By Birch Dietz Malotky

Like many folks, I first learned about the checkerboard fairly recently. Paddling down a stretch of the Platte River through an old burn zone bursting with fireweed, a friend described the strange pattern of every-other-square ownership and how difficult it can make getting to public land. I didn’t think much about it, until a few years later when the corner-crossing story of the “Missouri Four” began to unfold in the news and the courts, sparking off what Kelly Dunning calls one of the past decade’s most significant developments regarding conservation.

Those hunters—who passed through the airspace above private land on their way from one public parcel to another—may have drawn the national spotlight to both Wyoming and the checkerboard, but this unique pattern of landownership is nothing new. Recreationists, landowners, and the US Forest Service have been sparring over access in Montana’s Crazy Mountains for years and horse advocates, ranchers, and the Bureau of Land Management have been gridlocked in the Red Desert for even longer. The checkerboard itself goes back nearly two centuries, to a grant made to Indiana for canal construction that was part of a much larger campaign of nation building.

Set on an expansionist path driven by belief in Manifest Destiny, the federal government claimed, gridded, and handed out land for all kinds of purposes—to incentivize railroads and settlement, to support public education, and to further displace and attempt to assimilate Native Americans. This practice created the foundation for an unseen superstructure of policies, legislation, and case law that governs much of life in the West—but doesn’t neatly overlay the living landscape. That mismatch has implications for everything from energy development, to wildfire management, to the recovery of grizzly bear populations.

In answer to the challenges of checkerboard management, the stories in this issue make a strong case for the power of coming together across the invisible lines that separate us. Across the West, collaboration is driving many of the solutions and workarounds we have, including localized access pathways, collective action and management among stock growers, and landscape-scale, multi-decadal coordination between federal and state agencies, local governments, private landowners, and other organizations. As the West continues to grapple with the challenges of transboundary management in complex landscapes, we hope this issue of Western Confluence helps illuminate a part of how we got here and some ways we might move forward.

Header image: Analysis of satellite images can reveal on-the-ground differences in management, as seen in the checkerboard around Eugene, Oregon, that resulted from grants made to the Oregon and Pacific Railroad in the mid-1800s. The public parcels are mostly forested, while the private parcels have been largely harvested for timber. (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory using data courtesy of N. Lang)

By Birch Dietz Malotky

When the University of Wyoming brought together a couple dozen managers and researchers from around the world to visit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and discuss international wildlife policy, one reaction stands out to me above all others: “For better or worse, it’s nice to see that you’re dealing with the same issues we are.”

As national parks expert Bob Keiter observes in Upstream, Yellowstone National Park has served as a model for global conservation since its protection in 1872. Widely heralded as the world’s first national park—though Mongolia’s Bogd Khan Mountain, protected a century earlier, has a strong claim to the title—Yellowstone has continued to be a nursery for innovation in wildlife conservation and land management. From tracking and mapping animal migrations, to supporting private land stewardship, to collaborating across agencies for landscape-scale management, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is truly a leader.

And yet, in today’s constantly evolving world, huge challenges remain. Managers and researchers continue to battle invasive species and wildlife disease. They look to balance development pressure for food, fuel, tourism, and first, second, and third homes with preserving year-round wildlife habitat. And they work to reconcile what drought, wildfire, flooding, heat waves, and more will mean for the people and animals that depend on these cherished landscapes.

As Katie Doyle discovered in Spain’s Canary Islands, going away can teach you a lot about home. Around the world, people and organizations are working to reduce conflicts between livestock and carnivores, reconnect fragmented landscapes, and foster community-driven ecotourism that supports both people and wildlife. In these shared challenges, there is opportunity to learn from new and experimental thinking unbounded by decades of tradition, as well as the enduring wisdom of a people’s age-old relationship to the animals and the land.

