder of the Hirola Conservation Program, and a University of Wyoming alumnus. He has always shared his home of Garissa—a small town situated by the Tana River in eastern Kenya that calls itself “Home of the Hirola”—with the antelope. Its enduring presence throughout his life inspired him to pursue a conservation career that puts his Indigenous knowledge first.  

Growing up in the midst of Kenya’s changing conservation policies, he often noticed how scientists external to Indigenous communities would come in and misunderstand the situation at hand.  For example, he says the enthusiasm for African predators caused scientists to seek out proof that predators were responsible for declining hirola populations. This excluded other factors contributing to hirola decline, such as habitat degradation, and it would have highlighted predator control as a solution. But predator control is resource intensive and, because “Africa has a multi-predator system that is key to ecosystem health,” Ali says, it could upset the delicate balance of natural and human communities.  

For Ali, protecting the hirola is about maintaining that balance through grassland restoration, a more approachable method backed by his research. Ali’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming focused on the impact of habitat degradation on hirola antelope. He found that habitat change in eastern Africa from open grasslands to forested woodlands had been accelerated by the loss of elephants that no longer removed a lot of the woody trees. He believed that this could be remedied in a way that benefitted both local communities and ecosystems. Since “almost 70% of wildlife in Kenya thrives and coexists on community land,” he says, restoring grasslands to support the hirola also helps sustain people’s livelihoods.  

Now, Ali’s Hirola Conservation Program endows eastern Kenyan communities with resources to conserve hirola, and inadvertently livestock, at a local level. The program employs people to essentially replace the work of elephants by thinning trees and planting native grasses. These same people then harvest the grass seeds and sell them back to the program. Farmers also receive suggestions on how to selectively graze their livestock on these grasses to ensure sustainability, and communities learn to help monitor hirola populations.  

Given that the people have strong intrinsic cultural attachments to the land and wildlife that provides for them, many communities have established their own small conservancies, blending centuries of inherited knowledge and observation with modern needs for conserving wildlife. These smaller, more localized conservancies are a powerful tool for conservation and community development, Ali says. “Conserving in our own land improves the living standards of our communities, and helps minimize competition and conflicts.” 

If given space and inclusive voices, both Ali and Kock believe that ecosystems can recover—and thus, people can recover. Ali believes, “When you empower the communities, you can feel a larger impact of conservation,” not only for the animals, but for the people. Despite the earlier involvement of many stakeholders in hirola conservation, it was the integration of foreign ideologies and science with locally-led approaches that drove the development of solutions that ensured both hirola and human well-being. Ali believes that “there is a lot of conversation globally about putting conservation in local hands; we should add to that momentum. We all want to save the animals and the planet.”  

Tesia Lin is an ex-wildlife biologist and current biological systems researcher. She is passionate about learning from communities whose lifestyles and cultures are historically intertwined with their land, and is grateful she has the opportunity to share their stores.   

Header image: These sandy-colored, desert-adapted antelope are highly visible in todays grasslands, making them more vulnerable to predators. (Hirola Conservation Program)

By Emily Downing

Every spring, Chris Williams looks forward to seeing the terns alight on the meadows of the southern Wyoming ranch that he manages. It’s a fleeting sight—the birds are there for one day and then they’re gone, off to breeding grounds further north. However brief, the terns’ stopover on the ZN Ranch is an essential part of their migratory journey, as it is for the dozens of other species Williams sees every year.

“We provide this edge of green right in the middle of the sagebrush, which is important for a lot of animals,” Williams says. “Our irrigation isn’t just about waterfowl and wading birds, but it’s that edge habitat that supports deer, elk, antelope, sage grouse—all of it.” 

The ZN Ranch, like most other ranching operations in the Upper North Platte watershed, relies on a system of dirt ditches dug by hand in the 1880s to sustain that edge of green. In the spring, when tributary creeks are running high, the ditches divert water and spread it over the floodplain to grow lush grass that will be cut for hay. In the face of a drying western climate, ranching operations that use flood irrigation to grow food for livestock have come under fire for taking too much water out of streams and rivers. But new research is showing that flood irrigation in certain places does so much more than grow hay—it might just be the glue holding western ecosystems together. 

As the West’s water resources are stretched thin, policymakers and the public are calling for increased irrigation efficiency on agricultural land to reduce one of the highest demands on water in the West.  The reasoning goes that flood irrigation—where water is spread out over a field and left to slowly saturate the soil—is inefficient because much of the water that’s diverted is “lost” to seepage and evaporation, rather than directly supporting growing plants. Conversion to center-pivot sprinklers, lined canals, and other irrigation methods intends to minimize these losses while ensuring as much water as possible goes to crop production. As a result, federal programs that fund irrigation infrastructure upgrades are prioritizing the conversion to drip or pivot sprinkler irrigation systems. 

But this calculated way of thinking about crop production doesn’t account for the interconnected pathways that water follows as it moves through a healthy watershed, supporting aquifers, fisheries, and wildlife along the way. Specifically, flood irrigation that happens along historic river floodplains can provide a slew of benefits beyond agricultural yields.  

Before rivers became highly regulated and channelized, floodplain meadows served as sponges, soaking up the spring runoff that topped the creek’s banks. Beaver dams and other diversions slowed the fast-moving snowmelt, spreading it over low-lying meadows and saturating everything. The flooding formed temporary wetlands that provided habitat for migratory waterbirds and food for big game animals. Later in the season, when river flows were low, water that wasn’t absorbed by the plants growing along the floodplain returned to the waterway’s main channel, helping keep it flowing and functional. 

Today, the dirt ditches used by Williams and his neighbors along the banks of Pass Creek mimic these natural flooding cycles, sustaining ribbons of green that provide outsized value for wildlife and human communities. A 2024 study published in Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment found that although flood-irrigated floodplain meadows are only 2.5 percent of the Intermountain West’s irrigated footprint, they provide 58 percent of the region’s temporary wetlands (shallow wetlands that exist for fewer than two months each year) and 20 percent of seasonal wetlands (wetlands that remain wet between two and six months each year).  

Both wetland types are needed by waterbirds and waterfowl at different stages of their lifecycle, from nesting and breeding to fueling up during migration. Patrick Donnelly, a spatial ecologist for the Intermountain West Joint Venture and the US Fish and Wildlife Service who led the research, says that without flood irrigation practices, many of these wetlands would vanish, creating massive habitat gaps for migratory birds. (Disclosure: the author is employed by Intermountain West Joint Venture.) 

“These sites are often invaluable because they’re putting water in the right place at the right time of year to provide the right kind of habitat for the birds moving through the area,” Donnelly says. “When they dry up, due to infrastructure conversion or maybe even the loss of the agricultural operation to development, the flyway becomes increasingly fragile.” 

Emerging research also suggests that flood irrigation can provide other benefits by saturating soils and feeding groundwater supplies, although there is still much to learn about how surface and groundwater are connected. Frontiers in Environmental Science recently published one such study on the Henry’s Fork River in Eastern Idaho, an important fishery at the headwaters of the Snake River. 

Christina Morrisett, the lead author of the research, says that from 1978 to 2000, many agricultural producers along the Henry’s Fork converted from flood irrigation to pivot infrastructure. As expected, surface water diversion from the river decreased by 23 percent over those years, meaning operators were taking less water out of the river. However, return flows to the river also decreased significantly. That’s because when irrigators change to a system that sprinkles or drips small amounts of water onto crops, it waters the crops and nothing else. “You’re probably not putting anything back into the system,” says Morrisett. The end result was that there was less water in the river after the conversion than there had been before.  

In contrast, Williams points out that the irrigation water he uses is recycled multiple times as it moves downstream. After helping plants grow, the “excess” water from flood irrigation infiltrates the earth and can make its way back to the river, creek, or aquifer and continue downstream for future uses. “My upstream neighbors turn it out and put it on their fields and then it goes back into the creek and I’ll pick it up and irrigate with it again and again,” he says. “That water will get used four or five times before getting back to the creek.” 

Morrisett says that’s one reason why operations located higher up in watersheds might be the most important places to maintain traditional flood irrigation practices. There, irrigated meadows in the floodplain can soak up and slowly release water for wildlife and downstream users across the growing season. “Water flows downstream, so whatever isn’t used high up can be recycled by someone else,” she says.  

As communities of the West make difficult decisions about water, science that pinpoints where irrigation provides multiple ecosystem services will be increasingly helpful. Further research into how water moves through watersheds and affects groundwater supplies and aquifers—and how human actions influence both of those things—will also be important. 

In the meantime, supporting farmers and ranchers like Williams who use flood irrigation high in the watershed is ​​​​an easy way to bolster resilience and preserve critical habitat in the West. Funding federal and state programs that enable producers to continue doing what they’re already doing, on a relatively small percentage of private land, will have outsized impacts on preserving watershed function—and key habitat—in the places where it counts. That way, the terns (and the sandhill cranes, the warblers, the mule deer, the pronghorn, and the elk) have somewhere to return to next spring, and all the springs in the future. 

Emily Downing is the Water 4 Communications Specialist for the Intermountain West Joint Venture, a regional public-private partnership that conserves habitat for the benefit of priority bird species, other wildlife, and people. Her role involves producing media that tells the story of emergent wetland habitats on public and private lands in the Intermountain West. In her free time, she is outside with her husband and dogs exploring the mountains and sagebrush around their home in Polaris, Montana. 

Header image: A field in Utah’s Upper Bear River Watershed is flood-irrigated to produce grass hay. Flood irrigation in historic floodplains higher in watersheds can create a sponge effect that slowly releases water back into the waterway over the course of a growing season. (Intermountain West Joint Venture)

By Ezra Stepanek

Bruna Ferreira tried to go into her conversations with the people living around Atlantic Forest State Park without expectations. That was the point of Fantastic Detectives, the program she leads in central Brazil aimed at developing community-driven strategies for coexistence between people and wildlife. With farms, ranches, and villages surrounding the 3.6 square miles of protected area, it seemed like a recipe for conflict. There were some cases of mountain lions and other predators killing livestock, but Ferreira and her team were not making any assumptions. Instead, they were asking the community to define the problems they experienced and share their ideas for living alongside wildlife.

She was still skeptical when she heard story after story of black jaguar sightings. “My grandfather saw a black jaguar,” one rancher told her. “I was driving, and I saw one off the road,” another claimed. “It seemed really impossible, because there haven’t been any register of [black] jaguars in the area for decades,” she says. Then, just a few months after hearing these stories, the team caught a black jaguar on the wildlife cameras they set up in the state park. “People knew about it earlier than any of us that were researching there,” she says. “It was amazing to see and hear and then look through the people’s stories with new eyes.”

Fantastic Detectives is part of an emerging field that combines social and ecological understanding to attain a better picture of the complex interactions within a landscape shared by people and wildlife. This is a departure from conservation management and planning that focuses only on ecological data, like habitat suitability, and disregards people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors completely or until the end. Meaningfully including people from the beginning, Ferreira and others say, is a far more effective way to reduce human-wildlife conflict and improve conservation outcomes.

“Generally, we see when there is a coexistence project, there are [conservationists] that come and say, ‘These are the methods you can use to avoid predation [of cattle] and all that,’ but they don’t often ask what the farmers want or what the ranchers want,” says Ferreira. Situations like this often result in regulations that locals feel are forced on them and don’t reflect the situation on the ground. After being left out for so long, communities can be wary of engaging with researchers at all.

Fantastic Detectives, with support from the Cerrado Mammal Conservation Program and Colorado State University’s Center for Collaborative Conservation fellowship program, plans to develop a conservation and coexistence action plan that involves local people every step of the way. “We want this action plan that can be really implemented and can be made in collaboration with everybody, so everybody has ownership of the process,” Ferreira says. Hearing stories from the local people, like black jaguar sightings, has been the first step in building trust between the local people and the team. Their discussions and workshops with locals are centered around conserving the iconic, but threatened, jaguar, mountain lion, hoary fox, and maned wolf. The Fantastic Detectives have also presented in schools, hosted a fire training, and shared what they captured on camera traps to open the conversation.

Already, Ferreira has noticed a world of difference in how friendly the people are compared to the beginning of their research. One farmer, who was one of the team’s first interviewees, called her a month after they visited to report a huge jaguar pawprint on his land. He sent pictures and invited the team to come back to visit. “It was really special because after a month away, he still remembered us and talked to us,” says Ferreira. The key, she says, is just letting people into the conversation. “When you just give them time to talk, they engage in the projects because it’s more near what they know.”

Because they are still in the early stages of their work, the Fantastic Detectives have yet to observe tangible conservation improvements. Nevertheless, Ferreira is hopeful their efforts to create a collaborative space will not only foster human-wildlife coexistence but also increase citizen participation in conservation efforts.

Dr. Keifer Titus also studies conflict between agriculture and conservation, but on working lands in Montana. Before starting the field work for his PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology from Clemson University, he had seen and heard a lot of negativity about ranchers in the West. “The people that [do] extractive agriculture or agriculture in general almost always get a bad rap, right? Like, they’re the ones doing the harm for the wildlife.” But, he says, “when I got out there and interacted with these folks…it couldn’t have been more opposite. These people care more about the land than most. They want to see wildlife doing well.” Those conversations showed him that “if we could just, from the beginning, get these stakeholders on the same page, it just would do so much better for conservation and preservation of culture and livelihoods,” says Titus.

Like Fantastic Detectives, Titus’s work is grounded in bringing local stakeholders into the conversation from the beginning, specifically to coproduce science, which he says can create better conservation strategies for both people and wildlife. “Without public buy in, most of the time [wildlife restoration and conservation efforts] are unsuccessful, especially in the long term,” says Titus. Where his work goes beyond community engagement is combining data about ranchers’ attitudes towards wildlife with common spatial modeling techniques to create a map of social and ecological conditions on a landscape. “We’re really good at modeling the environmental side. A lot of times we can have the best habitat available for the species we’re looking to restore or conserve, but if social conditions aren’t right, it’s a barrier to achieving a lot of the restoration goals that we might have,” says Titus. Being able to see where both factors are favorable, called areas of socio-ecological suitability, can help conservationists make more informed decisions on where to focus their efforts.

For example, part of Titus’s work was trying to identify the best place to do habitat restoration for mountain lions in and around Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. To do this, he developed maps to identify places with both high habitat value for mountain lions and high local tolerance for them. To measure tolerance, Titus and his team sent out mail surveys to Montana ranchers across the plains region asking them to agree or disagree with statements related to their attitudes towards the species, their support for incentives and conservation for the species, and how they behave toward the species on their land. Titus mapped the survey results, relating tolerance to things like the proportion of public lands and the presence of conservation easements around respondents’ ranch lands. Then, he modeled habitat suitability according to land type, elevation, terrain, and the distance to roads and water. Based off only the habitat data, the public land in the wildlife refuge appeared to be the best candidate for habitat restoration. But tolerance was relatively low there. Conversely, further north of the wildlife refuge in areas with more private land, the habitat quality was much lower but the tolerance for mountain lions was the highest, which “seemed backwards to us from the ecology side of things,” says Titus.

Since Titus’s framework was one of the first of its kind, he was uncertain if the suitability results reflected an accurate picture of the landscape. He had the opportunity to share his results at the Nature Conservancy’s Matador Ranch Science and Land Management Symposium, where wildlife researchers, ranchers, and the public come together to discuss the latest research. Titus and his team spoke with some of the same ranchers surveyed to collect tolerance data, who confirmed the accuracy of the predictive maps. Because higher quality mountain lion habitat is in the wildlife refuge, those working around it are more likely to have had negative interactions with mountain lions and therefore lower tolerance. The ranchers living where mountain lions don’t frequent as much have higher tolerance because they haven’t had any issues with them. Bringing the two sets of data together helped create a clearer picture than each on their own. “It hit home that it’s so much more than habitat, and it causes us to need to think creatively about how we’re aiming for restoration,” says Titus, who now works as a postdoctoral scholar in the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Science at Oregon State University.

Though his model is among the first, socio-ecological integration is a growing field. A 2023 literature review in Landscape Ecology found 104 articles that used integrative approaches like Titus’s, with the majority from 2020 or after. There were several different approaches in analysis, including attempts to understand the complicated drivers behind tolerance and incorporating predictions about the outcomes of possible management strategies. Common research questions included where on a landscape human-wildlife interactions occurred, what ecological and social factors impacted interactions the most, and if interactions could be accurately predicted to improve management strategies.

