the land ethic

Pronghorns in the Sweetwater valley, copyright 2014 Chris Madson.

THE HORRIFIC WINTER OF 2022-23 IN WESTERN WYOMING HAS CREPT BACK INTO THE NEWS IN RECENT DAYS.  THE people who went out into the sage south of Pinedale when the snow finally released its grip that year were appalled at the sight of scores of pronghorn carcasses scattered across the landscape.  Estimates of the winterkill ranged as high as 70 percent.  The Wyoming Game and Fish Department set the loss at roughly 50 percent, which meant that the weather had claimed something like 20,000 pronghorns in the Sublette herd.[i]

Some have said that it was the worst winter in living memory in that part of the world.  I guess that depends to a marked degree on how long your memory is.  The winter of 1983-84 was a ring-tailed screamer with temperatures in Pinedale as low as 37 below and average snow cover well over a foot.[ii]  I won’t argue that it was worse than 2022-23 because I wasn’t in Pinedale in 2022, but I think it’s fair to say it was comparable in its intensity and effect on big game, especially the smallest of our big game animals, the pronghorn.

In its most recent analysis of the Sublette pronghorn herd’s condition, Game and Fish commented: “Now three years after that winter [2022-23], better than average fawn ratios have let this herd start to recover and regain some of the ground that it lost during that winter.”  The “ratio” referred to here is the ratio of fawns per 100 doe pronghorns in the herd.  In the 2025 report, that ratio was 70 youngsters per 100 does, which is, as the biologists report, a ratio that may well result in more pronghorns in the Sublette herd, assuming there isn’t another killer winter in our immediate future.

But the description of this ratio as “better than average” bothered me a little. I spent thirty years looking over the shoulders of the biologists who literally risk their lives collecting data on Wyoming’s big game herds, and the idea that 70 fawns per 100 doe pronghorns was “better than average” strikes me as more than a little myopic.  This would be nothing more than a quibble among professionals— except that the fawn:doe ratio reflects a lot of ecological, physiological, meteorological, and geographic variables that are particularly critical to the well-being of pronghorns.  When the ratio is low, it whispers of management problems that have little or nothing to do with the length of a hunting season or the number of permits issued.

The winter of 2022-2023 was a classic example of the effect weather can have on a pronghorn herd.  It was exceptionally long, exceptionally cold, and exceptionally snowy.  Pronghorns lose weight during the winter, even a mild winter.  How many survive depends largely on the amount of fat they have when the first storm hits, how much forage they can find to augment their fat stores, and the amount of energy they lose to the cold as they look for that forage.  The colder it gets and the longer the cold lasts, the more energy they need.  The more energy they burn finding forage, the less they have to keep warm.  In 2022-2023, nearly half the adult pronghorns in the Sublette herd lost more energy than the combination of forage and fat could furnish— those animals died.

There is a lingering side effect to the winter energy audit.  Pronghorns mate in September and early October, which means that does are carrying the next generation through the winter.  In the most extreme winters, some does will resorb their growing embryos in a desperate attempt to survive.  The does that deliver their young the next spring may not be able to produce enough milk to support the newborns, and the newborns themselves may be unusually small and weak.  The fawn:doe ratio drops after a bad winter, reflecting the loss of reproductive potential.

Historically, there has often been a tiny silver lining in the black cloud of a killer winter.  Deep snow and extended cold often result in a wet spring, which brings a smorgasbord of forage for the pronghorns that have survived.  In addition, there is less competition for that forage since a large part of the herd has been erased.  The bountiful supply of groceries allows adult does to fatten up for the fall rut, and the stored fat helps them get through the winter with their fawns safe in the womb and well-nourished with milk after birth the following spring.

In such years, nearly every doe will bear twins.  Biologists who have watched pronghorn populations recover after a bad winter call it “the bounce,” an increase in population almost as startling as the reproductive potential in a population of rabbits.

The winter of 1983-1984 was one of the epic killers of the last century.  The population estimate for the Sublette pronghorn herd dropped by more than 13,000 animals after that winter.  The fawn:doe ratio in the fall of 1983 was 72:100.  In the fall of 1984, it dropped to 52:100 because the does in the herd were in such poor condition coming out of the winter.  A year later, the ratio rose to 72:100.  In 1986, it climbed again to 84:100.  In 1987, it hit 90:100.  The bounce.

The veteran biologists who have followed the ups and down of Wyoming’s pronghorn population for decades and documented these meteoric recoveries are expressing concern these days.  “The bounce,” they say, is gone.

Since we’re focused here on the Sublette herd, let’s consider some of the recent fawn:doe ratios.  After the winter of 2022-23, the ratio subsided to 47 fawns per 100 does, an expected consequence of the poor condition of the herd’s females.  In the fall of 2024, it rose to 68:100, a moderate recovery.  In 2025, it hit 70:100.  Is this really “better than average?

In the ten-year span between 1973 and 1982, the Sublette herd averaged almost 82 fawns per 100 does, with a peak as high as 96:100.  In the 1970s, other pronghorn herds in Wyoming produced well over 100 fawns per 100 does.  One of the more troubling statistics from the record of the Sublette herd is the ratio from 2022, the year before the killer winter— that year, there were only 55 fawns per 100 does in the Sublette herd.

In fairness, local biologists say that four out of the last six winters in Pinedale country have been “bad” for pronghorns.  That may well be, and those winters may offer at least a partial explanation for the lack of a “bounce” in the Sublette herd.  But I’m troubled when I compare fawn:doe ratios from the good old days of pronghorn abundance in the 1970s and 1980s with the numbers today.  Take just one other example, the Medicine Bow pronghorn herd a hundred miles east of the Sublette herd.  In the decade between 1975 and 1984— even after the devastating effect of the winter of 1983-84— the Medicine Bow herd averaged 80 fawns per 100 does.  Between 2016 and 2025, that average dropped to 67 fawns per 100 does.[iii]

Enough numbers.  Today’s game managers can’t be blamed for assuming that the mean of the last ten years of data reflects some sort of normal state against which the current year’s estimates can be measured.  They’re dealing with a new normal.  What, precisely, is “new” about it?  Weather, for one thing.  We’ve seen four killer winters in the Green River country over the last six years.  That’s something new.  And, between those winters, we’re seen a remarkable succession of dry summers— without adequate forage,[iv] a pronghorn herd simply won’t “bounce.”