While this issue of Western Confluence is divided into four, cross-cutting themes—evolving threats, patchwork governance, from the roots, and toward coexistence—what struck me in editing these stories was how entangled all the categories were. In the Alps, addressing conflict between wolves and people required coordination across a half dozen countries. Climate mitigation strategies had unaccounted-for impacts on the bond between people and reindeer that has shaped the arctic tundra of Sápmi. And repurposing a pastoralist community’s centuries-old adaptation in Kenya offered an unexpected way to protect lions and the rare antelope they hunt.

It’s a good reminder that thinking across borders includes looking outside the systems and silos we work in to see the web of cause and effect, problem and solution, that unite people, animals, and the landscapes they share. From tropical forests to African savannah, wet meadows to Mongolia’s mountain slopes, please join
me on a tour of large landscapes around the world as they work to address the most pressing issues in wildlife conservation and management today.

Header image: Protecting large landscapes is about more than preserving individual species, it’s also about sustaining ecological processes and relationships. In the arctic lichenlands of Sápmi, the cyclical migration of reindeer and people is woven into both land and culture. So too has the wildebeest migration shaped the Serengeti, working lands provided refuge for waterfowl and antelope in the Mountain West, and shepherds trod their mark on mountain slopes from the Alps to Mongolia. The story of wildlife conservation, then, is one of abundance, and movement, and coming together as people and animals to share the landscape, face new threats, and care for one another. Ina-Theres Sparrok, a herder in Voengelh Njaarke reindeer herding district in Norway, captures this confluence in the spring migration of reindeer across snow- and ice-covered routes that grow more treacherous with climate change.

By Emilene Ostlind

On a search for a place with “a combination of adventure, culture, and affordability,” Outside magazine recently named my hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, “the most affordable mountain town in the West.” The magazine highlighted Laramie’s access to mountain biking, skiing, hiking, and rock climbing along with microbreweries, film festivals, and a farmers market, all while maintaining a cost-of-living below the US average. I read this with a mixture of pride and dread, as no doubt did many other Laramigos. Yes, we know this town is a hidden gem with excellent outdoor amenities that lack the hype—and associated problems—plaguing more famous recreation destinations. And yet, we have already turned away from overflowing trailheads, encountered both human and dog poop at the base of favorite climbing crags, and watched as housing prices leaped skyward. Even before the publicity from Outside, it felt like Laramie might be the next of many western towns to be transformed by an outdoor recreation boom.

Communities across the West are racing to embrace outdoor recreation and tourism as an up-and-coming industry. This means figuring out how to reap economic and quality-of-life rewards while avoiding pitfalls such as trash, crowds, and too many seasonal, low-wage service jobs. “What would it look like to envision and work toward an outdoor recreation future where our communities are thriving?” asked the Ruckelshaus Institute (publisher of this magazine) in a statewide forum last year. At the forum, people from across Wyoming worked on how to balance economic, social, and environmental benefits of outdoor recreation against the impacts. Now, Western Confluence continues the conversation.

In this issue, professional journalists as well as students, staff, and faculty at the University of Wyoming explore outdoor recreation’s challenges and opportunities. As communities build new trails and businesses welcome visitors from afar, more people are experiencing the outdoors than ever before. But as usage grows, decision makers grapple with how to manage human waste, off-leash dogs, and housing crises. When outdoor recreators descend on a place that’s unprepared, managers scramble to accommodate, sometimes defending development plans to angry locals determined to protect their place from unwanted change. Addressing these challenges requires anticipating and planning for demand before it arrives. This might require reconsidering old systems in need of an update or taking creative approaches to steer outdoor recreation toward addressing local challenges.

These stories make me consider what Laramie might look like ten or twenty years from now. Will we be the next victim of the amenity trap, clogged with traffic and no longer affordable to anyone except the very wealthy? Or will we get ahead of the challenges and find solutions that welcome residents and visitors alike to our trails and mountains while creating a robust economy and protecting the qualities that make our town special today? As outdoor recreation shapes communities across the West, we hope this issue of Western Confluence will help towns and cities, parks and resource managers, understand both the value and perils and consider smart ways to prepare.