The review also pointed out challenges and opportunities for growth, particularly around the measurement of sociological data. According to Titus, social variables like attitudes and tolerance can be hard to map onto a landscape, fluctuate often, and take time and money to repeatedly survey for. A lack of standard methodology, on the other hand, makes collaboration and comparison across studies difficult. But none of these challenges are stopping Titus. “While it might not be systematic, necessarily, from a Western science perspective, there’s tons of qualitative information that can really help us move the needle for wildlife.”

The more research there is, the better. As new studies fill in gaps and streamline the process, socio-ecologically integrated approaches will become easier to implement widely and may start to change norms in the conservation community towards always including diverse voices in the conversation. Titus is very excited at the possibilities: “I think this is going to be the next frontier of how we approach wildlife restoration in working lands.”

Ezra Stepanek is a WyACT Science Journalism Intern and an undergraduate student at the University of Wyoming. He is studying environmental systems science, environment and natural resources, and communication.

Header image: A black jaguar and a mountain lion photographed by wildlife cameras in Atlantic Forest State Park (Courtesy Bruna Ferreira).

By Graham Marema

Just before sunrise, Nine Quarter Circle Ranch wakes up. The valley is still blue with fog, and wranglers don cowboy hats and vests, shimmying their feet into worn boots. Guests wake and yawn over a communal meal of eggs, sliced fruit, and mugs of steaming coffee. Soon, the Appaloosa horses will come thundering down from their night pastures into the corral, followed by the hooting wranglers, for a day of riding beneath the Taylor Peaks.

I could be describing a scene from 75 years ago, as this dude ranch began another day of horseback riding, fly fishing, and guiding guests over the scrubby hillsides of the Taylor Fork Valley. Or I could be describing a scene from this morning.

That’s sort of the point.

“Our motto is ‘time stands still,’” says Kameron Kelsey from beneath the rim of an old black cowboy hat. Kameron runs the Nine Quarter Circle Ranch in southern Montana, right outside Yellowstone National Park, along with his wife Sally. They host some 600 guests at their ranch each year. “I mean, we have a guest here this week who came in the early ’60s as a young child, and it hasn’t changed. That’s part of the appeal and charm of the place.”

That longevity is something other tourism sectors have, at times, struggled to replicate. For western outdoor tourism, the question of sustainability—which requires balancing the positive and negative impacts on local ecosystems, economies, and cultures—grows more crucial every year. As visitors arrive so do economic opportunities but often at a cost to local communities. With tourism booms come complications, from increased housing prices, to human waste in fragile backcountry ecosystems, and more.

While tourism draws like rock climbing and winter sports have struggled to mediate their impact on local systems, dude ranching, a quietly understated western tourism industry, has remained popular, unobtrusive, and relatively unchanged for nearly 150 years. The timeless charm of dude ranching might provide a compelling example of a long-term recreational sector rooted in sustaining a cultural and natural way of life.

A dude ranch, also called a guest ranch, is distinct from a working ranch, whose sole purpose and income comes from cattle ranching. The dude ranch, by contrast, receives at least part of its income from hosting guests for cowboy-themed vacations. When the practice began in the late nineteenth century, ranches hosted these guests for free. The very first “dudes,” as visitors were called, were mostly folks from East Coast cities enamored with the western lifestyle. They felt drawn to the romantic image of the cowboy, a figure somehow unchanged by the quickening urban sprawl of eastern cities.

It wasn’t long before ranches found that guests were eager enough to pay for the chance to play cowboy. From there, an industry was born. Dude ranches popped up from Montana to Arizona, California to Washington. The railroad brought more dudes out West than ever, slick-haired and shiny-shoed, yearning for a vacation far from the city bustle. In the 1920s and ’30s, as people were leaving the countryside for urban jobs in offices and factories, the wide plains of the West offered a reprieve—a grounded, traditional experience that urbanites craved. Dude ranches became more popular with each passing year.

The same allure that tempted guests out West in the twentieth century continues to enamor tourists of the twenty-first. Check out Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram, or Carey Underwood’s, and you might catch them sunburnt and beaming in front of a picturesque mountain backdrop at a favored luxury ranch getaway. These dude ranches promise a reconnection with nature and authentic western lifestyle, where values and landscape haven’t changed in over a hundred years. Tourists who have never touched a horse before can clamber into a saddle and even wrangle some cattle. Think Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

“It’s a different type of vacation,” says Bryce Albright, director of the Dude Ranchers’ Association, which provides membership to more than 90 dude ranches across the West. “They’re more of an authentic western experience, which you can’t get anywhere else. When people come out West, yes, you’ll see the cowboys, and you’ll see the rodeos, but until you get immersed in that kind of culture, you won’t really have respect for it.”

So what has made this model of tourism sustainable for local environments, economies, and cultures? While some forms of outdoor recreation balance negative and positive impacts on local systems by introducing something new—new management plans, new renewable energy technologies, new ideas—dude ranches contend with all three pillars of sustainability by embracing something old, traditional, and relatively unchanged.

In a way, environmental sustainability is inherent to dude ranching. Knowing that their customers expect beautiful, pristine landscapes year after year and decade after decade, ranchers have incentive to be responsible stewards of that land. As Sally Kelsey puts it, “If Kameron’s family had chosen not to maintain a dude ranch… this landscape would have looked very different.”

That isn’t to say dude ranches never embrace new technologies. Take the solar panels soaking up rays outside Goosewing Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, or the hydroelectric generator at Diamond D Ranch in Stanley, Idaho. In fact, the Dude Ranchers’ Association requires some form of environmental footprint reduction as a prerequisite for becoming a member.

But Sally points out another, less measurable way that dude ranching fosters environmental sustainability. “Something that is undervalued when it comes to our impact on conservation,” she says, “is our guests get to take rides in the country and learn to value a place that’s very different from where they come from. That would benefit the community should we ever have a threat to the area and need people to speak up about why this kind of place is special.” This is the same tactic the National Park Service has been using for years to instill a sense of urgency for conservation in park visitors: to care about something enough to fight for its protection, you have to see it for yourself.

When it comes to the second pillar of sustainability—economics—the industry is often “overlooked,” according to Bryce. “It doesn’t get the recognition,” she says of dude ranching’s economic impact. “Tourism organizations frequently overlook dude ranches because they don’t think it’s very big, but if you look over the past couple of years, they were probably some of the most visited vacation destinations in the US.”

It’s true that compared to tourism that brings people to stay and spend money in mountain towns, dude ranching’s contribution to a shared local economy may be smaller. Guests at the Kelseys’ ranch might eat a meal or two in Bozeman or spend a weekend in Yellowstone, and locals may find seasonal work on the ranch as wranglers, cooks, or housekeepers. But the economic contribution outside of the ranch itself is relatively humble.

Still, dude ranching has had an important economic impact on the ranching industry. For some ranches, opening their doors to guests has provided an economically viable alternative or supplement to raising cattle. “Agritourism,” which invites guests to vacation on farms and ranches, has grown in popularity among both tourists and their hosts with revenue tripling in the US between 2002 and 2017.

To examine dude ranching’s impact on the third pillar—culture—take a look at the Dude Ranchers’ Association’s six Hs: Hospitality, Heritage, Honesty, Heart, Hats, and of course Horses.

“We’re holding onto our forefather’s ruggedness and way of life and hoping to share that with as many people as we can,” says Kameron, who himself, as the third Kelsey to run Nine Quarter Circle, is evidence of this. Preserving an “authentic” and old-fashioned culture is baked into the dude ranch aesthetic, and that means immediate impact on culture in towns like Bozeman seems somewhat negligible. Dude ranches play on a romantic, mythologized image of the West that has drawn visitors for more than a century, and while skeptics may raise their eyebrows at the perpetuation of that myth, the “authenticity” of dude ranches being run by real ranchers plays a large role in local communities embracing them.

Arizona acknowledged the importance of this cultural preservation when it designated dude ranches as key heritage sites in 2022, creating the Arizona Dude Ranch Heritage Trail. The trail acknowledges dude ranches’ historical and cultural significance and puts frameworks in place to preserve these sites for future generations.

What’s more, relative to forms of outdoor recreation that entail high-speed sports or loud motors on public lands, dude ranch guests spend most of their time on private land, partaking in low-impact activities like horseback riding or branding their initials into leather belts. They aren’t as likely to leave trash on public trails or overburden the infrastructure of small mountain towns to the extent of other industries that rely on those towns to house, feed, and sustain their guests.

Dude ranches like the Nine Quarter Circle Ranch bring tourists into this region—to gain an appreciation for the land, spend their money, and celebrate local cultural heritage—without a significant cost to local communities. That seems like a pretty balanced version of the sustainability math equation. In the evening, the eggshell sky over the Taylor Fork Valley softens, and the ranch winds down for the night. The Appaloosas return to their grazing pastures. Cowboy hats sleep on hooks by the front doors of the cabins. Guests settle into bed, listening to the shush of the dark river, sore and sunburnt and smiling. Imagine how this scene will look in the next 75 years. My guess and hope—pretty much exactly the same.

Graham Marema is pursuing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming, with a concurrent degree in environment and natural resources. She is a writer from East Tennessee who often writes about landscape, ghosts, and SPAM.

By Tesia Lin

In 2014, John Coffman arrived in Wyoming as The Nature Conservancy’s new steward for the Red Canyon Ranch and quickly encountered an unforgettable lesson. “We were trying to figure ourselves out on some new country and trying to make sure we were on top of getting the hay meadows irrigated. An intern was having trouble with a beaver plugging a headgate,” he says, preventing water from getting to the fields. They opted to get rid of the pesky beaver, as agricultural operations have done for a long time.

The following year, high spring flows washed away bridges and crossings from the fields, forcing Coffman and his team to restore irrigation ditches and pipes, a resource-intensive process. In a different part of the ranch, however, a stream system that still had beavers showed more resilience to the spring flows. “Instead of those streams eroding away, the [beaver] ponds slowed everything down,” says Coffman. “The ponds filled with sediment and are now growing willows and lush grasses.”

Seven years later, during a mid-July visit, Coffman showed me this historic beaver complex, still thriving after those floods. For twenty feet on either side of the stream, floodplains were green with grasses, willows, goldfinches, and a rattlesnake we were lucky to hear first. Coffman chuckled; he had cautioned me earlier that they’re after the rodents abundant in the area. Four beaver dams bridged deep, still ponds. The beavers built with no regard for clean, neat lines or straight waterways—challenging my understanding of what streams should look like.

After the consequential floods in the spring of 2015, Coffman says, “We came to the observation that there were some serious benefits to having beaver dams and beavers in place.” This beaver complex serves as a model for the conditions that he hopes to restore several streams to. Across an increasingly parched and degraded West, land managers and researchers seeking effective and efficient water management solutions may benefit from the same realization. Perhaps, it’s time to end recent antagonism against beavers and instead form an alliance with nature’s most effective, once prolific waterway engineers.

“None of us in our lifetimes have seen how common beavers would have been,” says Niall Clancy, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming surveying fish diversity in beaver ponds. Before the arrival of Western settlers in the early 1800s, there were as many as four hundred million beavers in America, creating wetland mosaics that covered almost three hundred thousand square miles of land in serene greens and glittering blues. Beavers dam up slower streams to form deep moats around their homes, creating refuges not only for themselves, but also for plants and animals that rely on, and co-evolved with, these dam structures. Series of dams spawn floodplains, wetlands, and ponds—so called “beaver complexes.” Sheltered pools of standing water provide safety for young fish, invertebrates, and amphibians. They are also havens for threatened or rare birds, like sandhill cranes. “The more complex the types of habitats you have, the more types of wildlife you can support,” Clancy says. “Messiness is good in ecology.”

Messy can also be how land looks when humans are stewards. “When we think of the past, we need to add Indigenous people,” says Rosalyn LaPier, faculty in the history department at the University of Illinois and enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana and Métis. “When the first settlers arrive in the West, what they are seeing are these ecosystems that have co-evolved with plants, animals, and humans.” To survive in water-limited environments, Indigenous communities living between the plains and Rocky Mountains studied and manipulated natural processes. LaPier says that they managed beaver populations to manage water; beaver ponds provided a water source for Native peoples as well as the animals they hunted. Beavers were so important that the Blackfeet considered them sacred and divine. Thus, humans developed a close, symbiotic existence with beavers and their natural worlds.

Western expansion upset this balance. As settlers introduced new diseases and deforestation, they also introduced the concept that waterways were most efficiently managed if they were linear, unobstructed, and moved large quantities of water. They diverted rivers and streams into deep irrigation ditches and killed beavers where they interfered, declaring them pests. Coupled with overharvesting for the global fur trade, human pressure nearly extinguished beavers and the ecosystems they maintained by 1900. Of the floodplains and wetlands that once existed across North America, less than ten percent remain today.

In their places are thousands of miles of down-cut streams like the ones that caused Coffman and his team so much trouble a few years back. In straight, unobstructed waterways, controlling transportation to agricultural fields is the main objective. The force of water travelling quickly does not allow water to collect in the soil or for nutritious sediment to be deposited, so incised banks become unable to support plant life. Without roots to hold the banks together, exposed soil dries and crumbles in the heat of summer, eroding the streambanks. Braided stream systems shrink to a single water channel, drying the surrounding land. This cycle eats away at floodplains and wetlands, which otherwise accumulate nutritious sediment, retain water underground (resisting evaporation), and promote biodiversity. With nature’s “sponges” gone, water and nutrients wash out to the ocean, leaving behind arid land and lost habitat.

Reconnecting waterways, reducing erosion, and replenishing groundwater is difficult and expensive. When I asked Coffman about solutions for managing and retaining water on Red Canyon Ranch, he emphasized the hefty costs of bringing heavy machinery and hiring engineers and landscape architects. Such disruption could also set back ecological processes, displacing invertebrates, mammals, and birds alike. The integrity of the ecosystem could take years to recover. Not to mention the challenge of maintaining such an elaborate construction when faced with the unpredictable nature of rivers and streams, which change their courses over time. All in the hope of mimicking the effortless effects of floodplains and wetlands.

Nationally, hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated toward the labor and materials required to develop water resiliency projects in the West alone. These interagency developments prioritize the storage and protection of water in reservoirs and groundwater, as well as the restoration of wetlands and waterways. Though this large sum recognizes the importance of restoring ecosystems, humans cannot accurately replicate natural processes.

“What [modern] restoration practice has done is borrow from empirical observations and produce average conditions. We are crap at designing for variability and complexity,” explains Joe Wheaton, an ex-civil engineer studying nature’s engineers at Utah State University. Nature, he says, does not adhere to averages but is rather unpredictable. The movement of water and how streams change course are challenges that researchers and engineers cannot account for. Unlike scientists, though, beavers instinctually adapt to and engage with the changing courses of water. They foster jigsaw ecosystems, supporting critters that are co-dependent on one another in ways that scientists often overlook and would be hard-pressed to reproduce.  That makes beavers cost-effective tools for maintaining and helping manage the natural water systems that so many people, industries, plants, and animals rely on. For Wheaton, beavers are tools of restoration that engage natural processes, balancing the “mismatch between effort and scope of problem.”

In the most degraded waterways, beavers and their accompanying biodiversity will not return on their own, but we know how to entice them. Clancy’s team facilitates the return of beavers by installing beaver dam analogs, commonly called BDAs). He and his collaborators strategically select for where a beaver’s work is required, targeting heavily eroded streams devoid of life and too deep for cattle to cross. Spanning the width of these channels, they weave sticks and logs, and pack mud to mimic dams. These barriers slow the force of water as it moves downstream while creating pools, the goal being to create a habitat appealing to beavers. Should beavers move in, they build upon and maintain these structures without need for human labor and constant surveillance.

While the implementation of beaver dam analogs and encouragement of beaver repopulation outpaces the research, many initial results have been positive. In places where beavers have been reintroduced, ranchers and researchers alike have seen streams flowing anywhere from an extra week to an extra month. Beaver restoration can also replenish groundwater, often a key source for municipal water use. Meanwhile, burying plant materials during the damming process sequesters carbon, preventing it from entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. And in some once-degraded sites where beavers have been successfully introduced, their restoration effectively increased the variety of habitats and the abundance of critters they could support.