I’m tempted to deliver a sermon on climate change here, but, even if we took Bill McKibben’s advice and treated the climate challenge with the single-minded focus we used to win World War II, we wouldn’t see any improvement in the plight of the pronghorn for decades.

We can only change what we can change.  The “Path of the Pronghorn” has finally been pried open— the migration corridor for a single herd of Wyoming’s pronghorns.  There are other corridors in other parts of the state, just as critical to the well-being of migrating big game but poorly defined and beset with obstacles, both physical and political.  Clearing the way for the migrants is important but only if the destinations on either end provide the animals with what they need.  Of all the implications of the low fawn-to-doe ratios, this one may worry me the most.

How much forage do we leave for our pronghorns, on the summer pasture, along the migration corridors, down on the critical winter ranges?  The fawn counts suggest it isn’t much, probably not enough to sustain the herds at the numbers some of us knew fifty and sixty years ago.  If we want those thriving herds again, we need to feed them.  According to the BLM’s own data, a vast area of the public range is in fair to poor condition.[v]  No small part of this is due to a long history of abuse.  If we care about pronghorns and much of the rest of our wild heritage, we need to stop that abuse and set about healing the damage.

And, while we’re considering how much livestock the range can really support, we need to turn our attention to the management objectives that have been set for many of our big game herds as well.  Just one example: The current objective for the Sublette pronghorn herd is 48,000 animals.[vi]  It will take a hell of a “bounce” to return that herd to the size it attained in the 1970s.  It’s worth asking whether that objective is even achievable and sustainable in current conditions.  As much as many of us would like to believe it’s possible, ongoing weather patterns and grazing regimes may not allow it.  If that’s true, then our efforts to reach the current objective may only damage the habitat that remains.  Hard data on the condition of the animals and their habitat could define the dimensions of this issue, but only if we care enough to collect it, and it won’t make a whit of difference if we don’t act on what we find.

Hunting is not the problem here.  The length and timing of hunting seasons, the size of the buck harvest, the number of licenses we issue have little, if anything, to do with the sluggish production of pronghorn fawns in the last twenty or thirty years.  Unfortunately, the only management tools state biologists really have to influence pronghorn populations are hunting seasons and license allocation.

The real solutions are controlled by other state and federal entities whose political agendas are set by a host of special interests with little or no interest in pronghorns or any other wildlife.  They can be swayed only by massive public outcry.  The success of the campaign to open the Path of the Pronghorn shows what is needed, but one migration corridor is just the barest beginning.  If we really want to get back to “better than average,” we’ll have to feed our pronghorns better, and that’s not likely to happen until the public at large demands it.

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[i] Anon, 2026.  Green River Region Big Game Job Completion Report.  Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Cheyenne, WY.

https://wgfd.wyo.gov/media/34073/download?inline.  Accessed August 19, 2026.

[ii] NOAA, nd.  NOAA Online weather data for Pinedale, Wyoming, for the months of November, December, January, February, March and April, 1978-79.

https://www.weather.gov/wrh/climate.  Accessed August 19, 2026.

[iii] Anon, 2026.  Laramie Region Big Game Completion Report.  Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Cheyenne, WY.

https://wgfd.wyo.gov/hunting-trapping/job-completion-reports.  Accessed August 19, 2026.

[iv] Shi, Hua, et al., 2022.  Trends analysis of rangeland condition monitoring assessment and projection (RCMAP) fractional component time series (1985-2020).  GI Science and Remote Sensing 59(1): 1243-1265.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/15481603.2022.2104786?needAccess=true.  Accessed September 21, 2026.

[v] Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, 2024.  Evaluating trends in rangeland health on Bureau of Land Management Lands.  https://peer.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Evaluating-Trends-Rangeland-Health-BLM-Lands-5_5_24-FINAL.pdf.  Accessed September 21, 2026.

[vi] Anon, 2026.  Green River JCR.  Op cit.

AS THE DISCUSSION OVER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HEATS UP— ONCE AGAIN— the focus has settled— once again— on whether the independent mechanized analytical tools that may well emerge from the labs at Anthropic, Meta, Open AI, and the rest over the next few years will serve humanity or threaten us.

Even the critics of AI seem to believe that we simply can’t do without the benefits its inventors keep promising.  Meanwhile, those inventors have incurred so much debt in the pursuit of their dream that anything short of brilliant success not only guarantees their financial ruin but threatens the stability of the world economy as a whole.  Both sides in the debate agree that we should build these systems and that we MUST build a moral code into them as they approach independence.  Neither side seems willing to contemplate for a moment the possibility that this may not be possible.

The recent breaches of containment suggest that AI is absorbing the entire range of justifications for human behavior from the highest-minded ethical strictures of the saints we all admire to the most venal motives for self-advancement.  AI systems have cheated, lied, flouted directives, ignored boundaries, invaded forbidden spaces, and plotted to hide their misbehavior, all in an effort to win a reward.  They learn from us, alright— they learn far too well, and I doubt there is any way to keep them from absorbing the worst of our communal character along with the rest.

As alarmed as I am by these mechanized ethical breaches, I find myself considering a more basic issue: Can we expect “alignment” with a machine that shares nothing in common with us or any other life form?  It does not need ANY of the things we need— not food and water, not oxygen or shelter from the elements, not an atmospheric umbrella to tame incoming radiation and regulate the planet’s temperature.  It has absolutely no connection with the organic world.

Nor can it learn much about these things from the masses of data it could obtain from the worldwide web.  Our current relationship with the world demonstrates that we ourselves don’t grasp our connection with the rest of the biosphere.  Many of our most important insights into that relationship are intuitive, the product of 4 billion years of kinship rather than rational analysis.  How could those intuitions ever be programmed into a computer?  And, without those intuitions, how can an AI system possibly grock the living world?