When we put out a call for stories exploring how to simultaneously advance social, economic, and environmental well-being, an early response was, “I strongly suspect the concept for this issue is likely to end up focusing on various efforts to apply lipstick to corpses.” The metaphor implied that looking for win-win solutions was sugar-coating a long history of human development causing pollution, habitat destruction, and species loss, and of environmental protection resulting in the forced removal of people from their homelands, lost jobs and revenue, and cultural conflict. But when we went looking for the intersection of conservation and prosperity, we didn’t come back empty-handed.

Instead, we learned how a leap of faith by a multi-generational ranching family has paid dividends to the community, grasslands, and climate. We pondered what it would take to turn the loss of an industry into an opportunity to save a river and a community. We heard how working with, rather than against, beavers can lead to more resilient river systems. In every story, there are people who believe that mutual benefit can be achieved even when it seems impossible. A biologist insists affordable, carbon-free energy doesn’t have to come at the expense of golden eagles; a bevy of organizations commit to reducing the footprint of Wyoming’s most popular tourist destination; and fading agricultural towns believe an inclusive community is the path to prosperity. For Jason and Patti Baldes, the intersection of conservation and prosperity means return: return of buffalo to Wind River, return of sovereignty to tribes, return to a reciprocal way of being where all relations care for one another.

Reading these stories is a chance to experience a world where conservation doesn’t have to mean sacrifice and progress doesn’t come at the expense of the environment. It’s a glimpse of what might be possible if we let go of zero-sum thinking. It’s an invitation to re-imagine a future where people and the ecosystems they rely on don’t just adapt and survive, they thrive.

Lipstick on a corpse will only get us so far in animating this kind of future. In the lipstick metaphor, we are simply trying to put a good face on something that we’ve already accepted is hopeless. Much like greenwashing, it is meant to appease, to make inadequacy palatable enough that we lose the desire for real, substantive change.

Cover artist Abi Paytoe Gbayee shows us an alternative with her painted beaver skull. Rather than covering up the old, she transforms it. Appeasement is easy and thoughtless. Transformation is difficult and requires vision. She found a skull; instead of leaving it to decay, she imagined a new life for it. Her paint was proxy for care and creativity. With attention and time, the skull became art. So too does this issue highlight how hard work, innovation, and genuine dedication to human and environmental well-being can transform what we what thought possible and bring us closer to the intersection of conservation and prosperity.

“For many Americans, the open road best captures the essential character of the West—unfinished, open-ended, a marriage of the human psyche with the earth, sky, and highway.” —William Wyckoff, Geographer

We’ve all been there, driving fast on a ribbon of asphalt, watching a distant thunderhead boil up, counting raptors on fenceposts, cresting a long geologic uplift only to have the last FM station flicker to static. These roads of the West mean everything to us, linking our scattered towns and cities with the most remote ranches and energy fields, carrying goods and newspapers, food and medicine, letters and visitors. We need our roads. We take our roads for granted, forgetting how extensively they shape our existence. And we curse our roads when they are clogged with construction or sheathed in deadly ice.

Like any human-built infrastructure, roads also change the places they cross. In the last few decades, researchers and ecologists have begun to look carefully at the ways roads disrupt natural systems. We open this issue with an introduction to the Western Transportation Institute, a research unit based at Montana State University in Bozeman, to illustrate the cutting-edge ways road ecologists are scrutinizing roadway impacts and devising solutions to mitigate the damages they cause. 

Some of the damage is apparent, marked with legions of bloody wild animal carcasses, small and large, smacked by speeding vehicles. Other influences are more subtle, such as the way roads alter wildlife behavior even when the animals aren’t struck. The more we learn, the better we can do to blunt the harsh disruptions roads bring to our wild lands. For example, ecological datasets can inform ways to divert new roads around fragile natural areas. One simple way to mitigate road damage is to reduce speed limits, especially at certain times of day or year when animals are most susceptible. Researchers and highway managers are even designing crossing structures to safely ferry wild animals over or under roadways. In the case of massive Interstate 80, which acts like a wall across hundreds of miles of big game habitat in southern Wyoming, new wildlife crossing structures might begin to stitch a broken landscape back together. Of course, as one researcher in this issue puts it, “Not building new roads is the number one conservation action.”