Exploring a symbiotic relationship with beavers is still a new but growing practice that has not been without challenges. Coffman says, “Since that situation years ago, we got beavers back creating messes: damming up ditches, plugging up headgates. But we’re trying to approach it a lot differently now.” Rather than treating beavers like nuisances, his management approach centers around the balanced relationship between beavers and stewards. Like Clancy, he is installing beaver dam analogs throughout streams on the ranch—a project that started with five and expanded to over forty structures. Though there are headgates and irrigation ditches where damming is undesirable, Coffman still allows beavers to exist under his watchful eye. After all, early dams can be dug out and individuals relocated—but beavers’ effectiveness in retaining water and restoring floodplains cannot be replicated.

Beavers may not be the ultimate clean-cut solution for our water resource problems. Messy, multi-faceted tools, they challenge the modern concept of controlling water. But researchers and land managers alike have found that nurturing an alliance with beavers, adapting to their activities, and integrating science with natural processes—the way Indigenous peoples have—can help build resiliency in the face of dynamic environmental challenges.

Tesia Lin is a master’s student at the University of Wyoming characterizing pathogens in bighorn sheep pneumonia. She hopes to pursue a career which encourages interdisciplinary and intercultural research at the forefront of ecology and conservation. This story was supported by a grant through Wyoming EPSCoR and the National Science Foundation. 

By Samuel Western

I’m in upper eastern Montana, a land of undulating drainages, heading north on Highway 87. The Little Snowies are off to my left, white-capped, drifting in and out of the clouds. You can put miles on this road and see little that is man-made besides telephone poles, fence posts, and the occasional cell tower. Rarer still does a pump jack come into view, especially one that’s actually working. A ranch house appears flanked by a low barn, equipment scattered around the buildings like chicks to a mother hen, all hiding behind a wind break. Then it’s prairie again, short—very short—grass and sage.

Then it’s more prairie.

The Musselshell and Upper Missouri River watersheds of Montana are classic tomorrow country, as in tomorrow it will be better. However, for the shrinking towns nestled around these drainages, the idea of thriving communities is gaining currency over fatalist nostalgia. While rooted in farming and ranching, residents recognize that inclusivity and economic diversity, rather than clinging to the status quo, is a more expedient path to prosperity.

Petroleum County sits between these two rivers. It only has 496 people—the smallest population of any county in Montana. It has lived at the mercy of the commodity index. US Department of Agriculture data show that from 2012 to 2017, net farm cash income in Petroleum County dropped 63 percent. Years ago, there were twenty-four school districts in the county. Now the single remaining district faces declining enrollment. When students graduate, they tend to leave.

These aren’t new problems for the county or agriculture. In 1939, Petroleum County officials sold off 20,000 acres of land taken for non-payment of taxes. Some went for as little as fifty cents per acre. By 1941, the county still found itself with 120,000 acres of land taken from landowners who couldn’t pay their taxes.

In the northern Rockies as a whole, ranchers find themselves buried under rising costs. “We are getting a smaller piece of the food dollar. And it keeps on shrinking,” said Leo Barthelmess, who operates in Phillips County, just north of Petroleum. “Meanwhile our input costs, like insurance, equipment, and feed, keep on rising. The price of land is also climbing.”

“Life here is hard,” says Lindsey Wilkerson, superintendent of the Petroleum County schools. “Those hardships have developed some very self-reliant people.”

And sometimes embittered. It’s no accident that The Montana Freeman Movement, a militant antigovernment group that surged in the 1980s, had its roots in Garfield County, located just east of Petroleum County. The signs of a siege mentality abound in Winnett, the Petroleum County seat. Trump: No More Bullshit; Save the Cowboy: Stop the American Prairie Reserve; The Sierra Club Sucks. Each block has at least two or three abandoned and boarded-up homes. Paved streets are few.

“Hold the line? Bullshit, we’re going to create something.”

But that’s not the whole picture. Far from it. Winnett is redefining what it means to be self-reliant. It has the standard rural metrics of sufficiency: plenty of neat and well kept homes, a bar, grocery store, motel, post office, city hall, county buildings, and a K-12 school. But it also has new and restored structures, one quite imposing at nearly 12,000 square feet. Indeed, one cannot help but notice the activity, the roar of equipment and echoing of hammers, as workers erect the Petroleum County Community Center. Once completed, it will serve as a gathering place for community events like weddings, adult education classes, and receptions.

One might reasonably ask: What’s going on? How can a county with a $1.8 million total assessed valuation be building a $5 million community center? The answer is that extractive-based money funded most of this structure and county residents chipped in the rest. Native son Larry Carrell, a petroleum engineer, made his money in oil and gas. He gave back to a place with disappearing oil and gas reserves.

Oil isn’t the only commodity paying it forward. Just up the block from the construction activity sits a well worn, boarded-up structure. The Odd Fellows Hall, built in 1914, rests upon a brand new foundation. It took 245 hours of volunteers to dig, shoot grades, haul dirt, set footings and pour the concrete. The building, with much celebration, was moved from its original site on February 7, 2022.

An organization rooted in agriculture—the Winnett Agricultural Community Enhancement and Sustainability (ACES)—holds title to the Odd Fellow’s Hall. This nonprofit 501c3 has renovation in the works, including a major interior remodel. There’s discussion of a retail and coffee shop on the first floor and apartments on the second.

There’s more on ACES’s improvement docket. With the help of the Montana Historical Foundation, and others, ACES is undertaking a feasibility study for rehabilitation of the county courthouse. Commercial spaces and small apartments for new school teachers are planned for the now mostly disused upper floors.

Founded in 2016, Winnett ACES understood that if the region was to thrive, agriculture had to become more inclusive and involve community affairs. The ACES Facebook page describes the organization as “a community group that works to improve land, life, and community in Winnett, MT.”

Laura Nowlin, who ranches north of Winnett with her husband, Levi, says their first meeting was ostensibly about how Petroleum County could have a more direct role in managing wildlife. “The conversation morphed into a discussion about the problem with absentee ranch owners. Then the talk centered on a more existential question: the future of Winnett,” Nowlin says.

At first, ACES undertook steps directly related to ranching, such as putting local beef in the public schools and, most ambitiously, starting a grass bank for young ranchers. A grass bank is a type of grazing cooperative where aspiring stockmen combine their herds on a shared, leased piece of ground. Grass banks attempt to solve one of the thorniest problems in ranching: cost of entry for the next generation. The baton theory of agriculture—passing your operation on to the next generation—is on its last legs. The reasons have been thoroughly documented. Among them: cost of land, cost of capital, and cost of equipment.

“We need each other to build a thriving future.”

Not so long ago, it was ranches with river access and high scenic amenities nestled next to the Rockies that commanded princely prices. Now, ranches everywhere are being purchased by non-residents for recreation and hunting, squeezing agriculture out of the market. For example, the realty firm Hall and Hall recently sold the 8,426-acre Salt Sage Coulee Ranch in Petroleum County. The asking price was $4.4 million According to the US Census, the median household income in Petroleum County is $40,000.

This meant ACES had to expand its network in the search for grazing opportunities, sometimes finding partners in unlikely places. “We got funds from the US Fish and Wildlife Foundation,” Nowlin says. “They had money on how to develop a grass bank strategy. Some of us didn’t know what that was. We hired a consultant to write a feasibility study.”

Another door opened when Bill Milton, a rancher who lives between Roundup and Winnett, introduced the possibility of grazing on the Matador Ranch. That’s in Phillips County and owned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Milton invited a TNC representative to lunch. “Nobody else knew he was coming,” says Nowlin. “We were all too polite to ask him to leave. So, we listened to what he had to say. The people of ACES are conservative, but they are also open-minded and willing to find solutions.”

According to Milton, the meeting was met with mixed results. Some of the older attendees balked, saying the group needed to accept the fact that environmental nonprofits like TNC “just didn’t like us.”

Agriculture invests a lot of time being on the defensive: grazing on public land, use of chemicals, soil loss, trespass issues, fencing policy, and more. Milton and ACES prefer positive demonstrations. Converts to the ACES aspirations, “are no longer spending 90 percent of their time at a stock grower’s meeting defending themselves,” says Milton. “They’re not trying to hold the line. Hold the line? Bullshit, we’re going to create something. We’re going to build community centers. We’re going to put beef in the schools. We’re going to work on historic buildings. We’re going to invite people in to talk about soil. These things are well attended.”

So far, the Matador partnership has not come to pass. Yet Milton remains confident. A grass bank, he says, will happen. “It’s just a matter of time. We’ve got all the pieces in place.” And although deciding to form a grass bank is what pulled ACES together, their mission has expanded. Nowlin says “We have a lot of broader community goals, too. We’re an agricultural community but can’t survive with those who live in town. If we’re concerned about ag, we’re concerned with the town itself.”

This blurring of the distinction between town and county is relatively novel for the American West. For decades, agricultural communities gave priority to supporting farmers and ranchers. They considered it a prudent path to prosperity; more essentially it allowed residents to keep their cultural identity. Then reality required a readjustment. Market cycles proved punishing and, for many, unsustainable. Principles of efficiency and evolving technology were so ardently followed by ranching and farming that they minimized the human factor. The 1980s agriculture crisis drove the final nail in the projection that successful agriculture equaled thriving town. Since then, it’s questionable if production agriculture needs towns or any semblance of a working community to succeed.

For example, in a recent interview, Karl Stauber, former Deputy Undersecretary of Rural Development observed, “We are at a strange point in our history. The economic reality of agriculture has displaced the cultural reality of community. Education, broad-based education, is no longer necessary for a farmer to prosper. If a community loses its champion high school, how does that relate to the farmer or rancher? What farmers need to prosper, and what community needs are two different things. I think more farmers and communities haven’t realized this yet.”

Milton doesn’t think that fits the Winnett model. “There’s probably data that agree with that vision. But we have a competing vision. These self-governing, self-organizing circles have the capacity to right this huge wave of concentration. And these circles involve more than just agriculture.”

This inclusivity goes beyond Winnett. Roughly 135 miles north lies Phillips, a struggling county on the Milk River. The county seat is Malta. The population is declining and growing older. The number of ranches and farms dropped 20 percent from 2010 to 2020. Leo Barthelmess, who runs 700 mother cows south of Malta with his brother, is trying to do something about this.

Once the pivot is made, other changes often follow.

He goes to school often. Never mind that he is sixty-six years old, a fourth generation rancher who has been raising cattle and sheep since 1964. You would think he already knows what he needs to know. Yet Barthelmess is afflicted with a bad case of lifelong learning. As he puts it: “I’m a breeder and a reader. I’ve spent many a night reading about how we can be better ranchers.”

Barthelmess attends classes put on by Ranching for Profit, a Wheatland, Wyoming based company that advertises itself as “transforming ranches into sustainable businesses.” This approach dovetails with lessons Barthelmess has learned over the years from applying the principles of Holistic Management. This school has a core tenet (monitored rotational grazing) but also advocates that livestock needs to be managed as an integral part of the wider ecosystem. The longer you listen to Barthelmess, the more you realize he’s talking about more than just running cows, although they get plenty of attention.

Barthelmess is president of the Rancher’s Stewardship Alliance, based out of Malta. Its mission statement is “Ranching, Conservation, Communities—a Winning Team.” He writes in the organization’s annual report, “Our collective successes are only possible when we tap into the reserves of a deeply rooted community. We need each other to build a thriving future.”

This also means avoiding technological seclusion. Since 2019, Barthelmess and his brother have been part of a pilot project using electronic collars to move cattle. The collars, manufactured by the Vence Corporation of San Diego, permit real-time monitoring of livestock and pressure the animals, either by auditory or electronic stimulus, to move in certain direction and avoid others. If a cow approaches the edge of a grazing paddock, the collar emits a sound. If the cow continues to move towards the perimeter, she gets a shock. “It takes about two days for a cow to learn the drill,” says Barthelmess.

The use of electronic collars, if they prove viable in the long-term and at-scale, have a long list of benefits. For starters, they help efficiently and economically maintain better pasture. The ultimate goal of rotational grazing is fostering soil health; with better soil comes an abundance of better forage and, hopefully, fatter cows. Yet moving cattle frequently requires time and labor, a strike against economy. In contrast, the collars have allowed Barthelmess to manage his paddocks virtually, altering the size and placement of the pasture through the Vence Herd Manager webpage. As a result, the ranch has gone from minimal rotation to having thirty-eight or more pastures. “We move the cattle weekly or even every ten to twenty days. We’ve also been able to diversify their diet and increase stock density,” says Barthelmess.

Electronic collars could also mean reduced fencing, a boon to wildlife. Barthelmess says, “we have sixty miles of barbed wire fencing. Some of it’s eighty years old. The cost to replace it is tremendous, about $15,000-20,000 per mile. We also have the second longest antelope migration in North America. Less fencing would improve their survival. We like to minimize the conflict with wildlife, plus improve our soils and grazing lands.”

Marisa Sather, a wildlife biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, helped Barthelmess get a grant for the collars. She says they portend major change for ranching. “It’s really a new business model. The amount of emails and phone calls I’ve gotten inquiring about electric collars is impressive. It [development] won’t be fast and probably won’t totally eliminate boundary fencing. But it will reduce interior fencing,” she says.

This reduction in fencing, she says, spells good news for wildlife. During migrations antelope can, “hit hundreds of fences, some wildlife friendly, some not,” she said. “With each fence they might either scrape off hide and hair or spend some time running up and down the fence line looking for a place to cross. Some die trying.”

The promise of fence elimination leaves Barthelmess hopeful but far from certain. “Maybe,” he says. “But what if these collars, in the long run, don’t work? We plan to remove old fence as maintenance costs exceed value. Then it will be replaced by the newest Vence technologies.”

Barthelmess and his brother are challenging another tradition: eliminate winter feeding. The goal is to graze year around. “We haven’t done it yet but we’re working on it,” says Barthelmess. If successful, it would rewrite ranching tradition and economics. Putting up feed is expensive. “When I was a kid, we’d invest three to four hundred hours each summer cutting and putting up feed,” he said. “The value of livestock and the price of equipment has changed. It’s not sustainable for the long-term. We can’t afford to put up hay.”

To those unfamiliar with tomorrow country, these developments—Winnett’s community center, the work of ACES, the Barthelmess brothers’ willingness to experiment with electronic collars and reduced winter feed—may appear insignificant. Yet they represent the logical path for bottom-up shifts in conservative rural communities. They are what sociologist Shawn Ginwright calls “a pivot:” a small but powerful change. Once the pivot is made, other changes often follow.

Think of the situation in these counties as an earthbound version of an extended slack tide. Commodities grown by family producers have been moving away from these places for decades. In the rural Rocky Mountain West, small ranches get swallowed by larger operations. Grain elevators and houses sit empty.

The demographic data suggest, however, the tide is slowly coming back in. The 2010 and 2020 censuses show that Petroleum County actually gained population. Maybe it’s only two folks, but that means that the bleeding has slowed to a trickle. Phillips County only lost thirty-six people from 2010 to 2020, the slowest decrease in forty years.

It also shows confidence in an idea, expressed with an agricultural sense of patience. For example, after struggling to create the grass bank it deemed so critical, the Winnett ACES’s relationship-building paid off last year.

Curt and Kate Vogel, a couple from Bozeman, had a 680-acre parcel of land near Winnett. It had been in the Vogel family since 1911 and was being leased out to a neighbor. The couple decided to donate it to The Nature Conservancy, but TNC wasn’t sure it was a good fit for their land purchases. “But,” said TNC grassland conservation director, Brian Martin, “we thought it would be a perfect fit for the Winnett ACES.”

Nowlin sees this gift as the foundation for creating a grass bank. “For now, we lease the property to the neighbor because there are multiple parcels that are intermixed in a large BLM allotment. But down the road, it creates all kinds of opportunities.”

It’s this lens on the future that excites Barthlesmess. “We have so many more opportunities than I did when was I was younger. I hope the young realize the opportunities we have out here. One of the hopes of the collar is that it will engage the next generation.”

And don’t forget fun. “We enjoy the work with ACES,” says Nowlin. “It’s a social thing. It’s energizing. It’s energizing to have people appreciate the work. We go to the bars but instead of complaining, we celebrate we’re solving some of the world’s problems.”

