The Perceived “Threat” of Ecological Restoration on Public Rangelands
Something quite remarkable is happening here in Montana, and thus far it has gotten little notice. It could end up having widespread implications for our twin existential crises: global heating and biodiversity.
Over strenuous objection from the powerful cattle industry, the federal Bureau of Lands Management (a.k.a., the other “BLM”), which controls vast swaths of mostly degraded rangelands across the West, has issued seven permits to the American Prairie Reserve (a project of WWF) to graze American Buffalo (Bison bison) on about 100 square miles of our public lands. APR acquired “preferences” to these allotments by purchasing private ranches that have traditionally grazed cattle on them. Ironically, it is the rancher-dominated legislature in Montana that insists on categorizing APR’s genetically distinct bison as “livestock,” not wildlife, in the hopes of excluding wild bison from Montana’s extensive wildlands. And so the APR, which has slowly built up a herd of about 800 buffalo on relatively intact (i.e., untilled), privately owned grasslands in the Upper Missouri River area (where Lewis & Clark first disembarked), applied to change the “class” of these allotments from cattle to what BLM calls “domestic indigenous livestock,” or bison.
While ecologists around the world are celebrating this development, it represents a defeat for Montana’s cattle industry. In comments for an article in the online journal Science, their spokesperson Vicki Olson had a curious way of spinning the issue over use of public lands. Expressing the cattle industry’s concern that “the BLM decision signifies a shift in range management that will favor restoration,” Olson told the journal that “[t]he rangeland will be the ultimate victim.”
Yes, you read that right. According to the Montana cattle industry’s backwards thinking, managing our chronically degraded public lands to favor ecological restoration will ultimately victimize public rangelands! Compare this attempt at fear-mongering with the actual scientific determination by the BLM after conducting an environmental assessment of its proposed change in class from cattle to bison:
[T]hose areas being grazed by bison will experience improvements to vegetative communities including variation in vegetative communities, diversified vegetation and an increase in native plant species. Because bison tend to graze in patches, the result is a patchy distribution of vegetation that encourages plant species diversity by allowing forbs to flourish. Species such as Greater-Sage Grouse will benefit from an increase in native forbs. Because bison tend to spend less time and forage greater distances from water, improvements to riparian vegetation and riparian function will also be seen. This will improve habitat conditions for aquatic and riparian wildlife species, such as amphibians and riparian birds, by increasing the availability of habitat features, such as canopy cover and nesting sites, due to increased riparian vegetation diversity and abundance. Reduced erosion and sedimentation will improve in-stream habitat by improving water quality and hydrological function, which are important habitat characteristics for some special status fish species.
Oh NO! The Greater-Sage Grouse will benefit! Degraded stream banks will recover! There will be more fish in the streams!
Clearly, this represents an existential threat to the cattlemen’s ‘way of life.’ If we the public are suddenly able to go fishing in streams managed by BLM, with bison grazing in the background and Sage Grouse strutting about, people might start getting the crazy idea that we’re better off restoring our national mammal, the American Buffalo, to its former glory on public lands than we are with cows trampling streambanks, denuding grasslands, and standing in streams to escape the extreme heat of global warming!
Millions of Americans visit Yellowstone National Park every year to view wild bison and the diverse wildlife they engender as keystone species in their natural habitat. They are usually shocked to learn that, when they go back home and the snow covers the landscape, their Park Service gets busy trapping those same bison by the hundreds and sending them to slaughter — at the behest of Montana’s cattle barons. Maybe our public servants need to include some brutal film of that spectacle in an episode of the wildly popular television series “Yellowstone” to really bring it home to people that ecocide is not just a historical relic — it is ongoing.
As for real threats, a lonely bull bison wandered out of the Park last month, after the floods, making it all the way to Emigrant in the Paradise Valley before a rancher called the Montana Department of Livestock. They killed him, of course, because of the perceived threat that he might mingle with cattle and transmit brucellosis. Never mind that it is biologically impossible for a bull bison to transmit brucellosis to cows. He was a “perceived threat,” like ecological restoration is, to our cattle industry.