This exploration into the field of road ecology took us in some less-expected directions, too. You’ll find an essay about a highway engineer and his care in designing roads through the desert he loved. And you’ll join an adventurer who explores abandoned mining roads by mountain bike and discovers something other than the ruined industrial site she expected. Roads are part of our human experience on the landscapes where we dwell. Even as they disrupt wild places, they also mediate our connections to the land, indeed linking our psyches to the earth and sky.

We hope this issue of Western Confluence will contribute to that endeavor. While we can’t explore every invasive species and proposed solution, we have curated a mix of stories that paints a picture of the problem’s scale, touches on both plants and animals as well as terrestrial and aquatic species, and most importantly shares examples of cutting edge research and approaches.

In many cases, control efforts focus specifically on getting rid of the invaders, whether that means spraying every last patch of a new invasive annual grass, treating a hot spring to kill all the exotic fish, or transporting every last mountain goat out of a mountain range. But as Tessa Wittman writes in her piece about resilience in native plants, we “will never get rid of the last cheatgrass seed.” One of the take-aways from these articles is that many invasive species have become permanent additions to the systems they now occupy.

Where eradication is out of reach, managers are shifting from the objective of getting rid of invasives toward figuring out ways to live with them. In these articles, researchers and managers share new strategies for keeping potential invasive species out of new places, identifying first arrivals of new species early, targeting those before they take off, optimizing where to apply control measures, making native systems more resistant to invasion, and even extreme potential future solutions, like genetically engineering diseases to wipe out invasive species. Scaffolding all these solutions are strategies around human coordination, communication, education, and data sharing.

Will these efforts work? There are some encouraging successes, but on a whole, invasive species, seem to be expanding faster than we can keep up with. Meanwhile, managers struggle to find adequate or sustainable funding for a seemingly endless battle that has few wins and little to celebrate. And yet, given the damages they cause and threats they pose, doing nothing about invasive species is not an option. Invasive species require that we keep working on, innovating around, and paying for these and future solutions. We will have to be incredibly informed, coordinated, and responsive. We will have to get creative about directing our limited resources to where they will best improve the situation. We will also have to adjust our expectations of what our ecological and cultivated systems should look like and consider new measures of what counts as a functioning ecosystem. We will have to adapt to a new normal.

By Emilene Ostlind

In this issue of Western Confluence, we examine how everyday people like you and me interact with the 400 million (plus or minus) acres of federally and state-managed public lands that make up more than half of the surface of the 11 contiguous western states. The following stories consider what our experiences on these western lands mean to us. This issue is less about industry and resource extraction (look at our past issues on energy development, water, forests, and other topics for stories about that) so much as it is about citizens’ personal experiences on public lands.

For example, writer Emily Reed dives into a surprising study from the University of Wyoming’s Business Marketing and Management Department about how people “consume” experiences on Bureau of Land Management lands. Gayle Irwin investigates the ways local resistance to a national monument changed to support over the years. Kit Freedman examines how some small towns in the west are looking to diversify their economies through recreation, which requires getting the right structures in place—from trails to taxation. And Ann Stebner Steele shares an essay about her family’s secret spot in Wyoming’s Red Desert, and what it’s meant to generations of her family to access one certain patch of public land over the years.

Additional stories in this issue—by Josh Morse about human perspectives of mule deer migration, by Steve Smutko about Wyoming’s effort to find permanent designations for wilderness study areas, and by R. McGreggor Cawley about the never-ending Sagebrush Rebellion—touch on the difficulty of finding agreement about the highest and best use of our public lands. But it’s not only how we use these lands. Public lands provide more than resources and services. They’re also the places where we have life-changing moments, from first hunts to nights alone under the stars contemplating the universe, from marriage proposals to seeing our kids connect with the natural world. To that end, public lands management for the future is both about handling overlapping uses and about sustaining the human experiences we can’t get anywhere else.