Samuel Western has covered Rocky Mountain natural resource issues for decades. For twenty-five years he was a correspondent for The Economist in London. His next book, A Reckoning in August, explores the political and economic shifts of the Great Plains and Northern Rockies from statehood to the current era.

By Birch Malotky

When I get Dallas May on the phone for the first time and ask how he’s doing, he immediately tells me, “We were getting ready to start selling cattle and a week later the rains started. It’s really saved our lives.” It wouldn’t have been the first time he downsized his herd due to drought, but that doesn’t make it any easier. “It sounds like you’re saving yourself by selling cows, but it is devastating financially,” he says. Not to mention that after a lifetime breeding them, there’s a history and emotional attachment to every single cow. “Forty-five generations of cattle have gotten us to where we’re at. You can’t just buy a replacement.” 

These are the kinds of crises May has faced routinely, repeatedly, and increasingly. In 2004, drought forced the May family to sell off half their herd; it took eight years to recoup just a third of those losses. Shortly thereafter, the herd was halved again and it took until 2020 to build back up today’s 800 head of cattle. Over those decades, May has watched the costs of his operation go up, the price of beef go down, and dry weather stick around. It’s a death spiral, he says, one that threatens not only the financial viability of his multi-generational family operation, but also the health of 15,000 acres of native prairie and wildlife habitat under his stewardship.  

As climate change causes more frequent and severe droughts in the arid West, ranching isn’t getting any easier. And with crop values on the rise, it’s sometimes only a matter of economics until working ranchlands are plowed under for commodity crops like corn and soy. When that happens, it’s not just ranching heritage and wildlife habitat that’s lost: carbon is released too. In a vicious cycle, the carbon stored in grassland soils ends up in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the climate crisis. 

But what if something could break the cycle, serving up the win-win-win that conservationists, ranchers, and climate activists didn’t dare hope for? In 2016, the May family got involved in a brand-new conservation tool that purported to do just that: rangeland carbon credits. Five years after their pioneering project began, it’s time to see what promises panned out, and if this tool can scale up to address challenges faced by the people, animals, plants, and carbon safeguarded by America’s grasslands.   

Under Threat: People, Biodiversity, and Carbon 

In southeastern Colorado near the small agricultural town of Lamar, the May farm and ranch comprises 5,000 acres of cropland and 15,000 acres of native shortgrass prairie. When I visit in mid-July, the fields are a shocking medley of greens: thick sagebrush and waist high grasses dipping into wetlands bristling with bulrushes. Hardly a moment goes by without some birdsong or another floating in through the open truck window as Dallas and his son Riley drive me through a shifting mosaic of pasture and stream, regaling me with stories of swift foxes, elk herds, and dragonflies that look like peacocks. 

“If we don’t have the ranchers, we lose the grasslands.”

Intact, native grasslands like those on the May ranch provide ecosystem services key to the health of human and natural communities. They support a unique array of plant and animal species, filter and store water, sequester tons of carbon, provide habitat for pollinators, and are the basis of many rural livelihoods. Yet, temperate grasslands are the least protected ecosystem on the planet, and the most endangered ecosystem in the United States, according to the 2020 Plowprint report released by the World Wildlife Fund. And they’re disappearing fast. 

Historically, grasslands have suffered the one-two punch of being economically profitable to develop and not traditionally scenic, leaving them underrepresented in the public lands portfolio. Now, 84 percent of remaining intact grasslands in the Great Plains are privately owned, and therefore vulnerable to economic pressure. Billy Gascoigne, associate director of conservation strategy for Ducks Unlimited (DU), says that “when commodity prices go up, we see that grasslands go out, and row crops like corn or soy go in.” In 2018-2019 alone, 2.6 million acres of grassland were converted to crops in the Great Plains of the US and Canada. In the American West, eastern Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado; the western Dakotas; and eastern Washington and Oregon are most at risk.  

“Ranchers are the last strongholds,” says Gascoigne, speaking about the prairie pothole region of the Dakotas where DU focuses its work. “If we don’t have the ranchers, we lose the grasslands.” But ranchers are facing issues of their own.  

The difficulties confronting livestock agriculture are numerous, intertwined, and worsening. In brief, given the low and variable price of beef and lamb, the high costs of land and infrastructure, and the cut taken by the packing industry, “you have a system where the profitability margins are tenuous,” and ranchers have difficulty absorbing yearly economic fluctuations says Erik Glenn, the executive director of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust and the president of the 11-state Partnership of Rangeland Trusts.  

“And then on top of that you add drought and unpredictable weather situations,” Glenn says, which leave ranchers with few good options and a hard time recouping losses. Take the Mays for example: if the rains hadn’t come just in time, they—like their neighbors—would have had to sell their cattle into a flooded market at rock bottom prices. With half their income to cover the same fixed costs as always, they’d eat into their savings while slowly building their herd back up. Alternatively, a rancher could risk grazing their full herd, potentially damaging the land and jeopardizing the ability of each cow to put on the weight necessary for market.  

“Neither decision is a good decision,” says Glenn. “And that makes it hard for producers to run a business that is profitable and appealing to the next generation.” Indeed, with the average age of landowners continuing to rise (57 in Wyoming 2017), succession is increasingly a concern for agricultural producers. Who will take over management of the land when the current generation retires? There are not enough young people, says a report from the National Young Farmers Coalition, leaving the future of millions of acres hanging in the balance.  

Both instability and uncertainty make the land vulnerable to other uses. Absentee landowners may decide it’s more reliably profitable leasing to farmers than ranchers. Land-owning ranchers might go under. “It’s a wonder we haven’t been swallowed up,” Dallas tells me, pointing to the cropland that hems the ranch in on all horizons. We’re paused at the geographical center of the ranch, a promontory overlooking a bulrush marsh edged in sagebrush, Big Sandy Creek winding its way through miles of untilled fields beyond. 

The May ranch harbors wildlife that the surrounding farms simply can’t support. The stream is flush with beaver dams and sandpipers bob along the edges. There are prairie dog colonies, enough that Colorado Parks and Wildlife is considering a release of black-footed ferrets on the property. The ranch is designated an Audubon Important Bird Area and is part of a narrow corridor of grassland connecting the two populations of lesser prairie chickens in Colorado. There is a lek nearby, Dallas says, but it’s in grassland that’s about to phase out of its protection under the Conservation Reserve Program. Dallas hopes the prairie chickens will find refuge on the May ranch if the lek goes under the plow.  

Grassland bird species, like the lesser prairie chicken, have been struggling for decades. Researchers say habitat loss through grassland conversion has contributed to a population drop of 80 percent in some species since the 1960’s. As a group, grassland birds have experienced the steepest decline of all North American birds, though waterfowl and shorebirds also rely on grasslands, using embedded wetlands as migratory stopovers and nesting habitat. The May ranch, for example, plays host to the largest population of eastern black rail in Colorado. Last year, the rail was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Key pollinators like the once-widespread rusty-patched bumble bee are also suffering from the loss of native grassland.  

It’s not just wildlife habitat that makes America’s last remaining grasslands important. World Wildlife Fund’s first Plowprint report points out that every unplowed acre of grassland can store thousands of gallons of water, critical for water catchment and filtration as well as flood and erosion control. And what may seem at first glance like a homogenous field of grass is in fact a rich assemblage of plant species; on the May ranch, surveyors from the Denver Botanical society found 335 species, 90 of which had never been documented in the county.  

Widespread alarm about the nation’s declining grasslands is relatively new; concern about the climate impact of grassland conversion is even newer. The impact is real. Proceedings from the 2019 America’s Grasslands Conference estimate that from 2008–2016, conversion for corn and soy released more than 14 million metric tons of carbon per year. That’s the equivalent of the yearly emissions of 13 coal-fired power plants, or a 5 percent increase in the number of cars on the road in the US.  

“There was a daily chance that it would get sold and someone would plow it all up.”

Of course, carbon is getting extra scrutiny lately because the world is on course to vault past the warming limit set by the Paris Agreement of well below 2 degrees Celsius. Instead, 2020’s United Nations Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report predicts more than 3 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century. To get back on track, global emissions would have to be cut in half by 2030—just eight years from now.  

In response to growing demand for action around climate change, dozens of high-profile international corporations have announced sustainability goals, pledging to go carbon-free or carbon-neutral by a certain date. The problem is, some emissions can’t be eliminated on such a tight time frame. For a small business whose local utility doesn’t offer renewable energy, it might be impossible to cut emissions to zero. The same is true for the aviation sector, which doesn’t yet haven’t a usable alternative to jet fuel.  

To supplement emissions reductions, airlines and many others are investing in carbon offsets, which are meant to compensate for certain unavoidable emissions by creating reductions elsewhere. Offset projects may also have “co-benefits”—like protecting natural spaces or supporting local livelihoods—that make them more desirable to businesses who want to tell a good story about their sustainability work.  

That’s why a diverse group of stakeholders is pushing forward rangeland carbon offsets. Rangeland carbon could check all the boxes, they argue: protecting endangered grassland ecosystems and their declining biodiversity while supporting local food systems and rural communities in the heartland of America. And of course, fighting climate change through low-cost, long-term carbon sequestration.  

Under the Hood of Rangeland Carbon 

The principle behind carbon offsets is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not localized or specific issues, but rather global and universal. Therefore, any kind of carbon sequestration anywhere in the world can help balance emissions in a worldwide ledger. In that ledger, and the burgeoning carbon market, the universal currency is carbon credits. Each credit stands for one metric ton of carbon dioxide that isn’t in the atmosphere (or the carbon dioxide equivalent of other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide).  

In some countries and the state of California, participation in the carbon market is mandatory and regulated. Elsewhere, businesses, organizations, and even individuals can choose to participate in a voluntary carbon market, purchasing credits to offset anything from personal travel to yearly or historic operations. Google, for example, announced last year that it had used offsets to compensate for all the emissions it has ever created (a claim that is still being scrutinized). The voluntary market is less centralized than the regulatory market, but that’s not to say it’s a free-for-all. Most, if not almost all, carbon credits go through one of three registries: the American Carbon Registry, the Climate Action Reserve, or VERRA. These registries develop protocols that outline what offset projects qualify, how emissions reductions are calculated, and the process for verifying and monitoring credit generation.   

“If you’re developing carbon credits on a bunch of land that is never going to be converted, say, or logged, you’re not actually doing anything for climate change.”  

There are dozens of kinds of carbon offset projects; each of them generates credits by either increasing the capture and sequestration of carbon, or by reducing or avoiding emissions that would otherwise be generated. Many kinds of offset projects rely on technological improvements for emissions reductions, like investing in renewable energies or improving waste management systems. However, projects categorized as natural climate solutions, or nature-based solutions, take advantage of land management strategies that create and maintain natural carbon sinks like forests, wetlands, and grasslands. A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found not only that natural climate solutions could contribute significantly to short-term global emissions reductions, but also that they are cost effective and deliver important auxiliary benefits to people and nature. 

Grassland carbon credits are relatively new to the carbon offset scene and still not very prevalent. They fall under the “avoided emissions” category of offset, preventing the release of soil carbon (and other greenhouse gases) that would result if the grassland were converted to cropland. There is ongoing research investigating whether grasslands could also produce carbon credits by increasing sequestration, but Drew Bennett, Whitney MacMillan Professor of Private Lands Stewardship at the University of Wyoming, says that “there is still debate if you can increase carbon stocks through management and it seems like even if you can, it’s a very, very slow process and probably not viable financially.” In contrast, he says, “There is a significant and clear benefit to preventing the existing carbon that’s in the soil from being lost through conversion to row crop agriculture.” Any activity that does not disturb the soil carbon, including grazing, recreation, and light haying, are still permitted under these projects.  

While the impacts of conversion are obvious, understanding how they apply to specific land parcels—and how that translates into carbon credits—is far more complicated. Now, the American Carbon Registry and the Climate Action Reserve have both developed protocols that outline exactly how to start and run a grasslands carbon project. When Dallas and Riley May first got involved, however, no such protocol existed.  

When the elder May finally signed the deed to his farm and ranch in 2012, he immediately began calling around to local conservation organizations. He wasn’t looking to sell carbon credits, which he had only vaguely heard of, he was just trying to protect the land for future generations. Even if down the line his family could no longer care for it, he wanted to be sure that the land stayed native prairie, “just the way God planted it.” Back then, he says, “there was a daily chance that it would get sold and someone would plow it all up.” He knew from the years it took to close on the land that “there were entities waiting in the wings” to snatch the property up.   

Initially, Riley says, his dad couldn’t get any traction. Dallas gives a knowing laugh, explaining, “We’re not the mountains. We’re the flat, arid, eastern plains.” By 2015 though, grasslands were enjoying enough of a surge in attention that non-profits were stepping over themselves to work with the Mays on financing the conservation of the property. 

The various organizations, however, were careful not to step on each other. “We all came together to tackle various pieces of the conservation puzzle,” says Gascoigne. The Conservation Fund, with the help of The Nature Conservancy and others, spearheaded the fundraising process to secure a conservation easement on the property, which, everyone agreed, should be held by the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust. The easement paved the way for Gascoigne to simultaneously develop a carbon project, which had only ever been done on rangelands once before. Dallas, eager to preserve the agricultural and conservation value of his property however he could, accepted. 

Then and now, the first step in developing a carbon project is determining the land’s eligibility. For an avoided grassland conversion project, the land has to have been grassland for at least ten years. Next, the most important thing to assess with any offset project is whether or not the carbon being sold as credits would have been protected or sequestered if it weren’t for the project’s efforts and revenue.  This idea, known as “additionality,” is critical, Bennett says, “because if you’re developing carbon credits on a bunch of land that is never going to be converted, say, or logged, you’re not actually doing anything for climate change.”  

For avoided grassland conversion projects, the question of additionality means determining if it would be possible to use a piece of land for row crop agriculture, and if that happening would be probable. One factor is land ownership and existing legal protections; only private land and non-federal lands managed for profit are eligible for a carbon project. Moreover, that land can’t have any regulations, zoning laws, deed encumbrances, or existing conservation easements that prevent it from being used for farming. The other factors relate to the land itself: soil type, water availability, topography, and present and future climate conditions all help determine if the land is even suitable to grow crops. Land that passes these tests must also be situated in a county where cropland is 1.5–2 times more valuable than ranchland, thus indicating a risk of conversion due to potential financial gain. Lastly, a project has to guarantee that the carbon being protected will stay protected. For this, a conservation easement with a no-till clause is required, alongside follow-up monitoring to prove that the soil carbon remains undisturbed for at least 100 years after the last credit is sold.  

A third-party verification body has to confirm everything. Dallas says that when the May ranch was first verified, a team from San Francisco flew in from their previous assignment verifying forestry carbon projects in the Congo. They spent four days walking the land, taking soil samples, mapping wetlands, and investigating the grazing management. Months later, the team submitted their report approving the May ranch carbon project to sell carbon credits and outlining exactly how many credits it was authorized to sell, based on the emissions avoided by the project. Because the verifiers are the ones who confirm that the project developers calculated the credits correctly, projects have to get re-verified every time they want to sell. For the May ranch project, that means every year, for up to 50 years.  

The reason that selling credits isn’t a one-and-done deal is because the avoided emissions aren’t either. Avoided emissions are calculated based on how many greenhouse gases would have been released in the atmosphere if the land had been converted to row crop agriculture. Loss of soil carbon is greatest initially, when grassland is first plowed for crops, and continues to be emitted for decades, tapering over time until a new, equilibrium is reached. As such, the avoided emissions of a grassland project also taper over time. After 50 years, it’s assumed that the soil carbon would have reached equilibrium, and the project no longer generates credits, instead moving into a 100 year “permanence period” that guarantees the avoided emissions remain avoided.  