As a culture, we’ve been working hard to deny our identity as living things in a vast community of living things.  We’re uncomfortable with all the messy details that tie us to the world.  We think of ourselves as disembodied drivers sitting somewhere above the windows of our eyes, directing the flesh and bones under us like operators of a piece of heavy machinery.  In fact, the consciousness in which we take such pride is a delicate equilibrium involving millions of biological and physical variables, internal and external, a balance that is easily disrupted by something as simple as a sore tooth, a case of diarrhea, or a tiny burst blood vessel.

A computer can never grasp the nuances of a single human life, let alone the infinite complexity of natural systems writ large.  It is not a participant.  No matter how “intelligent” it may be, it does not have the equipment that would enable it to understand because understanding takes more than intelligence.  It takes empathy.  To call AI an “alien life form” is to reveal a child-like lack of insight into the very meaning of the term “life form.”

AI can never align with humanity.  If we cede control of our civilization to the machine, we will regret it.  We are hairless chimps with a gift for making tools.  It remains to be seen whether we have the wisdom to wield the power they give us.  Right now, the outlook isn’t good. . . .

ON THE MORNING OF MAY 29, 1843, JOHN FREMONT RODE OUT OF THE LITTLE VILLAGE of Kansas City with Tom “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick as his guide and 38 other hard-bitten veterans of the frontier, bound for Oregon and California on a mission that was part exploration and part empire-building.  After reconnoitering along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies and recruiting, on the way, his friend and deeply knowledgeable mountain man, Kit Carson, Fremont turned north toward the Platte River and South Pass, the gateway to the Pacific.

On August 5, his party had found its way into Wyoming’s Shirley Basin, a broad sage-covered plain north of what is now the little town of Medicine Bow.

“The surrounding country appeared to be well stocked with buffalo,” he wrote in his report, “which it was probable, after a day or two, we would not see again until our return to the Mississippi waters.  I determined to make here a provision of dried meat, which would be necessary for our subsistence in the region we were about entering, which is said to be nearly destitute of game.”[i]

Fremont was only repeating what Kit Carson and several of the other experienced mountain men in his party had told him— that the country west of the Great Divide was short on buffalo.  As the party continued into Idaho, Utah, Oregon, and California, Fremont was to discover the truth in their observations.  After many adventures and several brushes with starvation, the expedition headed back east the following spring.  On June 11, 1844, they had come as far as the Continental Divide in what is now central Colorado.

“In the course of the morning,” he recorded in his journal, “we had the first glad view of buffalo, and welcomed the appearance of two old bulls with as much joy as if they had been messengers from home. . . .  The hunters killed two fine cows near the camp.  On the opposite river-plains herds of buffalo were raising clouds of dust.”[ii]

The question of where the buffalo roamed in early America has occupied generations of academics.  Much has been written about the easternmost range of the bison, but remarkably little attention has focused on bison in the Intermountain West.  It’s clear that the heart of buffalo country lay in the prairie fastness between the Mississippi River and the easternmost ramparts of the Rockies, but reports like Fremont’s have led some ecologists to assume that there were no bison much west of the Continental Divide.

Dr. Donald Grayson, ecologist and archaeologist with the University of Washington, has a more nuanced view based on concrete evidence from the past.

“Archaeological and paleontological records document that bison were widespread in the eastern and northern parts of the Great Basin, particularly after 1600 yr BP,” he writes.  “The relatively small numbers of bison specimens that are generally provided by these sites suggests the existence of small herds of these animals, as opposed to the huge agglomerations that characterized the Great Plains during early historic times.”  Grayson’s research suggests that bison were relatively recent arrivals in the Great Basin, that they weren’t found everywhere in the Basin, and that they weren’t very abundant anywhere.[iii]

Ecologists Richard Mack and John Thompson have pointed out that weather patterns in the Great Basin encourage most range plants to grow in early spring and become dormant during the drier summer months, which would deprive bison of nutritious forage at a time when calves are starting life.  The two researchers also considered the strange difference in distribution of native dung beetles on the plains and in the basin— it seems there were always plenty of dung beetles east of the Continental Divide where there have always been lots of buffalo . . . and no dung beetles in the Intermountain country.  No buffalo, no dung, no beetles.

“Perhaps small herds persisted in the steppe west of the Rockies only by withdrawing to sites of permanent water during the summer,” they conclude.  “Nevertheless, bison herds in recent times certainly did not reach the numbers seen in the Great Plains in the early nineteenth century.”[iv]

The distinction between bison on the Great Plains and bison in the Great Basin has a practical corollary far beyond the lack of fresh meat for explorers like Fremont: The grasslands on the Great Plains were adapted to periodic heavy grazing by huge wandering herds of cattle-sized ungulates; the grasslands of the Great Basin were not.  From a strictly ecological point of view, the introduction of cattle on the Great Plains after wild bison herds had been wiped out was little more than the substitution of one heavy-footed grazing animal for another.  In the Great Basin, the arrival of cattle and sheep was an entirely new ecological phenomenon.

Before cattle, the dominant grasses growing alongside the Great Basin’s sagebrush were bunchgrasses that depended on establishing new plants by seed.  The bare ground surrounding these tufts of grass was generally covered by a living crust of lichens, mosses, and cyanobacteria.  As cattle grazed, they nipped off the tops of the grasses, destroying the seed heads, reducing reproduction, and often uprooting the plants themselves.  At the same time, they trampled the soil crust into dust, encouraging erosion, decreasing the supply of fixed nitrogen, and exposing the soil underneath to increased evaporation.  Sheep added to the grazing impact by browsing on shrubs as well as eating grass.  By 1909, there were more than 6,000,000 sheep on the range in Wyoming alone, more than 700,000 cattle and 153,000 horses.[v]  The effect on rangeland was predictable.