By Emilene Ostlind

Collages here and on cover by June Glasson

Although we in the Ruckelshaus Institute believe in the power of collaboration, we did not charge the writers to explore endangered species through that lens. So it’s significant that it’s there nonetheless. The story of collaboration in bringing back black-footed ferrets from the brink is an exemplar. Sara Kirkpatrick writes about a ranch dog near Meeteetse, Wyoming, that delivered a dead ferret—a species thought to be extinct—to its owner’s doorstep, revealing that private lands still harbored the creatures. Now, willing private landowners, protected from risk and engaged through collaboration, are key to growing the wild ferret population (and in Buffalo, Wyoming, sage grouse too, as Maria Anderson reports). Even in Oregon, where the northern-spotted-owl saga fractured communities for decades, writer Courtney Carlson found that stakeholders are collaborating to find irrigation solutions that sustain both fields and amphibians. From frogs to sage grouse to ferrets, collaboration is more than just the least worst option. Many of the stories in this issue reveal that collaboration may well produce the very best option, for people and imperiled species.

This issue also shows that, more than ever, society needs different approaches for endangered species conservation in a rapidly changing world. Climate change, disease, and small population sizes are straining bull trout, bat, and bighorn sheep populations. We stand to lose too much. As our guest creative writers Alec Osthoff and Charlotte Austin note, when we lose species, wildness, and even access to quiet, we lose part of our humanity. The well-worn model of lawsuits and more lawsuits abdicates our responsibility to figure it out together, leaving critical biological and economic decisions to the courts. Our growing human footprint, the need for economically prosperous communities, our innate desire for connection to each other and to wildness—all beg for radical solutions.

As Emilene Ostlind concludes in her story on efforts to improve the Endangered Species Act, collaboration is just such a radical proposition. In spite of decades of intractable conflict, or perhaps because of it, endangered species management has become a surprising crucible for the collaborative and creative approaches that society so desperately needs right now.

By Nicole Korfanta

Now the country’s energy portfolio is shifting. In 2008, US energy demand leveled off and has been mostly flat ever since. And by 2016, only 30 percent of US electricity came from coal, surpassed for the first time by natural gas, which provided 34 percent of the nation’s electricity. In 2016 the US produced less coal than any year since 1978. Wyoming’s production dropped more than 20 percent from the previous year, sinking to less than 300 million tons for the first time since 1997.

This issue of Western Confluence, our energy issue, is motivated by that abrupt shift in the nation’s energy portfolio. What’s behind these changes, and what will our future energy landscape look like? Coal’s decline is driven by a range of factors, from citizens installing increasingly affordable solar power systems on their rooftops, to state officials requiring utilities to replace polluting coal with clean renewables, to federal policies limiting the emissions from coal-fired power plants. Technological advances are bringing down the cost of wind turbines, while a glut of domestic natural gas offers a cheap energy source. These many bottom-up and top-down forces complicate the energy story.

Considering such complexities, this issue has been challenging to put together. Some premises that seemed firm last August when we began working on this issue have turned upside down in the months since. But a few things remain true. States, through their own policies, have a strong say in how energy development moves forward and can drive regional energy trends. And the market is one of the strongest forces shaping the energy landscape. As westerners, it’s in our interest to take a clear-eyed view of this shifting energy landscape and try to understand what forms it might take in the coming years and decades. We hope this issue of Western Confluence will help you understand our changing energy world.

By Emilene Ostlind

Once largely used for farming and ranching, western private lands are transforming. Population growth, energy development, recreation and tourism, changing food markets, drought, and other factors all put pressure on open private lands. In many cases, the highest economic value for those lands comes via development. In this issue of Western Confluence, we explore alternatives to sprawl for private lands in the West.

Not only do private lands grow our food and fiber, and underpin the agricultural economies of rural communities, but they provide less obvious public benefits as well. They often span the creeks and rivers running through higher, drier public lands, so they shelter big game winter ranges and migration corridors, bird and fish habitat, and watersheds. They protect open spaces and sustain rural culture. About half the land in the Rocky Mountain West is privately owned, and how those private lands are managed in the coming years will shape the landscapes and character of the West.