Even that is a bit oversimplified. Avoided emissions account for not just soil carbon, but also include the nitrous oxide that would be released from fertilizing cropland and the fossil fuel emissions from any equipment that would be used in the farming operation. It’s also important to note that grassland projects like the Mays’ can only sell their “surplus” carbon. All the emissions the ranch produces are subtracted from the total avoided emissions before credits are calculated. This includes emissions from the breakdown of manure and other organic fertilizers, all fuel and electricity usage, and methane emissions from their cattle. Avoided emissions are further reduced to account for the possibility that preventing conversion in one place may increase the probability of conversion elsewhere (known as “leakage”). And finally, a percentage of the credits are withheld from each sale in a buffer pool, which acts like an insurance policy against something like a natural disaster that could release soil carbon. All this tallies so that, for example in 2018, the May Ranch avoided 14,278 metric tons of emissions, but generated 4,582. After 182 metric tons were withheld for the buffer pool, they were authorized to sell 9,512 carbon credits that year.  

“Lawyers, paperwork, and scientists,” Dallas says of the whole process. “You have to have everything perfect.”  It took the Mays and Gascoigne a full year to work through the protocol, until December of 2016 when they finally closed on the conservation easement and the carbon project together. In the end, Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust owns the easement, and thus the development rights; Ducks Unlimited owns the carbon project, and thus the greenhouse gas rights; and the Mays retain ownership of the property and all other rights. Complicated, perhaps, but with all parties working together to ensure the long-term protection and productivity of the land. For Dallas, Riley, and the rest of the May family, the project was sweet relief.  

As the project owner, Ducks Unlimited is responsible for generating and selling the credits and paying all associated costs. The Mays don’t know where their credits go and receive a just a portion of the profits from credit sales. “And honestly, what we get is small,” says Dallas. “What we really get is the emotional satisfaction of getting the job done,” and knowing that “this ranch has to stay just how it is, forever.”  

Once the credits are verified, DU submits the verification to one of the registries, which are the rulemaking bodies of carbon markets. The registries approve the credits for sale, assign them serial numbers, and issue them into a kind of “checking account” that DU pays to have at the registry. From this account, DU can sell to various buyers, sometimes direct to an end buyer like a major corporation, at other times through one or more intermediaries. 

In the past, Planet Bluegrass has purchased May ranch credits to offset its annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival and Mountainfilm Festival, and the town of Telluride has used them to offset its public bus system, the Galloping Goose. These credits were sold through an intermediary—the Pinhead Climate Institute. The credits are also available to individual consumers on the public-facing, non-profit website Cool Effect, another intermediary DU has worked with. Public-facing prices may range from $10-15 per credit, but it’s worth noting that, like any market, the more intermediaries and associated costs there are, the less the final price reflects the value of the credit to the producer.  

When I get home after visiting the Mays, I log onto Cool Effect. The May ranch is one of just a dozen projects and bears the title “Home on the Range.” The credits are sold out. They’re one of the first projects to sell out every year, Dallas has told me, despite being priced higher than many other projects on the site. “I guess there’s something about US grassland that resonates with people,” he says.  

Does it work? 

Certainly, the story is a nice one, the kind that would make eco-conscious buyers feel good about where their money is going. But to what extent do these grassland carbon projects really move the needle on climate change? Do they actually protect grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function? And can carbon credit payments supplement a rancher’s profits enough to deal with the tough times ahead? 

Compared to forestry offset projects, which are far more common, grassland projects deliver relatively low carbon sequestration rates: on the scale of 1 metric ton of carbon per acre compared to perhaps 100 metric tons per acre. Some may take this as an indication that rangelands projects are less worthwhile, but Kyler Sherry would say otherwise. She is a senior program manager at The Climate Trust—the oldest climate offset entity in the country—and deals with both grassland and forestry projects. “To say that we’re only going to do forestry projects because the one ton per acre [of avoided grassland conversion] doesn’t matter, I think that’s not the argument to make,” says Shelly. “A ton of carbon is a ton of carbon. And when you scale it up, it has an even greater impact.” In 2017, for example, the May ranch’s net avoided emissions were the equivalent of taking 2,300 cars off the road. 

Gascoigne, who developed two of the earliest grassland projects, agrees, saying, “If we can make these projects work without drawing away resources from other projects, then it’s all additive.” Besides, he adds, “Grassland carbon is some of the most steady-state carbon that we have, and we still have vast grasslands, so it’s a very important carbon pool.” Because 85–90 percent of the carbon is below ground, anything from tornadoes and fire to disease and grasshoppers can come in and destroy the grassland aboveground, but the carbon stocks remain protected. That’s a significant difference from forest carbon, which can turn into emissions in the blink of an unattended campfire.  

“Once the canvas is lost, it’s lost.”

Still, there are those skeptical of offsets in general, concerned about projects claiming to sequester or protect carbon, but not delivering that key element of additionality. This not only creates setbacks for climate change mitigation that the world can’t afford, it also threatens the market. For example, when low-integrity carbon credits made it into the Chicago Climate Exchange, which operated from 2003–2010, “The price of carbon cratered in part because nobody had confidence that what they were buying was actually what it was represented to be,” explains Bennett, the University of Wyoming researcher. Recently, accusations have been leveled that a few high-profile forestry offset projects are selling “empty” credits, leading to a wave of concern and scrutiny of both project developers and companies buying offsets. Mostly, critics say that carbon payments aren’t changing land managers’ behavior, that the managers would be doing these practices anyways and so the carbon credits produced by these projects are not “additional.”  

A counterargument is that no matter the intentions of the landowner, there’s no guarantee they won’t change their mind or lose the land and the right to decide. Dallas and Riley May, for example, aren’t planning to plow up their ranch land, but there was no actual guarantee of protection for the soil carbon until the carbon project and conservation easement made that a legally binding decision in perpetuity. Some say it’s important to get this guarantee while there is a willing landowner, whereas others might say willing landowners are less likely to provide additionality in the short term.  

Despite the furor, few would argue that offsets are fundamentally useless, or that no high-quality credits exist. Riley May says that, just like anything, “there’s always a loophole that someone finds and abuses, but that shouldn’t discredit the good programs out there.” It might just be that, in the decentralized voluntary market, there is greater onus on the individual players to hold themselves and others accountable. Project developers like The Climate Trust and Ducks Unlimited, for example, set requirements for potential projects that go beyond the registries’ protocols. Sherry says The Climate Trust will only support a project if it requires behavior that is not considered standard practice or the cultural norm. Gascoigne says that regardless of the protocol’s maps that determine eligibility, he wouldn’t support a project if it wasn’t genuinely at risk and absolutely worth saving.  

From a buyer’s perspective, there are a few ways to sift out potentially “bad” credits: a high-quality project should follow a scientifically grounded protocol, have proof of validation by an independent verification body, be registered with an established carbon registry, and perhaps most importantly, foster transparency by making all protocols and verification documents publicly available. I can say personally that after reading over the Climate Action Reserve’s Grassland Protocol 2.1, as well as the documentation for the May ranch, I feel more confident that grassland carbon credits do what they claim to do, and that the number of credits generated by a piece of land is not inflated. 

Transparency may also apply to the buyers of credits, since another common criticism is that offsets (high integrity or not) are a form of greenwashing that companies use to improve their image while avoiding serious emissions reductions. If companies made it clear how much of their carbon neutral goal is being fulfilled by offsets as opposed to reductions, and if they disclosed the sources of their offsets, claims of greenwashing might be readily confirmed or dismissed. In general though, an annual survey carried out by the Ecosystem Marketplace has found that companies buying offsets spend, on average, ten times more on reductions than companies that don’t buy offsets. Ultimately, offsets, says Sherry, “are a great tool for the short term and when the technology isn’t there yet. But they’re just one tool in the climate mitigation toolbox.”  

Carbon offset projects are also just one tool in the conservation toolbox.  

Other common tools for preserving grasslands include conservation easements (which protect land from development in perpetuity) and the federal Conservation Reserve Program (which pays farmers to not crop their land for a period of 15 years). Carbon projects do offer a number of conservation benefits that these others don’t.

Most notably, carbon credit projects protect the land from being plowed in the long-term, as opposed to the brief 15 years in the Conservation Reserve Program. While easements are also long-term, many conservation easements lack a “no sod busting” clause that forbids plowing, whereas carbon projects require it. The entire May property, for example, is under a conservation easement, but 5,000 of those acres are on farmland. It’s the carbon project, not necessarily the easement itself, that protects the native grassland on the 15,000-acre ranch. Also, carbon credits can act like “a cherry on top,” says Bennett, when selling credits creates “a tipping point that makes an easement financially viable where it may not have been otherwise.”   

More than anything, carbon projects “maintain the canvas that we need to paint conservation onto,” says Bennett. “Restoring row crop agriculture is inefficient, challenging and expensive, so once the canvas is lost, it’s lost.” But, he says, “If the land stays rangeland, it maintains the potential for us to go in in the future and steward in a way that maximizes the conservation value.” 

With careful land managers like the Mays, however, painting conservation on the rangeland canvas doesn’t need to wait for the future. There’s “a trope out there that all these ranchers are living on degraded land and just ruining it,” says Sherry, who worked in rangeland management before joining The Climate Trust. “That’s not actually what’s happening. A lot of ranchers are probably the best conservationists out there.”  

Dallas and Riley embody this sentiment, bringing my attention to the land again and again. Here is the blue grama going to seed. Here are the beaver dams that irrigate the fields simply by raising the water table. Here are the burrowing owls, a mule deer. They’ve never poisoned a prairie dog, they say, nor have they shot a coyote or killed a rattlesnake. They’re Audubon Conservation Ranching certified. They’re planning wetland restorations. They harbor rare and endangered species and plan to introduce more. They see their land as one, complete, intact ecosystem. “It’s a sanctuary,” says Riley. 

And the cows are included. Yes, there can be deleterious impacts of too many cattle on the land: there are well-documented cases of overgrazing leading to erosion, water pollution, loss of soil nutrients, invasive species, and a depauperate grassland flora. But grazing can also build a shifting mosaic of grassland habitats essential to diverse plant and animal species. Tall and dense vegetation may be great for sedge wrens to nest in, but meadowlarks do much better in moderately grazed pasture. Horned larks thrive in the exposed terrain created by intensive grazing, whereas northern bobwhites love the tall wildflowers that grow up afterwards.  

“We want to conserve, not consume.”

Most ranchers aren’t interested in overgrazing their land, Sherry tells me, but the Climate Action Reserve protocol further ensures this by dictating that rangeland health be maintained throughout the course of the project. If the land departs too far from ideal conditions described by a Bureau of Land Management protocol, the landowner is required to create a management plan to fix it, and to show improvement by the next verification period. If they don’t, they won’t be allowed to sell credits for that time period.  

This active management means that that private rangelands can even be healthier than public lands. A study in the Larimer foothills comparing rangeland, state parks, and residential development found greater biodiversity and fewer weeds on rangeland than the other two land uses. Researchers suggested it was because the ranchers had greater capacity and incentive to manage the land than Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

Indeed, Erik Glenn had a landowner once tell him as he looked out over his hay field, “I’ve been here my entire life. My dad grew up here, my grandfather spent most of his life here, and I can look at the land and I can tell when it’s sick. And I can tell when it’s healthy. And it’s my job when it’s sick to tend to it and to make it better.”  

The biggest question, perhaps, is if the sale of carbon credits could increase the chances that landowners can continuing stewarding and loving the land for generations to come.  

By all accounts, at current market prices, credit sales wouldn’t be a windfall—“they’re not going to buy the neighbor’s farm” quips Gascoigne, or even pay off the mortgage. When I ask the Mays if it could help make up for the widening gap between revenue and operational costs, Dallas tells me straight up, “It’s not enough. It’s nice—like running an extra 50 cattle every year—but it’s not enough.” 

But Bennett maintains that “for individual families, this has the potential to be really valuable, especially in small rural communities where payments [like carbon credits] can have spillover effects.” A 2020 study of Colorado found that investment in conservation easements generated twice as much economic activity, and that most of the benefit remained in the local economy. The hope, it seems, is that a little extra income could help ranching families get through a bad year or two, providing an economic buffer to help them cope with things outside their control, like market prices and weather. 

“I would say another component of this is that agricultural producers provide a lot of benefits to society, like carbon storage, that they’re traditionally not compensated for,” says Glenn. “And so any opportunity we have to compensate them for that added societal benefit is something we want to be exploring and advocating for.” 

What I see on the May ranch is how a little extra money, wherever it’s coming from, goes right back into the land. A small grant from Audubon of the Rockies has allowed them to put in five miles of wildlife-friendly fencing. Colorado Parks and Wildlife is providing plague vaccines to the ranch’s prairie dogs so the black-footed ferrets released on the ranch can thrive. In continuing partnership with DU, the Mays are restoring wetlands to create improved waterfowl habitat, installing erosion control devices, and leveling playa bottoms. And so on.  

The way Glenn sees it, “When you’re only getting compensated for producing a commodity, then there’s many more external pressures on you to continue to manage your land in a way that’s best for the commodity, not the land.” But because “the vast vast majority of ranchers want to do the right thing in terms of resource management,” even a little help—perhaps in the form of carbon credits—can go a long way. “That’s how stewardship of the resource improves,” says Glenn. 

“We want to conserve, not consume,” says Dallas. “Hopefully we stay financially solvent enough to be able to do that.”  

A way forward 

As of writing, there are ten avoided grassland conversion projects registered in the United States. They range from 265 acres to nearly 15,000 (with most around 4,000) and occur in Montana, Oregon, Colorado, and the Dakotas. “Generally speaking, landowners are very interested in these markets and are willing to consider participating if the structure and incentives are such that it makes reasonable sense to do so,” says Glenn, who has talked with a number of landowners about the possibility. Jessica Crowder, executive director of the Wyoming Stock Grower’s Land Trust, emphasized that “this is a big decision, and it’s forever, so people don’t take it lightly.” Understanding and ensuring the market is strong are both important factors, she says.  

From a market perspective, rangeland carbon credits perform well, and the market looks bullish. An annual assessment published by Ecosystem Marketplace notes that broad corporate demand for offsets fueled by increasing carbon-neutral pledges made 2020 a record year for voluntary carbon markets. “With so many larger companies making commitments to sustainability goals right now,” Sherry says, “there isn’t going to be enough supply for all the demand.”  

Moreover, “grassland offset projects are receiving high prices compared to other offset types because they have so many co-benefits that make them really charismatic,” Sherry says. Natural climate solutions in general are valued higher in the carbon market than other offset types and Ecosystem Marketplace predicts that that trend will continue. 

So far though, the price has not been right for widespread adoption. According to Glenn, “The challenge for rangeland carbon is one of price…If we can get to a certain price point—I think it’s got to be somewhere around $20 a ton—then it will be impactful.” Gascoigne, on the other hand, emphasized that “in order for rangeland carbon projects to work, there need to be large scale projects or a framework by which partnerships come together.” Both men are getting at the same thing; for rangeland carbon credit projects to really take off, the balance of income from credit sales compared to start-up costs has to be worth it for the landowner. Getting a project registered and verified can be really expensive, around $10,000 for initial verification with the Climate Action Reserve, and somewhat less for subsequent verifications. Certainly, the price of carbon rising (as it is expected to) would go a long way to make rangeland projects more viable, but there are other ways to tip the scales in carbon’s favor. 

One strategy is aggregation, the focus of a report recently commissioned by the Partnership for Rangeland Trusts. Travis Brammer, a University of Wyoming law student pursuing a concurrent degree in environment and natural resources under Bennett, was tasked with determining if it was legal to group several landowners together under one carbon project, so that they could get verified as one entity and split the cost. He found that it is in fact legal, and that it would be best to group landowners within a day’s drive. This keeps travel expenses down for the verification site visits and prevents the grouping from getting too unwieldy—having to deal with different state laws and easement forms, for example. He also found that keeping the aggregation relatively local makes for a clearer narrative. Anecdotally at least, “buyers seem to be looking for a good story, and it’s easier if they can show a picture of a family farm in a board room, rather than saying I bought one credit in each of these five states,” Brammer says.  

If efficiencies and the market combine to create the perfect conditions for rangeland carbon, everyone involved wants to be ready. The research that Brammer is conducting, the discussions simmering across land trusts for years, the initial interest expressed by landowners, it’s all laying the ground work to take advantage of this tantalizingly multi-dimensional conservation tool when the time comes. 