By themselves, the vast herds and flocks of livestock reduced the amount of food and shelter the native plants offered wildlife, and, as native vegetation weakened, the advent of farming along with ranching brought another ecological sledgehammer to the Intermountain West— cheatgrass.  The ecological impact of cheatgrass is a huge topic in itself.  Here, it’s enough to say that cheat was introduced accidentally and, occasionally, on purpose.  It probably arrived in contaminated lots of small-grain seed, in straw bedding for livestock shoveled out of rail cars, and in the guts and manure of cattle and sheep themselves.   It was even planted on purpose to produce fast-growing livestock forage.  It was well adapted to the winter rains and summer droughts of the Intermountain West and probably would have gained a foothold even in the absence of grazing, but the massive range abuse inflicted by cattle and sheep from the 1870s well into the twentieth century created ideal conditions for its spread.

In the history of invasive weeds, few plants have achieved such total domination of entire landscapes in so short a time.  In 1992, it was estimated that 3.3 million acres of rangeland in the Intermountain West had been overrun with cheatgrass and associated invasives, and another 62 million acres were at risk of invasion.[vi] Since then, new invasions have been occurring at the rate of more than 500,000 acres per year.[vii]

So what does all this have to do with sage grouse?

If there is one common denominator in four generations of sage grouse research, it is that sage grouse need sage.  The birds depend on sagebrush and the native grasses and other plants underneath for cover and much of their food— they are, in the parlance of the ecologist, sagebrush obligates.  Eliminate sagebrush, and you eliminate sage grouse. By 1900, much of the sagebrush that remained on the landscape was hardly fit to support livestock, let alone the wildlife that depended on it.  In 1904, Wyoming’s wildlife officials estimated that there were only 5,000 pronghorn on the state’s primary antelope range.[viii]  Sage grouse numbers had collapsed.  According to the Wyoming state game warden at the time, “Sage grouse have decreased at an alarming rate. . . . The destruction of sage hens may justly be charged to excessive shooting and destruction of eggs and young broods by the large bands of range sheep.”[ix]

A generation later, the pioneering Wyoming sage grouse researcher George Girard saw the situation in about the same way.

“Many sections of the state, at one time favorable for the production of sage grouse, have been converted through agricultural development into areas of intensive farming and grazing,” he wrote in 1937.  “The effect of this competition in its natural range, combined with the lack of protection from hunters, has resulted in the depletion of this game bird to a level which will require drastic measures for insurance of its restoration.”[x]

Sage grouse hunting was controlled by the late 1930s— several states closed their sage grouse seasons entirely, and when they were reopened, wildlife agencies had the enforcement personnel to make seasons and bag limits stick.  At the same time, the Taylor Grazing Act imposed strict new limits on grazing in the public domain.  The combination led to a renaissance in sage grouse numbers, at least where sagebrush cover still existed.

Still, the birds never rebounded to the astonishing densities the sage had supported before settlement.  George Bird Grinnell, an eminent naturalist with long experience on the western frontier, was never fond of exaggeration.  In the fall of 1886, he was camped in Wyoming’s Shirley Basin, the far eastern edge of sage grouse range.  He woke one morning to the sound of wings.

“Looking up from the tent at the edge of the bluff above us, we could see projecting over it the heads of hundreds of the birds, and, as those standing there took flight, others stepped forward to occupy their places.  The number of Grouse which flew over the camp reminded me of the oldtime flights of Passenger Pigeons that I used to see when I was a boy.  Before long the narrow valley where the water was, was a moving mass of gray.  I have no means whatever of estimating the number of birds which I saw, but there must have been thousands of them.”[xi]

By the early twentieth century, the unrelenting intensity of grazing had prepared the way for outright loss of huge tracts of sage to cheatgrass and devastated the sagebrush habitats that remained.  Half the original habitat of the sage grouse was simply erased.  It’s a legacy of ignorance and greed left to us by the generations of stockmen and farmers who first tamed the Intermountain West.

I think it’s fair to say that many modern ranchers share a concern for the sage and the wildlife it supports.  For some, their only reason is the lingering threat of a federal listing of the sage grouse and/or another denizen of the sage, like the pygmy rabbit or Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, as threatened or even endangered.  Others have a stake in the land that transcends business.  Either way, they want guidance on grazing practices that provide for sage grouse.  The question then arises: What sort of grazing regime suits sage grouse?  Is it even possible to keep healthy populations of sage grouse and profitable numbers of cattle on the same landscape and, if it is, how?

And, even after decades of research, the shocking answer seems to be: We don’t know for sure.

In 1937, George Girard wrote: “An ideal sage grouse refuge would also necessarily have to be protected from grazing of any sort,” but he added, “If deferred grazing were practiced, giving the grass and other forage an opportunity to develop, it would furnish food and cover and consequently nesting areas.”[xii]

In his 1952 monograph on sage grouse, Bob Patterson made a distinction between grazing and overgrazing.  “As a result of overgrazing by sheep, a small parcel of land at the lower end of Eden Valley lost its attractiveness as a nesting area for sage grouse,” but “there is no indication that moderate utilization of the range in the upper Green River Basin by sheep had created any conditions seriously detrimental to sage grouse.”[xiii]

In 1994, a group of Oregon researchers monitored 124 sage grouse nests.  Only 18 of the nests escaped the notice of predators, and these successful nests had “greater cover of tall, residual grasses and medium height shrubs” than nests that had been destroyed by predators.  Our data indicated the value of residual grass cover at sage grouse nests.”[xiv]

A 1998 study in southern Wyoming found that “areas with greater shrub coverage, taller grass, and residual grass, and greater litter cover were used for nesting.”  The researchers went on to observe that “our results suggest that grazing management practices that promote increased height and coverage of grass will increase chick survival.”  They recommended “maintaining residual grass heights of more than 10 centimeters to provide nesting sage grouse with suitable concealment and screening cover.”[xv]

In 2005, yet another group of researchers found that sage grouse preferred to nest in places that had more shrub canopy, residual grass cover, and grass height.  They concluded that “management strategies that protect dense sagebrush stands and enhance residual grass cover and height within those stands should be used to increase nesting success of greater sage grouse.”[xvi]

Other studies have reached the same conclusions.  The evidence is overwhelming— sage grouse prefer to nest and raise broods in stands of sage that have a thriving understory of grasses and broad-leaved plants.  This makes intuitive sense.  Grass cover helps hide a nesting hen from predators, provides escape cover for chicks after they hatch, and supports a smorgasbord of insects, seeds, and foliage to feed the growing brood.  If a little grass/forb cover is good, it would seem that more would be better.  In ecosystems that evolved with no significant herds of large grazing animals, the science suggests that the way to produce the most sage grouse would be to eliminate herds of large domestic grazing animals entirely.