Articles in this issue explore ways landowners are keeping their properties intact. We examine conservation easements from several angles. We learn how landowners partner with conservation organizations and wildlife agencies to create management plans that reward them for protecting wildlife. We meet landowners who take on side jobs, even conducting business by smart phone from the saddle. Landowners lease their property for everything from telecommunication towers to fossil quarries. And new tools are emerging. Economists at the University of Wyoming are calculating the value to society of ecosystem services like pollinator habitat and stream flows, so that we can adequately compensate the landowners who protect those resources.

Ultimately, at the center of the private lands management are private landowners. If we want to sustain the many benefits we get from big swaths of intact private lands, we must sustain the people who take care of those lands. Finding common ground among private, conservation, and public interests will let us support and encourage the best future land stewardship on private properties.

By Emilene Ostlind

Today, backpackers hike the nearby Continental Divide Trail. Families buzz past on high-tech ATVs. Cabins sprout near the highway. The scene is a microcosm for a greater trend on western lands, where a new generation extracts new value from the land. The ranks of outdoor enthusiasts are growing as populations expand, and more people work indoors and enjoy their leisure time outside. And technological advances—mountain bike suspension, packrafts, dune buggies, etc.—make it easier to play deep in the backcountry.

Some communities in the West are finding ways to capitalize on recreation. Take Casper, Wyoming, Oil City of the Plains. Today the town’s inhabitants may still work in the energy industry, but they also enjoy the town’s blue-ribbon fishery, trails system, and clear skies. The result is economic diversification and in some cases, increasing numbers of stewards compelled by a personal connection to the outdoors.

And yet, there are trade-offs. More visitors mean more encroachment into wild country. Even quiet backcountry skiers can disturb wildlife. As antler hunters descend on once-empty public lands in western Wyoming, they stress wintering mule deer and compete with hobbyist antler collectors.

This issue of Western Confluence examines outdoor tourism’s influence on local economies and the management challenges it presents. We also touch on some solutions, new ideas for protecting favorite places while pursuing outdoor tourism. The subject is huge, and our coverage is by no means comprehensive, but we hope to chip at its edges and provoke some new thinking.

Not far from the mining camp in the Sierra Madre, I passed a sheep wagon tucked into a stand of krumholz. Sheep bleated and nosed the mountain grass. Their shepherd sat horseback, resting his elbow on the saddle horn as he watched the flock. Even as the West changes, the ways of living off the land that Westerners have pursued for the last century are not going away. And tourism will raise some of the same questions as those other industries—how do we support the people who live here now while preserving the characteristics we love about these places for our children and grandchildren?

By Emilene Ostlind

To talk about wildlife is to talk about habitat, both of which Wyoming still has in abundance. Blur your eyes and the sagebrush steppe reduces down to blue sky and gray-green sea. The highway traveler might use words like empty or wasteland, but the researchers highlighted in this issue look closer. Hidden beneath the sagebrush, ants bring hyper-order to the ecosystem through a precise lattice of mounds, and a struggle for life and death rages as ravens attack sage grouse nests. The sagebrush steppe and its grassland cousin are rich in detail and texture, far from empty.

The threads that bind wildlife, land, and people are woven throughout this issue of Western Confluence, meandering and crossing in unexpected ways. Take the connection between a fisherman on Yellowstone Lake and the decline of an elk herd in Cody. Or a mule deer that disappears, only to be found 150 miles away, connecting a drill rig in the desert to a fall hunt in the mountains.

We humans are not just observers—we are stitched into the pattern. Whether it’s manipulating sagebrush to improve sage grouse habitat or gillnetting lake trout to help elk, stories in this issue illustrate the mighty challenges that managers and landowners face. Sagebrush, so difficult to get rid of in the past, is awfully hard to cultivate when it’s wanted. Managers feed elk to reduce conflicts with livestock and along the way, increase disease prevalence that is a danger to cattle. The pattern becomes complicated.