As anticipation builds, it is important to remember that rangeland carbon sequestration isn’t going to be a silver bullet. “I don’t think it’s going to be a great solution for everybody across the west,” says Gascoigne. “But maybe we can get creative and make things work in certain instances.” Those instances seem to be in the case of conservation-minded, financially challenged ranches in eastern Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado and the western Dakotas, particularly at-scale or in future conditions where the cost of voluntary carbon has increased significantly. In those conditions, Dallas would say to an interested landowner, “Why are you waiting? There is no downside whatsoever if you’re serious about conserving grasslands.”  

Even if it doesn’t solve all our problems, the kind of mutual benefit it provides—to the climate, to conservation, and to people—should be the gold standard we all aspire to. “The more we can support both ecological and human communities,” says Bennett, “that’s the balance we need to strike.”   

Birch Dietz Malotky is a Research Scientist and the Emerging Issues Initiative Coordinator for the Ruckelshaus Institute at the University of Wyoming. This story was supported by a grant through Wyoming EPSCoR and the National Science Foundation. 

Correction: A previous version of this article used a photo incorrectly attributed to Dallas May. The photo was taken by Evan Barrientos/Audubon of cattle on Pronghorn Ranch in Converse County, Wyoming. (February 3)

For many westerners, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is the exemplar invasive weed, well known for thriving in sagebrush landscapes where it crowds out native plants, fuels a devastating fire regime, and threatens wildlife and livestock grazing.

Over the passing decades, researchers, weed specialists, and rangeland managers have learned a lot about cheatgrass, including the patterns of mowing or grazing, kinds of herbicides, and range conditions that can slow it down. But we still haven’t figured out how to really stop cheatgrass’s spread or clear it out of the vast acreages it’s invaded. One of the main lessons has been, keeping cheatgrass out in the first place is much more effective and cheaper than trying to fight back the weed once it takes over.

So when another invasive annual grass—one that’s supposedly even worse than cheatgrass—popped up in Wyoming a few years ago, managers knew they had a small window of time to get control of this new invader, and they leapt into action. Given the cheatgrass situation, no one really believes an invasive annual grass can be controlled once it takes hold. But armed with lessons learned from decades of combatting various annual grasses, the best new herbicide chemical concoctions, and carefully developed strategies for a coordinated plan of attack, one team of weed specialists is out to break that barrier and prove it can be done.

Bring it to the classroom with a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

In the summer of 2016, a University of Wyoming professor named Brian Mealor took a group of students to the National Guard Training Area in Sheridan, Wyoming, a community of 18,000 nestled against the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains, to collect data for a graduate research project. As they set up transects and identified plants, a weird grass kept showing up. Mealor took some photos of it and started emailing his colleagues around the state, setting off a firestorm of worry and action.

The grass was ventenata (Ventenata dubia), also known as North African wiregrass, and it has been creeping outward from Washington and Idaho since its arrival there in the 1950s, spreading by as much as 3 million acres per year. In western North America, annual grasses like cheatgrass and ventenata are the worst of the worst when it comes to invasive plants. These exotic annuals have found an unexploited niche in the ecosystem. They germinate in the fall and sprout in early spring, stealing soil moisture before the native, long-rooted perennials get a chance at it. That gives the invasives a jump start on their growing season and helps them outcompete native plants. The produce prolific seeds, which spread by wind or by snagging on shoelaces and animal fur and drill into the soil, where they can persist for many years.

If rangeland managers thought cheatgrass was bad, ventenata is worse. Its tough stems tangle in mower blades and are inedible to grazers, even early in spring when cows or deer might eat cheatgrass. In the fall, ventenata creates a thick thatch of wiry stems over the ground, further choking out native plants. Like cheatgrass, it promotes fire. It is destroying already-threatened Palouse prairie and ponderosa ecosystems in states to the west.

One of the people Mealor first contacted about the weed was Beth White, a rancher with land adjacent to the National Guard Training Area. Mealor showed her the grass and asked her to keep an eye out for it. Over the next two weeks, as she checked on cows around her grazing association lands, she spotted the grass in more and more places.

“We went from thinking it was in a couple-hundred-acre patch we could get our arms around to it spread to an hour’s drive from one side to the other, in just in a couple weeks,” Mealor says.

Then, in August of that summer, a Natural Resource Conservation Service soil conservationist named Oakley Ingersoll was patrolling a piece of state land where ventenata had been found, trying to get a sense of how bad it was, when he came across another suspicious looking grass. This one had a bristly head of sharp seeds. He identified it as medusahead.

Medusahead wildrye (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) showed up in Oregon in 1887 and took off in the mid-twentieth century, spreading across much of northern California and into the surrounding region. It thrives in the wake of cheatgrass-driven fires and even crowds out the cheatgrass itself. Like ventenata, grazers can’t eat medusahead, which is high in silica and has sharp seeds. In some places, medusahead has reduced grazing capacity by 80 percent as it pushes out the palatable plants.

As ranch manager JD Hill put it while speaking on a panel about the two grasses at Sheridan College last summer, “What’s scarier than something that outcompetes cheatgrass?”

Within a week or two of the medusahead discovery, Sheridan County Weed and Pest sprayed 200 acres there with herbicide.

“At that point we treated every known acre in the state of Wyoming,” Mealor says, “but we’d found it late enough in the season that there was not a lot of time to survey other places.”

Mealor, who talks like a scholar, dresses like a ranch hand, and signs his emails “Grace and peace,” specializes in invasive plant ecology with a focus on sagebrush ecosystems and rangelands. He is described as “the guy who wrote the book on cheatgrass in Wyoming.” (He is the lead author on the 2013 publication Cheatgrass Management Handbook). Though he wasn’t exactly sure how medusahead and ventenata would act in northeast Wyoming’s environment, he knew well the threat these two grasses could pose to wildlife and agricultural operations. And he was already in close contact with a strong team of specialists, land managers, and ranchers in the region.

Mealor teamed up with Luke Sander, an energetic young man who serves as supervisor for Sheridan County Weed and Pest. The two reached out to everyone they could think of who might care about new invasive grasses including Wyoming Game and Fish, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service, conservation districts, and ranchers. They called a meeting at the end of that summer, 2016, and began to map out a plan for addressing the two new grasses.

They focused on a few actions. First, they would thoroughly survey Sheridan County (and beyond as necessary) for the two grasses and make careful maps of the plants’ distribution. They would use those maps to create landscape-scale management strategies, identifying the places where treatments would best contain the grasses’ spread. From there they would spray the infested areas with herbicide. And they would carefully study those treatments to determine which chemicals sprayed at which time of year best suppressed the invasives while letting native and desired plants grow.

“It feels kind of like we are … doing a military planning exercise: We stare at maps and we draw polygons,” Mealor jokes.

Along with this on-the-ground work, the group committed to share all their data and information broadly, tackling the monumental effort of compiling and making accessible observations and spraying activities from a whole range of entities. Additionally, they committed to increase awareness about medusahead and ventenata in the immediate community, as well as among weed districts and other partners across the state and beyond through signage, pamphlets, presentations, and other outreach.

Wyoming has its share of other noxious weeds to control, from leafy spurge and dalmatian toadflax to spotted knapweed and cheatgrass, but because ventenata and medusahead were thought to be limited to relatively small acreages, “it presents an opportunity, where if everyone focuses on it as a high priority, maybe we can mitigate it becoming a bigger issue than it is right now,” says Slade Franklin, weed and pest coordinator for the Wyoming Department of Agriculture.

Mealor and Sander’s group met again in January 2017 where they adopted the title Northeast Wyoming Invasive Grasses Working Group, which shortens to NEWIGWG (“nuh-wig-wig”) and articulated a mission: “Minimize impacts to rangelands for wildlife and agriculture by reducing, containing, or eradicating medusahead and ventenata in northeast Wyoming.” More specifically, they aimed to contain ventenata, which has the wider spread of the two grasses already, and eradicate medusahead, meaning get rid of every last plant in the state.

“I think ‘eradicate medusahead’ is a pretty lofty goal. We all think that,” Mealor admits. “But we thought we would go ahead and say the word to try to hold ourselves to a high standard.”

They began to apply for funding to cover the costs of the work they had planned for the coming growing season.

One of their early proponents was Lindy Garner, invasive species coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She quickly recognized that the NEWIGWG effort had all the elements for potential success. Further, medusahead and ventenata posed an imminent threat to the National Wildlife Refuge System and the sagebrush ecosystem where the greater sage grouse is a focus of her efforts within the agency. Wyoming is home to the largest remaining populations of greater sage grouse, a species that narrowly escaped being listed as an endangered species in 2015 with the understanding that states and agencies would continue massive west-wide efforts to protect them and their sagebrush habitat. That would mean keeping invasive grasses out.

One tool at the group’s disposal was a strategy known as “early detection and rapid response.” Taking a metaphor from cancer treatment, early detection and rapid response has long been one way to address newfound invasive species, and recently the Department of Interior formalized this approach with a 60-page document outlining a framework that government agencies and their partners can adopt.

When Garner heard that the National Invasive Species Council was looking for pilot projects to demonstrate the early detection and rapid response framework, “I said, hey, there’s this one. They’ve got their act together.” The council gave some early funding to NEWIGWG. That opened the door to additional federal agencies getting involved and helped set NEWIGWG in motion.

In its first three years, the group raised over $900,000 which they directed toward surveying more than 20,000 acres for the two grasses each summer, using contractors, drones, remote sensing, and other approaches. The group also coordinated spraying every known acre of medusahead, the less widespread of the two species, over thousands of acres each fall, while partnering organizations worked with landowners to tackle ventenata.

In 2016 and 2017, they used a mix of Plateau and Milestone, two herbicides approved for grazing lands that were known to be effective on annual grasses. “With Plateau/Milestone, you can get pretty good control for a year and then … ventenata starts infiltrating back in,” says Sander. “In some places in the second year it looked like we had never even been there.”

In 2018, they received special approval to use a chemical called Esplanade, which works better but is not yet widely approved for grazed lands. Esplanade penetrates the top inch or so of soil and inhibits root growth, stopping the shallow-rooted invasive grasses, “while your other natives are a little bit deeper rooted so they can grow through it just fine,” Sander explains. “It’s a very selective herbicide at the correct rate.” And whereas the Plateau-Milestone mix has to be sprayed in the fall to protect native plants, managers can spray Esplanade throughout the growing season. Esplanade is set to be approved for widespread use on grazing lands later this year.

Almost all the spraying is done by air, which is cost effective because a plane can cover in a couple of hours what would take ground crews several days to spray, but still pricey. “All those medusahead treatments have gone out at no cost to landowners. Zero. Which is starting to get pretty expensive,” Mealor says.

“Sustainable funding has been one of our big pushes,” Sander adds. “We can gather a bunch of grant money because it’s new and sexy and there is a bunch of hype around ventenata and medusahead for three or four years, but we need a funding source that we can rely on for 15 to 20 years.” Even if a dose of Esplanade beats the weeds back for three or four years, “We’re assuming that we have to do at least two treatments and possibly three treatments to be able to completely remove it from the area,” says Sander. “We kind of have a 10-year plan in place for areas, and knowing that going forward we have to manage funding to be able to have money to come back and retreat.”

There is also a research component to NEWIGWG’s work. “We have flight tracks and spray tracks from all the aerial pilots. They have mapping programs in their planes and they give us the data afterwards so we can see exactly where they turned on, where they turned off,” Sander says. “We keep track of what they sprayed, the rates, and the time of year, weather conditions, all that stuff.”

Then Mealor and his students follow up by monitoring the effects on the ground to both the invasive grasses and the desirable native species and analyzing their findings relative to the herbicide application data.

“It’s been kind of a cool collaboration to get some hard figures and facts of what the herbicide is really doing to the landscape,” Sander says. “It’s very surprisingly positive from everything we have seen so far, so that’s good.”

In addition to the surveying, treatments, and research, NEWIGWG also put up information signs and boot brush stations in eight locations, published and distributed a one-page “field guide” to help citizens and partners identify the two grasses, gave over 15 public presentations, and began hosting an annual “Medusa-Nata Tour” that attracts attendees from all over Wyoming and several surrounding states and Canadian provinces, as well as federal representatives from across the West and from DC. The group reports having reached some 4,500 people with information about the threats medusahead and ventenata pose and how to respond.

It remains to be seen whether these efforts will stop ventenata and medusahead from spreading eastward into more rangelands, sage grouse habitat, and the Great Plains. For now, ventenata has been detected on an increasing number of acres throughout not just Sheridan County, but also in Johnson and Campbell Counties. The known reach of medusahead in Wyoming has also increased. These expansions are likely due to both increased awareness of the species as landowners are starting to recognize and report the weeds as well as the weeds actually cropping up in new areas. Late summer aerial photos show the telltale blond swaths of ventenata infestations like brushstrokes on the Bighorn Mountain foothills.

And yet, Sander, Mealor, and the other NEWIGWG partners remain optimistic.

“I-90 is our new fire line, if you will,” Sander says. “If we can keep it north of I-90 and east of the Bighorns and try to contain it in that zone if possible. Our high priority areas are going to be any of those outliers or places that it is encroaching that boundary.”

This winter, NEWIGWG is applying for funding to hire a director and coordinator, someone who can take on the grant writing and bringing together stakeholders as a full-time responsibility rather than piling that work on top of already full-time jobs as Mealor and Sander have done. And the group continues searching for additional funding to cover the costs of this year’s surveying, outreach, research, monitoring, and spraying. In the few years they have been working on this, they have made progress on understanding the weeds and finetuning their management strategy.

“I would describe this project as a flagship project to address this,” says Garner. “They have all the components to make it successful, and they did everything they need to do, and they have the resources to do it.”

“So far to date we have done more landscape treatments than anywhere in the nation, so people are kind of looking to us of what to do,” Sander adds.

In his office at the extension building on the Sheridan College Campus, with a sweeping view across the college’s agricultural experiment fields toward the Bighorn Mountains, Mealor shares a parable. Goatsrue, a plant from the Middle East, was intentionally cultivated in Utah in the 1980s for forage but ended up being toxic to livestock and very invasive.

“It got to be 40,000 acres of documented spread,” he says. “A bunch of agencies came together, very similar to what we are doing here, and implemented a goatsrue eradication program. And over ten years they got it down to a few sporadic patches spread over tens of acres. They almost got rid of it.”

But then, as he tells it, people moved, administrations changed, and federal funding went away. Now there are more than 40,000 acres of goatsrue in Utah again.

“That’s the scary part. We could dump all this time and effort into it, and then some significant thing changes out of our control and it could come undone. That’s the unfortunate reality.” He knows eradicating the species is a stretch, but adds, “We have to build at least management of these species into the culture of this region. … I think we can try.”

By Emilene Ostlind

Emilene Ostlind is communications coordinator at the University of Wyoming Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources and is founding editor of this magazine.

Botanical illustrations by Katherine Benkman, artist intern at the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute.

Christy Bell rifled through a series of shallow drawers lining the walls of a dark, windowless lab. She opened drawer after drawer, pointing out different species, speaking their scientific names rapidly.

“Halictid bees,” she said. “You might have heard them called sweat bees.” Her finger swept a layer of dust from the protective glass as she traced a row of green insects. “That cuckoo bee over there is also a sweat bee, but she parasitizes other nests.” She pointed to another row, her hand already on the next drawer. “Right here are mining bees from genus Andrena.”

We hovered over the pinned specimens. It was as if she were digging through a box of family photos, pointing out close friends, old memories. There were thousands of bees. I tried to keep up.

There were social bees. There were solitary bees. There were furry bumblebees that looked like plush yellow toys. There were bees that looked like wasps. Some seemed more like beetles. There were green bees and blue bees and metallic bees with backs the color of an oil spill in a parking lot. There were bees the size of cherry tomatoes, and bees as tiny as the head of a sewing pin. All of them had different life stories and habitats and job descriptions.

Bell can recognize more bees by their scientific name than I can put names to faces in my own extended family. She doesn’t need a field guide to do it. “And this is just Wyoming,” she said. “Wheatland and Torrington, these are from the Black Hills, here’s from Tetons, Yellowstone, Lander, Big Horn Basin.”

Wyoming is home to an estimated 700 to 800 native bee species. In North America, scientists have identified 4,000. Globally, the number of species is around 20,000. But of the hundreds of species in the state and thousands in the world, Bell explained that we still don’t know the life stories of the overwhelming majority. And it’s hard to protect what you don’t know.