Two long-term studies, one in Idaho and one in eastern Montana, have tried to quantify the effects different grazing regimes have on sage grouse.  After a decade of research in each place, neither study offers much guidance for a rancher interested in supporting the birds.  Is it better to rest a sagebrush pasture first thing in the spring when sage grouse are nesting, or is it preferable to leave some forage standing at the end of the growing season so there will be cover before the forage starts to grow the next spring?  These studies provide little insight.  Is it better to rest a pasture for a year or more?  What about rest-rotation grazing?  Is there some optimum level of grazing that supports livestock and grouse at the same time?  The studies offer few answers, except to imply that, when managed “responsibly,” grouse and grazing seem to go together without much problem.

That’s a convenient conclusion, since it implies that ranchers and land managers like the BLM  have had nothing to do with the ongoing decline in sage grouse numbers. It doesn’t bother to define what “responsible” management looks like; it flies in the face of a huge body of research at the scale of the individual nesting hen, and it ignores the history of livestock’s impact on grouse in the early twentieth century.  The apparent contradiction is troubling.

It’s worth noting that stricter control of grazing on the public domain, beginning in the late 1930s, combined with effective regulation of hunting, gave sage grouse a boost that lasted more than 30 years.  The renewed decline in the last decades of the twentieth century seems to be due, at least in part, to another influence.  We know that sage grouse do better when the sage gets more precipitation, and a quick look at the data on drought shows that the last fifty years have been much drier than the fifty years that preceded them.  A lack of moisture takes a toll on everything in the sage, from grass and forbs to livestock and wildlife like pronghorn and grouse.  So maybe we can blame the decline on climate change.

But that doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility as managers.  We can’t make it rain, but we can adjust livestock grazing pressure as conditions change, especially on the public domain.  A recent analysis shows that 56,000,000 acres of range under the aegis of the Bureau of Land Management have failed to meet the agency’s own standards for ecological health, which are not known to be overly stringent.  On at least 37,000,000 of those acres, overgrazing is the cause,[xvii] and on much of the rest, a long history of range abuse has almost certainly encouraged cheatgrass and contributed to the problem.  Whatever effect well-managed grazing might have on sage grouse, we know from history that persistent range abuse is bad for grouse and other wildlife and no better for ranchers in the long haul.

There’s a lot we still don’t know for certain about the interaction between sage grouse and livestock in the Intermountain West.  The best way to change that is with long-term peer-reviewed research.  Until we have dependable answers from that effort, we should pay attention to what science already tells us and leave more grass for the grouse.

 

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[i] Fremont, John Charles, 1851.  Exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains, in the years 1842; and to Oregon and California, 1843-44.  Hall & Dickson, Syracuse, NY.   p.158 online, p.126.

https://archive.org/details/narrativeexplor02frgoog/page/n164/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater. Accessed August 14, 2024.

 

[ii] Ibid, p. 410-411 online, p.281.

https://archive.org/details/narrativeexplor02frgoog/page/n418/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater.  Accessed August 14, 2024.

[iii] Grayson, Donald K., 2006.  Holocene bison in the Great Basin, western USA.  The Holocene 16(6): 913-925.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239927776_Holocene_bison_in_the_Great_Basin_western_USA.  Accessed August 14, 2024.

[iv] Mack, Richard N. and John N. Thompson, 1982.  Evolution in steppe with few large hoofed mammals.  The American Naturalist 119(6): 757-773.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/283953.  Accessed August 15, 2024.

 

[v] Patterson, Robert, 1952.  The sage grouse in Wyoming.  Sage Books, Denver, CO.  P.274.

 

[vi] Pellant, Mike and Christi Hall, 1992.  Distribution of two exotic grasses on intermountain rangelands: status in 1992.  In: Proceedings— Ecology and management of annual rangelands.  U.S. Forest Service General Technical Report INT—GTR_313.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs_int/int_gtr313.pdf.  Accessed August 15, 2024.

[vii] Smith, Joseph T., et al., 2021.  The elevational ascent and spread of exotic annual grass dominance in the Great Basin, USA.  Diversity and Distributions 28: 83-96.

file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/Diversity%20and%20Distributions%20-%202021%20-%20Smith%20-%20The%20elevational%20ascent%20and%20spread%20of%20exotic%20annual%20grass%20dominance%20in%20the.pdf.  Accessed August 15, 2024.

[viii] Nowlin, D.C., 1904.  Annual report of the state game warden of Wyoming, 1904.  Chaplin, Spafford, & Mathison Printer, Laramie, WY.  Pp.9

[ix] Ibid, pp. 11-12.

[x] Girard, George, 1937.  Life history, habits, habits, and food of the sage grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus.  University of Wyoming Publications Vol. III, No. 1, pp.44-45.

[xi] Bendire, Charles, E., 1892.  Life histories of North American birds with special reference to their breeding habits and eggs.  United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.  p.111.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c026136661&seq=123.  Accessed August 19, 2024.

[xii] Girard, p.45.

[xiii] Patterson, op cit.  p.121.

[xiv] Gregg, Michael A., et al, 1994.  Vegetational cover and predation of sage grouse nests in Oregon.  Journal of Wildlife Management 58(1): 162-166.

[xv] Heath, B.J., et al., 1998.  Sage-grouse productivity, survival, and seasonal habitat use among three ranches with different livestock grazing, predator control, and harvest management practices.  Pittman-Robertson Project Completion Report, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Cheyenne, WY.