You see, while APR’s bison are considered to be “domestic indigenous livestock” in Montana, Yellowstone’s wild bison are not even considered to be wildlife under state law. Supposedly, that’s because they carry brucellosis, which they contracted from cattle (not the other way around). But Montana’s elk also carry brucellosis, and regularly transmit it back to cows. Elk are prized as wildlife here, however, and so it’s politically unacceptable to treat them like bison.
I’m the Director of Communications for the Buffalo Field Campaign, an Indigenous-founded and Indigenous-led activist media organization that is working hard to change this untenable situation. As the nation’s 4th largest state with the 3rd lowest population density (7 people/sq. mi.), Montana is big enough for free-roaming, wild bison. At present, outdoor recreation and agriculture each generate about 5% of the state’s GDP. Creating an ‘American Serengeti’ up and down Montana’s front range and eastern plains, replete with bison, pronghorn antelope, and blue-ribbon trout fisheries, would not just represent a huge economic boon to our state it would also allow us to do our part to address the very real threat to rangeland health — global warming. In other words, restoring wild bison in Montana would generate reciprocal economic advantages.
Here in the American West, there are still approximately 500 million acres of grasslands formerly inhabited by buffalo which, if restored ecologically, could draw down twice as much carbon annually as currently emitted by the entire U.S., the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer. Bison, of course, are the keystone species for these habitats, meaning that returning them to these landscapes triggers a cascade of benefits to all the other plants and animals bison co-evolved with, such as the imperiled Greater Sage Grouse.
According to the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition:
Bison were reported in present-day Montana from at least 33 locations, from the North Dakota boundary west up the Missouri Valley almost to Great Falls, along the Sun and Marias Rivers, and along the Yellowstone Valley from about present-day Billings to the North Dakota boundary. After the great bison slaughter of the middle and late nineteenth century, when more than 40 million animals were destroyed, the only remaining bison south of Canada were a few hundred individuals that were protected in Yellowstone National Park.
Nearly a century later, those few hundred individuals have become a few thousand wild bison who are “kept on the reservation” of Yellowstone National Park, which according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWP) represents only 15% of their historic range. This severe restriction of range, as well as the Park’s unscientific population control of Yellowstone’s wild herds, are just two of the threats currently being assessed by FWP in response to my organization’s petition to list bison as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
There is good news to report here, as well.
For the first time, the Custer and Gallatin National Forest’s land management plan has clear direction about the value of bison as a native species on the Custer Gallatin. Responding to consistent pressure from Native American tribes, who have treaty rights for hunting buffalo, as well as the public at large, the revised forest plan establishes “ a desired condition that bison are present year round with sufficient numbers and adequate distribution to provide a self-sustaining population on the Custer Gallatin in conjunction with bison herds in Yellowstone National Park.” Naturally, this revision was opposed by the cattle industry, who prefer keeping cows on wildlands over bison.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes currently manage a herd of about 500 bison on the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana, maintaining a diverse ecosystem of forests, riparian areas and ponds inhabited by elk, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, cougars, bears and over 200 species of birds. Accommodating APR’s bison herd in the Upper Missouri River Breaks area of northeastern Montana, which hopefully will culminate in returning free roaming bison to the nearby Charles M. Russell Wildlife Preserve — the “crown jewel” of the Interior Departments wildlife areas — together with allowing Yellowstone’s wild bison to inhabit the Custer and Gallatin National Forests in the southern part of our state, represent constructive first steps by our federal land managers towards increasing biodiversity and turning back the tide of rising global temperatures.
That’s a win/win scenario for us all.
But as we are wont to say in the conservation community, our wins tend to be temporary, often eliciting political blowback, while our losses tend to be permanent. Our governor, who is known for body-slamming journalists and riding into D.C. on horseback at Donald Trump’s invitation, has been bragging about ridding Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency of good scientists. As the United Nations urges, it is imperative that we continue to elevate and center Indigenous voices and wisdom in our efforts to come back into proper relationship with the natural world. With Native Americans heading up both the Department of Interior and the National Park Service, there has never been a more opportune time to promote and advance real solutions to the existential crises that we are facing.
Please support the Buffalo Field Campaign and the American Prairie Reserve in our continuing efforts to return the American Buffalo to its former glory. We are working hard to create a viable future for your children. This is a kind of reparations for genocide and ecocide that we should all be able to support.
