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Count on ranchers and state lawmakers to give Deb Haaland tons of grief over bison restoration plan [1]
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Date: 2023-03-30
Indeed, Montana Gov. Gianforte, who failed to take the required training before killing a wolf just outside Yellowstone in 2021, has already made his views clear. Advocates of restoration have long viewed the sprawling, 1.1 million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge (CMR)—the second largest refuge in the contiguous 48 states—as one obvious location for bison to be returned. The same year Gianforte pretended wolf-trapping rules don’t apply to him, foes of transferring bison to CMR gained his support, and he also signed a bill giving county commissioners veto power over any proposed relocations of the great beasts. Earlier this month, by a wide margin, the Montana state senate passed a resolution opposing transferring bison to the CMR.
Rob Hotakainen at Greenwire reported on a Feb. 28 hearing of the Montana Senate Fish and Game Committee:
Shelby DeMars, representing a group called the United Property Owners of Montana, called the CMR “a prized resource” and said bison should not be allowed there because of their detrimental impacts. “It has a very direct and severe impact on the rangeland but also in increasing the risk of transmission of disease between bison and wildlife and therefore also livestock,” she said. Nicole Rolf of the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, which represents farmers and ranchers in all 56 of Montana’s counties, said her membership shares similar concerns. “There’s concerns about competition for scarce resources like water and grass, as you already heard mentioned, and containment and property damage,” she told the panel.
But a study shows that, carefully managed, bison are not a disease threat to cattle. It found that cattle are more likely to catch brucellosis, the disease most feared by ranchers, from elk. Nobody in Montana is talking about keeping them off public land. As for ecological damage, a 2022 study concluded that restoring bison would be ecologically, economically, and culturally beneficial to the tribes and the land, and ease the impacts of climate change. The authors state:
One of the biggest items of contention is the annual killing of Yellowstone bison. So far, this year, 1,067 of them have been “harvested.” Many, if not most, of those animals, about a sixth of the Yellowstone herd, could have been transferred to the tribes. Two organizations are trying to stop the slaughter: the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Roam Free Nation. They rented a billboard saying, “There is no hunt. It’s slaughter!”
Of the Yellowstone herd, South Dakota Democratic state Sen. Troy Heinert, a member of the Rosebud Sioux and executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, told Lila Tran at High Country News, “Those animals were descendants of the animals that provided for our people. There’s a connection there between Indigenous people and those animals that can’t be replicated in other places. When you talk about buffalo restoration, it’s also land restoration, water resource restoration, and cultural revitalization. This is so much bigger than just the animal itself.”
Yellowstone National Park (outlined in black) and the surrounding private, public, and tribal lands.
One big supporter of bison restoration is Dan Wenk, the former Yellowstone superintendent whose longtime support for allowing more bison in the park spurred some Montana lawmakers to pressure the Trump administration to get rid of him. When he was reassigned to a desk job in Washington, D.C., in 2018, he quit instead. He has since joined the board of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
About putting bison in the CMR, Wenk told Hotakainen, “It’s almost as remote of a wildlife refuge that you can find anywhere. What could be a better place to put these bison?” Haaland should trust the science and “not blink,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of assertions out there on why this isn’t good or why we shouldn’t do this—because the place isn’t ready to have them, it’s not remote enough, or it doesn’t have the right kind of fencing. There will be a hundred reasons not to do it, but the science is going to give you all the reasons you need to do it.”
Foes of the Interior Department’s bison restoration work should be glad that Haaland didn’t persuade President Joe Biden to get behind the Buffalo Commons approach.
In 1987 Deborah Popper and Frank J. Popper wrote an essay for Planning Magazine titled The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust: A daring proposal for dealing with an inevitable disaster:
"Grass no good upside down," said a Pawnee chief in northeast Colorado as he watched the late-nineteenth-century homesteaders rip through the shortgrass with their steel plows. He mourned a stretch of land where the Indians had hunted buffalo for millennia. It grew crops for a few years, then went into the Dust Bowl; farmers abandoned it. Today, it is federal land, part of the system of national grasslands. Like most of the Plains, it is an austere monument to American self-delusion. Three separate waves of farmers and ranchers, with increasingly heavy federal support, tried to make settlement stick on the Plains. The 1890s and 1930s generations were largely uprooted, as the 1980s one soon will be.