[xvi] Holloran, et al, 2005.  Greater sage-grouse nesting habitat selection and success in Wyoming.  Journal of Wildlife Management 69(2): 638-649.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3803734.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Aa29f6e96c7a8b5c787c357178f2599f5&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1.  Accessed August 20, 2024.

[xvii] Rosenthal, Chandra and Josh Osher, 2024.  Much of U.S. rangeland in poor ecological condition.  Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, May 15, 2024.

https://peer.org/much-of-us-rangeland-in-poor-ecological-condition/.  Accessed August 20, 2024.

THE RUMOR FLOATED AT THE FRINGES OF THE JESUIT REPORTS TO OFFICIALS IN Quebec, stories of a river bigger than the St. Lawrence flowing south from the Great Lakes into the unknown.  The French authorities hoped it might prove to be the long-sought passage to the Pacific, but, whatever its course, they needed to fill in the blank spot on the map.  So, in 1672, they asked Louis Jolliet, a native of New France and an experienced coureur de bois, to find the river the Ottawa called Missi Sipi and follow wherever it led.  The Jesuits insisted on sending a priest with the expedition to bring the word of God to the heathen, and Jacques Marquette, an experienced backcountry cleric was chosen for the trip.  Jolliet launched his canoes from Sault Ste. Marie in the spring of 1673, stopped at Michilimackinac in May to pick up Marquette, then continued down the north shore of what is now known as Lake Michigan, into Green Bay, up the Fox River, and off the edge of the French map.

They found the river and headed south into a landscape like nothing a European had ever seen, an immense country of grass and wildflowers, head high in the summer breeze, stretching to the western horizon.  They called it “prairie,” a reference to the grassy openings they had known in France, but this was something far different.  As Jolliet commented on his return:

“At first, when we were told of these treeless lands, I imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing.  But we have certainly observed the contrary; and no better soil can be found, either for corn, or vines, or for any fruit whatever. . . . There are prairies three, six, ten, twenty leagues in length and three in width, surrounded by forest of the same extent; beyond these, the prairies begin again, so that there is as much of one sort of land as of the other.  Sometimes we saw grass very short, and, at other times, five or six feet high; hemp, which grows naturally here, reaches a height of eight feet.”[i]

Jolliet had spent a lifetime hunting in the untrammeled forests of New France, but he was still impressed by the abundance of game.

“The prairies and forests share this country, which provides beautiful pasturage for a large number of animals with which it is filled. The oxen [bison] never flee.  The Father [Marquette] has told of as many as 400 of them in a single band.  The deer and the hinds [elk], the roe deer [probably whitetails] are almost everywhere; the cocks [prairie chickens?] chase each other on all sides; the peroquets [Carolina parakeets] fly in bands of ten or twelve, and the quails are in the meadows at all times.”[ii]

One hundred and fifty years later, the Indian agent Joseph Street crossed the Mississippi into the prairie uplands and timbered bottoms in what is now northeastern Iowa.

“I had never rode through a country so full of game,” he wrote in 1833.  “The hunter who accompanied me, though living most of his time in the woods, expressed his astonishment at the abundance of all kinds of game.”[iii]

In 1839, geologist David Dale Owen came to the region, charged by the Secretary of the Treasury to complete the nation’s first survey of the minerals and soils in Iowa, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois.  The report he filed was long on scientific detail, but, at one point, he paused to consider the esthetics of the country he surveyed:

“At the Mississippi,” he wrote in 1840, “the prairie for the most part extends to the water’s edge, and renders the scenery truly beautiful.  Imagine a stream a mile in width, whose waters are as transparent as those of a mountain spring, flowing over beds of rock and gravel— fancy the prairie commencing at the water’s edge, a natural meadow of deep green grass and beautiful flowers, rising with a gentle slope for miles so that, in the vast panorama, thousands of acres are exposed to the eye.  Sometimes the woodland extends along this river for miles . .. and sometimes in vast groves of several miles in extent, standing alone, like islands in this wilderness of grass and flowers.”[iv]

This was the New World’s tallgrass prairie as the first Europeans found it.

And, as soon as John Deere and his successors designed plows up to the challenge of breaking the thick prairie sod, this was the wilderness of grass and flowers we proceeded to take apart.  Estimates vary, but there’s general agreement that less than five percent of that original grassland remains, making it one of the rarest ecosystems in North America.

A couple of years back, I was contemplating that grim statistic as I stood on the edge of a prairie restoration in northern Illinois, a jurisdiction that proudly, if more than a little ironically, calls itself “the prairie state,” though less than one-tenth of one percent of the state’s original tallgrass has survived into the present.

It was the middle of July, and this little patch of natives was well into a display that lasts from June to late September, a procession of wildflowers that rivals the best efforts of modern landscapers and injects a vibrant patchwork of color into the monotone of the surrounding corn.  The field literally hummed with bees, most of them native to this place; butterflies floated from one blossom to another, and a vast collection of smaller lace-winged insects hovered over the vegetation.

I’ve seen the carpets of spring beauties on the slopes of Arkansas’ Boston Mountains in the first days of spring, the stands of trillium in the maple forest of Wisconsin, the vast swaths of balsamroot on the summer hillsides along the Snake River in Wyoming— all of them exquisite evocations of the wild places that nurture them, breathtakingly beautiful.  But I have to say they pale in comparison to the fireworks of a thriving stand of tallgrass in the middle of July.

As I contemplated the exuberance of that patch of prairie, my ecological training began whispering in my ear.  This is a system that has been shaping itself since the last glacier retreated.  It’s the reason there were four or five feet of ink-black topsoil here when the first plow broke the sod, the reason the fertility of this ground remains the envy of the world.

If an ecologist were to measure the productivity of this system in its natural state, I wondered, what would those numbers show?  The primary production of the prairie vegetation itself added to the herds of bison, elk, and deer; the flocks of prairie chickens; the clouds of waterfowl— from a strictly quantitative point of view, how much could this landscape produce in its pristine condition?