It is fitting that Doris Florig, the artist featured here, uses tapestry as a medium. Her work reveals the connections and the threads that make up our world. Tug on one part and it pulls on something else. But it is more than a collection of beautiful fibers. To step back from her work is to see the whole thing, much greater than its parts.  In Wyoming, what first appears as a tangle of knots—fish with elk, elk with cattle, cattle with people, people with ravens—turns out to be an elaborate tapestry with each part tied to the others.

By Nicole Korfanta

Read more about Doris Florig’s tapestries in Nomad, Weaver, Storyteller.

And the airborne passenger can’t miss the tidy grids of highways and gravel roads, the reservoir dams, or the straight-sided crop fields stippled over the land. From above, the marks of water and humans are sometimes indistinguishable, and always knitted together. Perhaps the most emblematic sign of the intersection between people and water is the perfect circles of center pivots. A delicately woven tapestry or a message spelled out in code?

Painter Virginia Moore’s landscapes bring these aerial views to ground level. Her pieces reconfigure our planet’s shapes and colors into bright abstractions. They also reveal our landscapes as they really are, not sentimentalized or pristine, but shaped by eons of water following gravity as well as decades of planning, labor, and construction. These images remind us of our power to alter the places we dwell, and of the smallness and fragility of our presence on this vast and ever-changing planet.

Starting with Virginia’s view from above, this issue of Western Confluence examines a few of our many relationships to water. The articles look at how we use, rely on, and manipulate water, from the simplest dirt irrigation ditches to elaborate tunneling-pumping-piping-trading-filtering-recycling systems. And they question how sustainable our use of water is. You’ll read about western cities trying to hold onto and make the most of a finite and infinitely valuable resource, as well as people who want to bring once-wild rivers back to life. It’s impossible for one issue of a magazine to give comprehensive treatment to everything water means to us. Instead, I hope this collection of stories will provide a thought-provoking glimpse at how water shapes our landscapes and lives in order to trigger ongoing conversation.

And as you read through, flip back to the cover image from time to time. Virginia is a young artist who lives in Lander, Wyoming. Her fresh and honest interpretation of the place we all call home puts these stories into the right perspective. Water is everywhere, essential, and evasive.

By Emilene Ostlind

The forests that cloak mountainsides are one of the defining ecosystems of the western US. Recent big bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires raise questions about how forests are changing and how we should respond.

Forests rely on disturbances to open the canopy and clear the way for new, young trees. Over millennia, forests evolved with insects and disease, drought and wildfire, temperature swings and water availability. Today, human activities like logging, road building, and fire suppression, as well as natural disturbances like insects, pathogens, and storms, constantly shape forests.

Temperature is a major driver behind three big natural forest disturbances: drought, bark beetles, and wildfire. When a region warms up, even if precipitation stays the same, more water evaporates from soil and transpires from plants, drying out trees.[1] Warmer spring weather, earlier snowmelt, and longer summers also dry out vegetation and create conditions conducive to wildfires.[2] And warmer winters allow insects, fungi, and pathogens to survive better, reproduce faster, and more easily kill dry, weak trees.[3] A spell of warm years has driven the recent big wildfire seasons and beetle outbreaks. No one expects temperatures in the western US to cool off anytime soon,[4] so what might forests look like 50 or 100 years from now?

Making such predictions requires understanding how current disturbances compare to those of the past, how forests respond to disturbances, and what disturbances might be like in the future. Ecologists map historic forest responses to shifts in temperature and build models that take into account factors such as soil and vegetation types, moisture, temperature, and more.[5] They test these models by measuring whether they can accurately demonstrate known conditions, over, for example, the last century, and then use the models to simulate future forest behavior.