Our national experience in the Plains represents a spectacular variant on the tragedy of the commons, Garrett Hardin's famous ecological fable of how individual short-term economic rationality can lead to collective long-term environmental disaster. To the Indians and the early cattlemen, all of the Plains was a commons. The Homestead Act and the succeeding federal land subsidies for settlers amounted to attempts to privatize the Plains, to take them out of the federal domain and put them permanently in individual or corporate hands. Today's subsidies for crops, water, and grazing land amount to attempts to buttress the privatization.
But private interests have proved unable to last for long on the Plains. Responding to nationally based market imperatives, they have overgrazed and overplowed the land and overdrawn the water. Responding to the usually increasing federal subsidies, they have overused the natural resources the subsidies provided. They never created a truly stable agriculture or found reliable conservation devices. In some places, private owners supplemented agriculture with inherently unstable energy and mineral development.
Bison standing in the snow at the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming.
The Poppers also pointed out the continuing depopulation of the Great Plains, with more than 388 counties west of the Mississippi then having fewer than six people per square mile. That’s the density standard that historian Frederick Jackson Turner set when he declared the end of the frontier in 1893. Today, research shows 402 counties fit this category. Anyone traveling not far off the interstate highways will see the consequences of that depopulation in half-boarded-up towns and abandoned farms with rusty machinery and dilapidated houses and outbuildings.
The Poppers’ answer to this situation was to propose the creation of the Buffalo Commons, returning 139,000 square miles of the drier part of Great Plains to its native prairie ecosystem with the reintroduction of bison. Ten states would be included: Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. They wrote:
The federal government's commanding task on the Plains for the next century will be to recreate the nineteenth century, to reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons. More and more previously private land will be acquired to form the commons. In many areas, the distinctions between the present national parks, grasslands, grazing lands, wildlife refuges, forests, Indian lands, and their state counterparts will largely dissolve. The small cities of the Plains will amount to urban islands in a shortgrass sea. The Buffalo Commons will become the world's largest historic preservation project, the ultimate national park. Most of the Great Plains will become what all of the United States once was -- a vast land mass, largely empty and unexploited.
The idea got avid support from some Native tribes and environmental advocates, but many non-Indigenous Great Plains residents ridiculed it, noting that agricultural prosperity was not a function of larger populations. Those years were the heyday of the Sagebrush Rebellion, an effort by right-wingers such as President Ronald Reagan’s profoundly anti-environment Interior Secretary James G. Watt to turn ownership or at least management of much federal land over to the states so it could be more intensely commercially exploited.
These days, ridicule is becoming an ever more popular consideration, though it certainly hasn’t taken hold in practice. And in research just published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the authors state:
We present scientific evidence showing that protecting and restoring wild animals and their functional roles can enhance natural carbon capture and storage. We call for new thinking that includes the restoration and conservation of wild animals and their ecosystem roles as a key component of natural climate solutions that can enhance the ability to prevent climate warming beyond 1.5 °C.
Of this “rewilding,” Bob Berwyn at Inside Climate News reports:
An international team of scientists focused the study on marine fish, whales, sharks, gray wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants and American bison as species, or groups of species, that accelerate the carbon cycle. Collectively, they “could facilitate the additional capture” of almost 500 gigatons of CO2 by 2100, which would be a big step toward preventing long-term planetary heating of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the authors wrote in Nature. Recent global climate reports and guidelines on carbon dioxide removal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other groups of scientists have often overlooked the multiplier effect of animals as a climate benefit, said lead author Oswald Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology at the Yale School of the Environment.
Those scientists will have a hard time persuading critics that, say,10 million bison on the modern Great Plains is entirely reasonable given the 60 million that were here 500 years ago. But 2 million would be a herculean task.
The catchy name of the Sagebrush Rebellion’s states’ rights revolt of 40 years ago has disappeared, but the attitudes engendering it remain strong. When the federal working group’s bison restoration plan is released later this year, it will certainly fall well short of what the Poppers envisioned. But that won’t stop Gianforte and his ilk from having a tantrum over it.
Some additional sources:
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