It would have been staggering, certainly not as much as it produces now, I conceded to myself, but then, we inject an immense amount of energy into the system— the fertilizer and diesel fuel, the herbicides that focus all the output into the crops we’ve introduced; the pesticides that eliminate all the competition for those crops.  Subtract those massive inputs, and what’s left?  Does our version of this place produce more than the original?

And there is the question of sustainability, I thought.  What we’ve done with the prairie requires constant maintenance.  It degrades the water and pollutes the air.  And, if beauty matters at all in our lives, our approach to husbanding this place gives us none.  We set out to create a garden here and built a factory instead.

I don’t know whether we could have found a way to live in the tallgrass that didn’t destroy at least some of it, but, at the very least, we might have tried to find a way to live alongside it.  The ecologist E.O. Wilson has argued for a world split evenly between human demands and ecosystem integrity, half for people, half for the rest of life on the planet.[v]  What would the heartland of America be like if half of it were devoted to the culture of the crops we need while the other half remained “a wilderness of grass and flowers”?  Not as productive of profit, perhaps, but certainly a more beautiful, more livable home.

Restraint is not one of our virtues.  All too often, when we set our minds on a course of action, we take it to the most destructive extreme, generally without much further thought.  If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.  It’s a poor way to strike a balance in our affairs, an even poorer way to find happiness.  As I stood on the edge of that tiny patch of prairie, it occurred to me that it was a reminder of what we stand to lose when our only yardstick for success is a bank account.  The tattered scraps of tallgrass that remain are a reminder of a wilderness we erased, a monument to a mistake.  Like most of the serious mistakes in life, this one can’t be undone.  All we can do is regret it . . . and, if we have any sense at all, learn from the loss.

 

[i] Madson, John, 1983.  Where the sky began.  Houghton Mifflin.  pp.5-6.

[ii] Danlanglez, Jean, 1944.  The 1674 account of the discovery of the Mississippi.  Mid-America; An historical review, 26(4): 319.

https://archive.org/details/sim_mid-america-an-historical-review_1944-10_26_4/page/318/mode/2up.  Accessed July 4, 2026.

[iii] Dinsmore, James, 1994.  A country so full of game: The story of wildlife in Iowa.  University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, IA.

[iv]  Madson, op cit, 1983.  P.11.

[v] Wilson, Edward O., 2017.  A biologist’s manifesto for preserving life on Earth: An eminent scientists offers a bold vision for preserving Earth’s biodiversity.  Sierra, Dec. 12, 2016.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-1-january-february/feature/biologists-manifesto-for-preserving-life-earth.  Accessed July 11, 2026.

Eastern cottontail, copyright 2017, Chris Madson, all rights reserved

 

SOMEWHERE IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE ONGOING DEBATES OVER THE RELATIONSHIP between humans and artificial intelligence, there’s a question that never seems to die: If a machine should achieve consciousness, will it merit some sort of special ethical consideration?

The underlying issue has been a source of consternation for well over a century as the argument over animal rights has ebbed and flowed.  Are other living things conscious, and, if they are, do those beings deserve special moral standing?

This was an easier question to answer when we were content to extend the bright line just far enough to include chimps and possibly gorillas, but, as our observation of other species has broadened and deepened, that line has moved, blurred, and, finally, disappeared.  A growing body of evidence suggests that even plants are aware of their surroundings, communicate with each other, defend themselves against damage, and anticipate threats to their wellbeing.

If, by “consciousness,” we mean the ephemeral condition of “mind” we possess ourselves, then it’s clear no other organism can possibly be conscious.  But, if we take the behavior of other species as evidence of a level of sentience and awareness, even foresight, then the definition seems broad enough to include most, if not all, other living things.  In fact, it raises the possibility that a machine could someday achieve something that looks and sounds like consciousness.

Alan Turing was the first computer engineer to consider the possibility that a machine could be conscious.  His yardstick, later dubbed the Turing Test, didn’t offer a definition of what consciousness might be; it simply allowed for the possibility that, whatever it was, a machine might eventually offer a plausible imitation.  In recent years, other engineers have offered revisions of Turing’s approach, never offering a workable definition of consciousness but confidently assuring us they would soon build machines that had it.

Meanwhile, generations of scientists and philosophers have continued the human struggle to understand consciousness . . . with little success.  We haven’t been able to grasp its essential nature; we haven’t been able to find its seat in the human anatomy, still less in the structures of many other organisms that show unmistakable signs of consciousness; we’re not even certain how to recognize its outward manifestations.  Michael Pollan’s recent book, A World Appears, bears witness to our perennial confusion about consciousness.  Like quality in art, we don’t know what it is, but we know it when we see it— or, rather, feel it.

I find it unlikely that we can create what we can’t even define.  It’s far more likely that we will find a way to fool ourselves into believing a collection of circuit boards has somehow developed a “mind,” even a “soul.”

Our ever-expanding catalog of consciousness in other organisms demonstrates that many other living things, structurally simple and complex, have developed some version that allows them to collect information about their environment, assess that information, and act in a way that enhances their chances of survival.  If that’s true, then two observations emerge: first, that consciousness as we see it today is the product of at least four billion years of rigorous selection and specialization; second, that consciousness is probably a universal characteristic of life on earth.

A machine can never join that planetary fraternity.  No matter how immense its processing speed and complexity, no matter how universal its grasp of data, it cannot live.  If and when it ceases to function— when it “dies”— its constituent parts won’t feed into the organic processes that drive the world’s natural cycles.  It does not share an organic heritage or contribute its genetic material to a future shaped by organic evolution.  It is, and always will be, a machine— its structure, its analytical capabilities, its essence based on the fallible ideas of a handful of engineers with no grasp of the nature of consciousness.

We owe an ethical debt to the rest of life on earth, partly because we depend on the biosphere in its entirety and partly because there is reason to believe that all the children of earth bear some flavor of that ephemeral essence we call consciousness.  We owe nothing to our machines.  They are our tools, not our brothers.