She gestured to several long rows of bees with furry white bottoms. “From here to here are Bombus occidentalis. Those used to be one of the most common bumblebees, but now they are really rare. Up for petition to be on the endangered species list.”

Bombus occidentalis, the western bumblebee, is not alone. Thousands of bee species—essential to the pollination of both native and crop plants—are in similar trouble. But while researchers are aware that bees are in dire need of protection, the public conservation effort has centered almost entirely around one nonnative species: the European honeybee (Apis mellifera).

Most people know this bee. It lives in a geometric above-ground hive, socializes with a waggle dance, and produces a surplus of honey. But most people don’t know it’s not native. Honeybees were introduced to North America by European settlers. “They are essentially managed livestock,” Bell explained.

Over the last decade, problems facing honeybees have gotten a lot of press. But they are just one of many bee species in decline. The trouble, Bell told me, is getting people to understand there are a lot of different kinds of bees and they all contribute to the work of pollination differently. What works to protect honeybees, won’t protect all bees.

But understanding how to protect all bees is challenging. A lot of scientists research bees in the lab, but very few actually study them out in the field like Bell does. Last year, she became the first person to survey the entire state for native bumblebees. Over two summers, she drove 20,000 miles across Wyoming, collecting bees. That’s the equivalent of seven cross-country road trips without ever crossing state lines. “I’m a notorious bee murderer,” she said. “I think I killed like 3,700 bumblebees in those two summers. For the sake of science,” she clarified quickly with a nervous laugh. Bell told me to join her in the field the next day. “I’ll show you what bees are really like—while they’re still alive,” she said with a smile.

The next afternoon, I met Bell near a pollinator garden at the University of Wyoming. Seven researchers trailed behind her in a straight line, grasping long wooden handles with mesh nets gathered into pointy ends. If there had been more wind, the mesh might have flapped behind them, like triangular flags held by scientists on a pollinator parade.

Bell spotted something flying and placed her net over a lupine the way you might set the mouth of a jar over a crawling insect. “They pretty much always fly up,” she said as the bee headed toward the top of the mesh. She swished her net through the air to fold it over itself, then eased her bare hand into the buzzing net. She slipped the bee into a cylindrical vial about the size of a film canister. Inside, the captured bumblebee tried desperately to escape, its six legs slipping against the sides of the plastic. “This one is a Bombus huntii queen,” she confirmed, examining it more closely.

Unlike the familiar story of hive-dwelling honeybees, the vast majority of bees, like Bombus huntii, live underground and lead solitary lives, the details of which remain elusive to scientists. In late fall, Bell explained, most bumblebees die. The species survives by a queen who mates and crawls underground to sleep off the winter with a belly full of eggs. In the spring, she wakes and searches for suitable real estate to make a new nest and raise her young—usually a small hole or old rodent burrow in the ground.

Like these bumblebees, thousands of other species have evolved in North America to carry out a range of specialized pollination tasks. Some bees—like the native Perdita—can crawl deep inside tiny wildflowers honeybees wouldn’t touch. And certain crops—like tomatoes and peppers—require buzz-pollination, a process where native bumblebees vibrate their bodies at a high enough frequency to shake pollen from one flower to another. Without native bees, much of this specialized work of pollination would go unfinished.

Researchers like Bell are still in the early stages of understanding native bees and their role in certain habitats. But as more and more researchers sample regions for native bees, they are discovering a similar story: There are far fewer than before.

Bell thinks part of the reason we don’t hear more about native bees is we just don’t know much about them. “But all native bees are important, even if we don’t understand exactly what they do,” Bell said. “We’re not comfortable saying we don’t know, but honestly that’s what science is about.”

Honeybees are a fine pollinator, she explained. They just aren’t the only one. And in some cases, their presence can cause more harm than good. For example, when a managed honeybee hive—which can include anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 bees—is placed in an area where pollen is already scarce, native bees can be outcompeted by sheer number alone. And like anything raised in close quarters, pathogens can spread before amateur beekeepers are aware their hive has been compromised. Those sick bees can then spread diseases to native bee populations by pollinating the nearby flowers. It’s something like touching a tissue someone else has sneezed on.

One way people can help native bees would be to get rid of lawns. “They’re a huge waste. They don’t provide pollen and just take up space and water resources. And people sometimes spray them with chemicals,” Bell said. “Plant native wildflowers instead. Bumblebees love delphinium, lupine, hollyhocks.”

Ignoring gardening altogether can be a big help to bees, she explained. Nearly 75 percent of native bee species are ground nesters and a lot of them require patchy, bare earth to burrow. “It’s ugly, but leave some bald areas on your lawn,” Bell said. “And don’t clean up yard waste right away. Hold off on landscaping until early June when there’s been a couple weeks of warm weather.” Queen bees can overwinter in old hollyhock stems, she explained.

But those are small steps in the scope of a far-reaching problem. Without more researchers like Bell who study native bees in their natural habitat—and the accompanying funding to support that research—we risk losing species faster than we can understand their place in the world.

That evening, after I put away my net in the lab, I waded through a familiar tangle of last season’s hollyhock stems in my backyard. The ground was patchy and bald in places. Not much was blooming. Before, I would have said it didn’t look like a promising place to find bees.

But when I knelt close to the dirt, I saw metallic blue mason bees and reddish-brown Andrena mining bees. I saw green halictid sweat bees and a lone Bombus huntii queen with her orange striped bottom and yellow face. I saw a patch of bare earth that was alive in a way I’d never noticed before.

By Sally Leaf

Sally Leaf is a nonfiction writer pursuing a master of fine arts at the University of Wyoming. Her current book explores loss on a personal and global scale. Drawing on the sudden death of her father and the sharp decline in the migratory monarch butterfly population, she hopes to encourage conversation about what it means to lose a person (or a species) forever.

Invasive species are not a new phenomenon, but over the past few decades the West has seen an explosion of all types in all ecosystems. From quagga mussels, New Zealand mudsnails, and lake trout in fisheries and waterways, to injurious plants like leafy spurge, cheatgrass, and salt cedar in our rangelands and riparian areas, species that are foreign, aggressive, and pervasive are threatening native ecological communities, changing productivity, altering disturbance regimes, and generally wreaking havoc on land managers and agricultural producers.

Through improved transportation networks, increased levels of outdoor recreation, and new development, we are seeing the number of potential vectors increase to infect additional landscapes ever more rapidly. As a result, we have mobilized local responses through coordinated planning and direct management efforts while improving monitoring and prevention campaigns. With new herbicides and mechanical measures, use of satellite imagery and predictive modelling, new grazing schemes, efforts to cultivate more benign competitive species, and a host of potential biological controls, land managers are approaching the problem from all angles. However, these measures can be expensive, especially when management necessitates repeated treatments.

For all of the good work, our approaches always seem to be too slow in reacting to continually evolving challenges; every time we believe we are getting ahead, the goalposts move.

Although research has helped, we still need to better understand ecology, succession, and the dynamics of natural systems across spatial and temporal scales, and the value of placing practitioners in the same room with researchers. We have the opportunity to improve our odds through a more comprehensive and holistic approach to management and control. For these reasons, among others, I established the Invasive Species Initiative: a group of 32 practitioners, managers, scientists, local, state, and federal government entities, and representatives of private landowners and industry.

These members have been split into two teams, Policy and Technical, to approach the massive issue of invasive species from all angles. I have asked them to focus first on terrestrial invasive plant species and deliver a report to me on issues and potential fixes. The teams have had multiple meetings to date and a final report is expected this spring, which I eagerly anticipate.

Wyoming can lead the way. From our on-the-ground experts in Weed and Pest Control Districts, to researchers at the University of Wyoming and all the ranchers, wildlife managers, and other experts in between, Wyoming has the knowledge and the wherewithal to truly fight this battle. In tandem with other states, and through a demonstrable commitment of effort, energy, and finances, we can stem the flow and move towards an ultimate goal of reversing the damage of invasive species. It is high time we stop being reactionary and commit to a more proactive approach to invasive species control. Doing so will give us the ability to put our efforts on a more sustainable and economically logical course while at the same time leaving this wonderful place we call home better off for generations to come.

I applaud the efforts to date, but I also recognize we can do better. I am excited to see what our state can do in the future and my confidence in our citizens’ ingenuity and ability to build true solutions could not be greater.

In any court case, there are two sides. But in a wood-paneled courtroom at the Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Butte, Montana, differences between the two sides headed to court were not immediately apparent. Both groups of men and women assembled there in early March wore the practical vests, collared shirts, and dark blue jeans common to the mountain West. Both groups had left a chilly, blue-sky day to enter the courthouse. They emptied their pockets, left their phones with security and passed through a metal detector. Once the bailiff invited them into the courtroom, they sat in quiet clusters and waited for the judge to enter the chamber.

In one group, 59-year old Glenn Hockett gripped a notebook that held printouts of scientific papers he would refer to in a statement before the judge. He is the president of a small, all-volunteer, non-profit group called the Gallatin Wildlife Association and lives in Bozeman, Montana.

In 2015, his group sued the United States Forest Service to stop sheep ranchers from grazing public land in the Gravelly Mountains of southwestern Montana. At this latest hearing, the judge would consider their request for an emergency order to halt grazing in the Gravellys. It was the fifth such request they’ve made in addition to various motions and appeals that have moved the case forward intermittently during the past three years.

The group’s main argument is that domestic sheep hinder their use and enjoyment of public lands, primarily by threatening the survival of already-imperiled bighorn sheep, an ionic creature of the mountain West. Domestic sheep carry respiratory diseases that can kill bighorn sheep. Bighorns don’t currently live in the Gravellys but one herd roams neighboring peaks to the north. Hockett and his group think the grazing allotments prevent the bighorns from moving into suitable habitat in the Gravellys. If they prevail, the case could change the future of grazing on public lands throughout the West.

The second group in the courthouse included two sheep-ranching families that live near the small town of Dillon, Montana. As they gathered, they exchanged comments about the courthouse security process, a routine that had become distressingly familiar. Among them was John Helle, 54, a third-generation sheep rancher and managing partner of Helle Livestock. If the judge issues an emergency order, these families would have to scramble to find new summer grazing land for thousands of sheep. It could be devastating to their livelihoods, Helle says.

The case is just one of several challenging sheep-grazing rights in recent years. Vulnerable bighorns, public land allotments for domestic sheep, and the evolving culture of the new West form a potent mix for conflict. At the heart of the issue is the challenge of balancing wildlife conservation on public lands with natural resource uses that support the livelihoods, character, and open landscape of the West. Sheep ranchers, with their long history in the region, want to remain on allotments administered by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Wildlife advocates counter that domestic sheep hinder the reestablishment of healthy bighorn sheep populations. Individuals from both sides comb through scientific literature to find support for their views. They come to very different conclusions about what should be done for sheep management.

Nearly two million bighorn sheep once occupied the West, but their numbers plummeted to a few thousand by the early 1900s due in part to overhunting. Disease was another major factor. Domestic sheep are the carriers of respiratory illnesses to which bighorns have no resistance, experts now think. Once a herd contracts one of these illnesses, the pathogens remain in survivors and infect new lambs—a pattern that has affected herds across the West. Although restoration efforts bolstered the population to about 80,000 today, many herds remain small, isolated, and therefore easily killed off entirely.

In the court room that day, four different attorneys presented arguments to U.S. District Court Judge Brian M. Morris. Previously, Judge Morris had declined to halt grazing, though in 2016 he ruled that the Forest Service had failed to fully consider the impacts of two agreements made with sheep ranchers, didn’t disclose the agreements to the public, and violated the National Environmental Policy Act in the process. Part of the agreements detailed that the ranchers should shoot on sight any bighorn spotted near domestic sheep. That dramatic action was posed as the last chance that mangers had to ensure that an individual bighorn sheep wouldn’t take disease back to its herd. But it gave authority and responsibility to ranchers.

This time, the Judge Morris reminded the Forest Service of that failure and emphasized that they had not stuck to their own proposed schedule for resolving the issue. The judge added that unfortunately, the people who suffer the consequences of the delay are the two sheep ranching families that graze the allotments. “I have protected them so far,” he said. “But at some point, the Forest Service has to do its duty and follow the law.”

Both sides would have to wait weeks for Judge Morris to issue his next decision.

In a Bozeman coffee shop a few weeks later, Hockett explained that his passion for bighorns goes back decades. In the early 1980s, he advocated for bighorn sheep to be reintroduced in the Tendoys, a mountain range about 50 miles southwest of the Gavellys. “I kind of grew up with this herd,” he says. “I watched it, knew it, went over there to view it.” In 1993, he drew a hunting tag for a ram in the Tendoys herd, which at that time numbered more than 150 animals. His wife, Laurie, drew a ewe tag the same year. The hunt was successful and, to the Hocketts, a celebration of conservation efforts that created a herd viable enough to be sustainably hunted. But the winter after the hunt, pneumonia swept through the herd. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks counted only 28 sheep later that year, none of them lambs. “It was really disheartening, really shattering,” Hockett says.

If any bighorn sheep still roam the Tendoys, they are likely the last of that herd. After the animals struggled for years against respiratory illnesses, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks issued unlimited hunting tags in 2016 with the goal of eradicating the remainder of the Tendoys herd. With a clean slate, the agency could reintroduce healthy bighorns to the range in the future.

Given the risk to bighorns, wildlife managers encourage separation between domestic and wild sheep. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks’ conservation strategy requires domestic sheep to stay 14 miles away from bighorns. Yet domestic sheep, whose meat, milk, and wool helped European-Americans settle the West, often live near or in suitable bighorn sheep habitat. Some of those lands are grazing allotments on public lands historically established for livestock use. While many domestic sheep grazing allotments have been retired due to declines in demand for wool as synthetics arose, some still remain.

In early April, the domestic sheep that graze the allotments in the Gravelly mountains started lambing. Helle checked on the progress in his lambing and shearing barn. There, three ranch hands moved between pens, working together to scoop up newborn lambs and dip their umbilical cords in disinfectant. Helle greeted them and then surveyed hundreds of ewes milling in a fenced yard out in the sun, still round with their unborn young.

“I’m just super, super frustrated with the whole thing right now,” Helle says. He fears that the goal of the lawsuits is to disrupt ranching operations, rather than arrive at a conclusion informed by best management practices. “I don’t think it’s a way that we solve any issues here in the West, where we’ve been conservation-minded ranchers for years.”

Finding last-minute summer grazing grounds for the 10,000 sheep the ranch shears every year could prove impossible, Helle says. Even if land were available, the change would jeopardize his business. The Rambouillet breed the ranch keeps produces soft, curly wool for Duckworth, Inc., an apparel company co-owned by Helle that produces long underwear, pullovers, and more. In a declaration submitted to the court, Helle argues that the cool summers their sheep spend in the Gravellys’ high country are responsible for Duckworth wool’s unique properties.

On his ranch, Helle looked over the backs of the ewes waiting to lamb and up a series of sage- and grass-covered benches toward the Gravelly Mountains. His sheep would take a meandering path across that landscape later that spring to reach national forest land in the mountains by July 1. “All this land evolved under grazing of some sort, whether it’s buffalo, bighorn sheep, or deer,” Helle says.

Like many in agriculture, Helle has a strong sense of stewardship over the land where he lives. Classes in range management and animal science at Montana State University supplement his years of observations and generational knowledge about the lands his sheep graze. “If you don’t graze it, it tends to get really rank and prone to fire,” he says. “When you remove grazing, it’s just like if you removed fire from timber: You get a non-succession type vegetation.” Grazing the land keeps it open and available for bighorn sheep to use it as their winter range, he says.

Helle pulled out his iPad to show photos of the sheep in the high country last summer. He pointed beyond the grazing sheep in one photo to slopes covered with dead trees. Whitebark pine, killed by bark beetles. But a few green trees still stand amid the dead ones. He wondered if they have some kind of resistance to infestation. He sees a clear parallel to bighorn sheep.

Helle said he finds it puzzling that after a bighorn herd suffers a die-off, wildlife managers may kill the remaining animals. “Applying my genetic and animal selection science to that, I’d say ‘Wow, those sheep survived.’” Perhaps those are the sheep to keep around, not to kill off.