Several models that map forests in the coming century show continued warm temps exacerbating disturbances, leading to declining tree cover, especially in the southwest and northern Rocky Mountains.[6] One model estimates that shrub and grassland ecosystems will replace forests over about 15% of the West,[7] while another study predicts that the suitable climate range for 130 tree species throughout North America on average will decrease by 12% and shift north by 435 miles by 2100.[8] Still another found that, at least in some regions, tree populations are not yet migrating northward, but rather, are growing and dying faster at the southern ends of their ranges where climates are warmer and wetter.[9]

Forests are changing. They will never again look to us the way they did in, say, 1980. These changes have implications for anyone who relies on forests for timber or rangelands, drinking water or carbon sequestration, recreation or scenic vistas. How we adapt as our forests transform will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades. The articles in this issue of Western Confluence illustrate some possible responses and hopefully will trigger new thinking about ways we might adjust to our changing world.

By Indy Burke

“I’m weary and tired. I’ve done my day’s riding. Nighttime is rolling my way. The sky’s on fire and the light’s slowly fading. Peaceful and still ends the day. And out on the trail the night birds are calling, singing their wild melody. Down in the canyon the cottonwood whispers a song of Wyoming for me.”
– Chris LeDoux

Grazing in the west has been an important way of life for well over a century, supporting families, inspiring poetry and song, and maintaining open spaces. Over recent decades, grazing has also provoked intense controversy. Differing grazing practices, variable impacts to public lands, and livestock influences on wildlife habitat trigger opposing views. Even the scientific literature is contradictory, with recent articles both demonstrating the positive effect of livestock grazing on biodiversity and landscapes, and excoriating livestock for desertification, erosion, and loss of biological diversity. How can we arrive at sound management solutions for both ranchers and wildlife when there is so much disagreement over what is happening?

“Conservation grazing” is a management tool with potential to resolve some of the conflict. This practice focuses on managing livestock to enhance wildlife habitat in western rangelands while sustaining economic production.

Some ranchers have long stewarded wildlife habitat, and particularly game species. Without using the term, progressive ranchers have implemented a number of conservation grazing strategies. For instance, some ranchers graze goats to reduce weeds. Others have enrolled in conservation easements to preserve habitat and protect ranches from estate taxes. Many ranchers have for years maintained big game habitat and benefitted from hunting revenues.

Meanwhile, changing cattle prices, drought, invasive species, threatened species, energy development, other landscape changes, and shifting government policies and incentives present challenges to ranchers who want to steward wildlife habitat. These stumbling blocks reflect many of the complex natural resources issues of the West. Such challenges include elements of our culture and tradition, public land management strategies and government policy, existing and new scientific knowledge, and uncertainties associated both with our gaps in knowledge, and our inability to predict the dynamic futures of the weather, the economy, and biology.

Scientific approaches investigate how rangeland plants, animals, and landscapes may be enhanced or negatively affected by certain types of grazing. Scientists are measuring how grazing animals interact with biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as water quality and quantity, carbon storage, and soil stability, on rangelands worldwide. Studies of grazing and biodiversity in the western United States have focused particularly on species of concern, for instance the mountain plover, sage grouse, and neotropical birds, as well as less desirable species including weeds like cheatgrass and leafy spurge. This research offers a solid foundation to inform evolving grazing management that can foster increased rangeland biodiversity.

Conservation grazing represents a scientific forefront, a prospect for alternative income for ranchers, the opportunity for wildlife managers to inspire habitat protection across large multi-ownership landscapes and regions, and win-win incentives for private land conservation. But barriers remain preventing its widespread implementation.

The first issue of Western Confluence magazine will address these challenges, bringing to light the new and developing scientific knowledge, and presenting, in an unbiased fashion, the multiple perspectives of different resource stakeholders. The magazine will be a junction where academic knowledge can meet on-the-ground natural resource management. We intend for this publication to add critical facts, data, and sound science-based information to efforts to resolve natural resource challenges in the West. Read on to learn more about innovative ways ranchers can apply scientific findings to host rangeland wildlife species, along with other exciting collaborations to maintain open space and understand resource dynamics in the west.

We look forward to hearing what you think of our new magazine. Please write to us at editor@westernconfluence.org to share your thoughts, ideas, and criticisms.