Hockett also looks to science to support his position. In the Bozeman coffee shop, Hockett paged through his printouts of scientific studies. He paused conversation to find a particular highlighted passage. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks says that minimum number of bighorns needed to create a self-sustaining herd is 125, but Hockett’s highlighted passage— a technical discussion about the genetics of small populations—pushes that number up to 200. He can rattle off the official population counts of bighorns in the mountains north of the Gravellys for the past several years. “They’ve never counted over 80,” he says. Given his read of the science, that means the group isn’t likely to survive without a chance to expand into the Gravellys themselves. He says he fears that politics are overshadowing scientific understanding.

As in all scientific fields, the actual research surrounding bighorn sheep and disease is ever evolving. Helle is right, some bighorns don’t die after exposure to pathogens. Robert Garrott, professor of ecology at Montana State University in Bozeman is learning what he can from those survivors. He runs two ongoing projects—one surveying bighorn herds in and around Yellowstone National Park and another studying herds across Montana. Nearly 4,000 bighorn sheep live in connected herds east of Yellowstone, thriving when other herds have failed. Garrott and his colleagues sampled more than 20 herds in and around Yellowstone, swabbing their noses and tonsils for pathogens that cause respiratory diseases. They’ve found that about 75 percent of the herds already have bacteria suspected to cause die-offs including pneumonia-causing species of Pasteurellaceae and Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae.

“That was very different from what people were thinking,” Garrott says. Many of the herds appeared healthy. The findings tell Garrott that not all die-offs may be caused by recent contact with domestic sheep. Many could be caused by bacteria already in the herd that flare up and kill due to some additional stressor or genetic weakness scientists have yet to understand.

Does that mean that Helle’s sheep could graze in the Gravelly’s alongside bighorns without fear of disease transmission? No, Garrott explains that much more research would be needed to draw such a strong conclusion. For now, bighorns are best protected by the 14-mile separation. The differences in whether bacteria can cause sickness and spread quickly likely vary from strain to strain. Even if a particular herd of bighorn has the same species of bacteria as a herd of domestic sheep, different strains could cause new die-offs.

In the meantime, agencies have to make management decisions with current available science. The lag between new scientific findings and current management practices gives space for concerned individuals to step in through the legal system.

Hockett and the Gallatin Wildlife Association also have a case pending to halt grazing in another mountain range, where the Dubois, Idaho-based Agricultural Research Service Sheep Experiment Station grazes domestic sheep. These legal battles are part of a recent history of litigation challenging grazing allotments across the West. In some instances, the status quo and therefore the domestic sheep interests prevail. In a 2017 Wyoming case, the judge allowed the Forest Service to continue grazing allotments in the Medicine Bow National Forest because the bighorn population was viable in other areas of the Forest. In Idaho and California, the Forest Service closed portions of its lands to domestic sheep grazing allotments, sparking court challenges. In those cases, the decisions fell in favor of wild sheep conservation. In Utah, conservation groups have bought up grazing allotments from ranchers to get domestic sheep off the land and return habitat to bighorns. Many small battles add up to a landscape-wide conflict of push and pull between competing values.

In mid-April, Judge Morris denied the motion for an emergency order in the Montana case. Domestic sheep grazed this summer in the Gravellys, watched over by ranchers on horseback. In his ruling, the judge wrote that the Gallatin Wildlife Association did not meet the legal standards needed to justify an emergency order to halt grazing. Those standards are high and very little science figured into this particular decision. But the main case remains undecided, as the Gallatin Wildlife Association is appealing an earlier ruling.

Helle and Hockett will once again climb the steps of the courthouse in Butte to sit separately in the courtroom while their attorneys argue over the fate of two different species of sheep in the Gravellys.

By Maris Fessenden

Maris Fessenden is a freelance journalist and illustrator based in Bozeman, Montana. Find more of their work at marisfessenden.com.

I met Peter John Camino in the lobby of the Johnson County Public Library in Buffalo, Wyoming. A past president of the Wyoming Wool Growers Association, member of the Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame, and third-generation sheep rancher with Basque roots—his grandfather left Spain in the early 1900s to herd sheep in Wyoming—he and his family have been in the sheep business for over a century. He carried a rolled-up map of his property, which he spread out across the table. “We had just one spot for water in this main pasture,” he says, pointing to a creek bottom on the map. “The sheep were just hammering the grass in that one area.”

At the time his ranch outside Buffalo was divided into just three pastures, only two of which had any water. Overgrazing was a huge problem. Still, Camino told me, he thought things were working fine, and even if he’d realized he needed help to improve his pastures, he would have been reluctant to accept it. So when a government employee showed up asking him to join a federally funded conservation program meant to improve range conditions for livestock in the name of saving a treasured wild grouse, Camino did not immediately take to the idea.

“The North American [greater sage grouse] population was cratering. And it was a big cratering,” says Bert Jellison, a Wyoming Game and Fish Department Habitat Biologist in the Sheridan region at the time. Greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) populations in the West used to be in the millions, but development in the form of growing cities, natural resource extraction, and, to a lesser extent, farms and ranches, wreaked havoc on sage grouse. By 2013, sage grouse numbers had sunk to fewer than 500,000. In 2010, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided that the bird was in sufficient trouble to merit consideration for an endangered species listing, which would mean more government intrusion and regulations throughout the bird’s sagebrush steppe habitat. The threat of a listing kicked off a race to protect the greater sage grouse and to prove the species didn’t need federal protection. Over the next few years, the US Department of Agriculture invested more than $400 million in conservation efforts across the West.

Jellison was charged with protecting sage grouse habitats in Johnson County, and, since the county was mostly private land, he needed to get ranchers like Camino on board. He aimed to do that in part by directing federal sage grouse money toward habitat restoration on private ranches in the county. The sage grouse requires specific areas, called leks, to perform mating rituals. It was these leks that Jellison sought to protect, which made Camino a perfect candidate for this project; his property was located right in a core lekking area.

Jellison had read about a successful grouse project at the Deseret Ranch, in Utah—the first of its kind, as far as he could tell. The ranch used mechanical treatments and livestock rotation systems to enhance sage grouse habitat. The Deseret grouse population exploded even as the ranch doubled its livestock numbers. “That told me that you can manage livestock and improve the range to benefit both livestock and sage grouse,” says Jellison. “I wanted to show how a group of ranchers can choose to dictate their own destiny when it comes to conserving a species.” But could he replicate such success in Johnson County?

Jellison approached the local conservation district twice about funding such a project, and eventually, with the board’s approval, Nikki Lohse, Lake DeSmet Conservation District Manager, and Phil Gonzales, Natural Resources Conservation Service District Conservationist, took his idea and ran with it. The Lake DeSmet Conservation District’s Sage Grouse Program was one of many efforts across the United States under the umbrella of the broader Sage Grouse Initiative, a partnership of ranchers, agencies, universities, non-profit groups, and businesses working toward wildlife conservation through sustainable ranching. In the Lake DeSmet Conservation District, this entailed crafting “best management practices” tailored to each ranch, which provided recommendations for projects involving grazing rotations, mechanically enhancing rangeland health, water distribution, and fencing.

When Gonzales first approached Camino about joining the project, Camino had some reservations. A lot of government programs he’d seen in the past came with too many stipulations or asked for too big of a cost-share. The Lake DeSmet Conservation District’s Sage Grouse Program, however, paid 100 percent of costs for the improvements the best management practices would suggest. There was no cost share. Gonzales explained the kinds of projects the program would cover, such as new fences and water lines. Such projects would improve the rangeland for both sage grouse and livestock, and enhance the value of Camino’s land as well, Gonzales said. Eventually Gonzales warmed Camino up to the idea, and two years after their first discussion, the seasoned sheep rancher agreed to give the program a try.

“We found out we weren’t as efficient as we thought we were,” he says. “You fall into a groove and you don’t like change. You think it’s working, and sometimes it’s not.”

With the Sage Grouse Program support, Camino divided his three pastures into nine. He also added new water lines to better disperse the sheep over the pastures. “We reduced the pastures acre-wise to where we could rotate from pasture to pasture instead of hammering that main one,” he says. With the new fences and the waterlines, Camino could better utilize the entire property, and native grasses started to come back.

“It was a good situation for us all the way around,” says Camino. Since joining the Sage Grouse Program, Camino says with nine pastures instead of three, his sheep are healthier than ever and his ewes produce more lambs.

“Since we’ve joined the project, you can see the difference in the range. You can see the difference in the grasses. The stress on the sheep is way less,” says Camino. “Without this project, we couldn’t have done any of this work. It was cost prohibitive.”

In the end, the Johnson County Sage Grouse Program ran from 2004 to 2011 and included 24 landowners, 340,000 acres, and a budget of over $3 million. Each participant got a customized grazing plan. The program covered the costs of adjusting pasture layouts, building new fence, repositioning waterlines, and aerating pastures. The Lake DeSmet Conservation District planted over 17,000 pounds of shrub and forb seed, and installed six solar-powered water systems.

In 2008, the US Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service presented Nikki Lohse with the prestigious Two Chiefs Partnership Award for her leadership and hard work. Lohse was one of only four recipients that year.

Roy Roath, one of the project’s consultants and a Colorado State University range extension specialist who played a critical role in communicating the financial benefits of switching to best management practices, grew up in the ranching business. “As far as stretching a dollar in the district,” he says, “Lake DeSmet stretched it like a rubber band and shot it out of the park.”

How did this all work out for the grouse? In 2015, in part due to this and hundreds of similar collaborative efforts throughout the West, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to list the sage grouse as an endangered species. Landowners breathed a sigh of relief. In Johnson County, booming natural gas development confounded population monitoring, but Camino has noticed sage grouse coming back. The other day he saw a hen and eight or nine chicks walking out in the road. “We see more birds, more little ones, and birds through the summer,” he says. “This past year there were a lot more grouse. We’ve had one hell of a spring, and the grass is clear to your belly.”

By Maria Anderson

Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her fiction has been published in the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, the Atlas Review, and Big Lucks. She received her MFA at the University of Wyoming, and she’s an editor at Essay Press. Find her on Twitter.

“If we disconnected that 14-inch pipe and pointed it upward, the water would blast nearly 600 feet into the air,” says Les Hook over the loud hum of the hydro turbine.

Of course, the City of Buffalo public works director would land in jail if he pulled a stunt like that, but his scenario reveals just how much water pressure it takes to turn the 225-kilowatt turbine housed in a mostly underground concrete bunker at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming.

“That turbine is breaking about 250 pounds per square inch of water pressure down to zero,” Hook says. “That’s a heck of a lot of thrust!”

Buffalo, like a growing number of utilities, electric coops, municipalities, irrigation districts, and agricultural producers across the West, is using water and modern technology in the form of hydro turbines to generate “green” electricity. In particular, small-scale hydropower—those projects that produce less than five megawatts of electricity—can provide reliable, low-carbon, renewable energy for decades. And in a mountainous state like Wyoming, with plenty of streams and irrigation canals flowing downhill, the potential for additional small-scale plants like the one in Buffalo is anything but small.

At the Buffalo facility, nearly 50 gallons of water per second have blasted down a pipeline and into the Pelton turbine since going online in 1998, churning out enough juice to power about 150 homes in the regional grid. Electricity is sold to Rocky Mountain Power, and since the turbine was built to last 100 years, the city stands to profit on its long-term investment. But the Buffalo project never would have come to be without a loan from the Wyoming Water Development Commission. Even small projects like this one cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and take years to pay off. The state can play a role in incentivizing this clean energy source by pulling together funds from a variety of sources, including state, federal, and private, among others.

For ideas on how to promote hydropower development, Wyoming might look to its southern neighbor, Colorado, where a hydropower movement is gaining speed. The US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) recently awarded a $1.5 million grant to the state to help fund small-scale hydro projects on ranches and farms to address water quantity, water quality, and energy resource concerns.

An additional $1.5 million came from the state and a host of partners, including American Rivers, Hydro Research Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Farmers Union as well as a number of Colorado energy, water conservation, rural electric, and hydro boards and associations.

“Since Colorado enacted the citizen-led Renewable Energy Standard in 2004, the state has been very progressive in promoting renewable energy projects,” says Sam Anderson, Colorado Department of Agriculture energy specialist. He is overseeing the $3 million in grants that will help fund about 30 hydro-mechanical and hydro-electric irrigation systems in the state over the next three years. Colorado’s Renewable Energy Standard, the first voter-led initiative of its kind in the nation, requires investor-owned utilities (currently Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy) to generate 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020, including 3 percent from small-scale energy resources such as hydro, solar, and wind. The 22 rural electric cooperatives, meanwhile, must generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2020.

In addition to the Renewable Energy Standard, concerns about flood irrigation are also motivating the push for hydro in the state. “We use the hydro power as an incentive to encourage farmers and ranchers to engage in more efficient irrigation practices,” Anderson says. Converting from flood irrigation to center pivots saves water and reduces leaching of salts and selenium into waterways. Grants pay about 70 percent of the total project costs on farms and ranches, while ag producers fund the rest. Among those jumping on board is Susan Raymond, who operates a farm and veterinary practice in west-central Colorado near the small mountainous community of Hotchkiss.

Raymond was awarded grants from NRCS and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program to help install a hydro-electrical system and two center pivots, which collectively replaced labor-intensive flood irrigation and are helping her to grow better crops with less water. Produced electricity not only runs the pivots, but also her veterinary facilities, and any surplus goes into the power grid.

Colorado is playing a central role nationally in advancing small and micro hydropower, Anderson says. Working with NRCS and other partners, the state is developing an innovative program, and there is tremendous potential in other states to develop hydropower as well.

“Wyoming has great renewable energy resources, including hydropower, and the state can put that to work for the betterment of the people and the environment. It just takes a local champion to get that going,” says Milt Geiger, who served for six years as energy coordinator for University of Wyoming Extension and the UW School of Energy Resources. In 2016 he took a new job as the first alternative energy administrator for Poudre Valley REA, a non-profit rural electric association based in Fort Collins, Colorado.

During his time in the Cowboy State, Geiger co-authored the Wyoming Small Hydropower Handbook and hit the state’s highways to promote the publication and meet with citizens interested in small-scale hydro development, including those who operate farms, ranches, and irrigation districts.

The handbook states that hydroelectric installations are the most common and often least expensive sources of renewable electricity in the United States today. That’s appealing in a time when interest in low-carbon-emissions energy is escalating. But sizeable hydropower plants—notably those in dams backing up large rivers—come with their share of environmental problems and associated opponents. That’s why Geiger and his co-authors wanted to share information about small-scale hydro, which can be built into existing small dams or other infrastructure associated with irrigation districts. If designed properly, such projects can protect surrounding ecological values such as river flows, water quality, and fish and wildlife habitat.

One of Geiger’s co-authors, Skylor Wade, works for the Cheyenne engineering firm Wenck and Associates, which recently designed a new hydroelectric facility to run the city’s Sherard Water Treatment Plant. Construction of the 700-kilowatt unit begins in early 2017, and the plant is expected to be online in 2018. “I think there is a tremendous amount of potential for small-scale hydro in the state, but it will take support from a lot of people, including legislators and the Wyoming Public Service Commission,” Wade emphasizes.

Back at the Buffalo plant—where the thick, heavily reinforced concrete floor vibrates under Les Hook’s boots as water roars into the Pelton turbine—talk turns from pounds per square inch and kilowatt hours to the attitudes of people and our energy future.

“Yes, I definitely believe in promoting green energy,” emphasizes the public works director. “But it’s going to take action by legislators, public service commissioners, and utilities, to name a few. If a movement gets going, I believe renewable energy in our state, hydro included, will begin to fly.”

By Robert Waggener

Robert Waggener is a Laramie, Wyoming-based editor, writer, and photographer focusing on agriculture, natural resources, and science in Wyoming and the West.

Further Reading

ACRE3: Agricultural Hydro. Colorado Department of Agriculture. 2016.

Hydro Power Vision: A New Chapter for America’s 1st Renewable Electricity. US Department of Energy. 2016.

Milton Geiger, Sarah Hamlen, and Mike Vogel, editors. E³A: Micro-Hydropower for the Home, Farm, or Ranch. University of Wyoming Extension, Montana State University Extension, and Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. 2016.

Skylor Wade, Dylan Wade, and Milton Geiger. Wyoming Small Hydropower Handbook. University of Wyoming Extension Bulletin 1262-1. 2015.

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