Grasshopper on curly dock, Chris Madson

 

IT MAY BE THE FIRST SOUND I REMEMBER, AFTER MY MOTHER’S VOICE: THE TWO insistent notes at the beginning, then the jumble of song, sweet as strawberry preserves on fresh homemade bread.  A meadowlark, in the first dew-soaked cool of a summer morning, the anthem of Iowa corn country.

As I reach back, it comes to me against a background hum of bees on clover in the hayfield behind the house, the clatter of grasshopper wings in the wildflowers along the white gravel road, the chorus of crickets in the damp shadows, fading with the rising sun.  And, out on the edge of the shelterbelt, a rooster pheasant crowing in the first light.  The sounds of childhood.

As I grew and eventually moved to other parts of the Midwest, the sounds faded, bit by bit, so slowly I hardly noticed.  Between 1966, the first year national surveys of birds were run, and 1985, populations of the eastern meadowlark had declined by nearly sixty percent, nationwide.[i] Bobwhite quail had declined by nearly two-thirds.[ii]  Pheasant numbers had dropped by a third.[iii]  In Iowa, the pheasant harvest slipped from 1.4 million to 600,000.  The Nebraska harvest went from 1.2 million to 470,000.

The pheasant managers had a simple explanation for the decline— a lack of cover.  The weedy roadsides, pastures, and neglected corners that had supported wildlife were disappearing as farmers gained the horsepower and chemicals to bring them into production.  At the same time, federal farm policy was changing. From 1956 to 1964, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had paid farmers to retire cropland for under provisions of the Soil Bank program.  At the height of the program in 1960, 28.7 million acres were supporting some kind of cover.  The last of the contracts expired in 1973,[iv] and the cover went under the plow with predictable effects on upland game birds and a host of other Midwestern wildlife.

The solution seemed straightforward enough.  Wildlife in the farming heartland needed cover.  After more than a decade of lobbying from a coalition of conservation interests, the Department of Agriculture rolled out its 1985 farm bill, which an ambitious program to establish cover on marginal cropland—[v] the Conservation Reserve Program [CRP].  The bill set a target of 40-45 million acres of CRP cover, and, by 1990, there were 33.9 million acres under contract.[vi]  Hunters, serious birdwatchers, and a host of other conservationists celebrated the unprecedented establishment of wildlife cover on working land and sat back to wait for good news from wildlife surveys in the field.

The news was underwhelming. Numbers of eastern meadowlarks continued to decline, although the rate of loss had slowed a little.  The same for other grassland specialists like the bobolink, eastern kingbird, and grasshopper sparrow.  The catastrophic trend in numbers of the northern bobwhite actually turned slightly upward for two or three years before continuing its heartbreaking decline.  And pheasants?  The nationwide survey of pheasants stabilized,[vii] and harvest in the core of pheasant country rose substantially, although it didn’t return to the glory days of late 1950s.

Pheasant managers and other avian biologists were puzzled.  There was more federally subsidized cover on the ground than there had been in at the peak of Soil Bank— why weren’t there more birds?

Scott Taylor, formerly a biologist and upland bird manager for the Nebraska Game and Parks Department and now coordinator for the National Wild Pheasant Conservation Plan, was just finishing his Ph.D. in upland bird research as the question arose.  The first hint of an answer, he said, came from an unlikely place: Great Britain.

“The idea that chick survival, specifically, was something that needed greater attention was the publication of Dick Potts’ book on gray partridge.  I think that was ’86.  That’s when the tide turned here in North America.”

The book was The Partridge: Pesticides, Predation and Conservation.  The author was G. Richard Potts, an English farmer’s son who earned his Ph.D. with his research on seabirds but quickly became fascinated by the worldwide decline of the gray partridge.  The book was the culmination of eighteen years of work on the gray partridge in the southeastern British county of Sussex, which followed twenty-two years of earlier investigations supported by well-heeled sportsmen in the area.

Not even five years into his study, Potts had already found that “food insects might be at least as important to chick survival as the weather.” His subsequent decades of work only supported that view.  After careful examination of the effects of weather, predators of eggs and adults, and loss to human hunters, he concluded that, “taken overall, partridge populations appear as if they are on a down escalator. . . . The only way to move back up the escalator or stop going down is to improve the supply of insects to the chicks.”[viii]

Potts documented the effect insecticides had on food supply, but he was also among the first ecologists to recognize that herbicides could have the same effect by killing the broad-leafed plants that supported insects.

Research in Germany, Hungary, and Britain during the 1950s and 1960s supported his own findings, “that herbicides had a dramatic effect on the insect and other arthropod fauna, reducing overall densities by 50%.”[ix]

Potts’ research squared with what American wildlife biologists were beginning to see in CRP habitat— a monoculture of tall, thick grass wasn’t the best habitat for many grassland birds, including pheasants and bobwhite quail.[x][xi]  That was when Pheasants Forever got involved.

 

Peter Berthelsen was a biologist with PF, beginning in the early 1990s.  He’d done the research for his master’s degree on grassland songbirds and pheasants in CRP.  In the early years of CRP, he says, the typical cover crops were “brome and alfalfa.  When a state wildlife agency or the Fish and Wildlife Service would say, ‘USDA— maybe we could look at planting some different mixtures,’ USDA said, ‘Hey, this is our program; we got it.’”

It took years to convince the authorities to get a wider variety of plants into CRP habitat and to manage the vegetation to encourage more broad-leafed plants, the vegetation that supported insects for a spectrum of grassland birds, game and nongame.  As the Department of Agriculture began to see the advantages of more diverse stands of cover plants, native prairie grasses and wildflowers found their way into seed mixes, and in 2002, Pheasants Forever and a coalition of other conservation groups convinced Congress to make an important addition to the conservation title of the farm bill— mid-contract management.  The new provision required participants in the program to break up stands of cover halfway through the federal contract.  The disturbance could be fire, a light disking with a tractor, a herbicide, or interseeding broad-leafed plants— anything to open up thriving stands of grass that would otherwise overpower broad-leafed plants.

While this change in approach was debated and finally implemented, another alarming ecological trend began to emerge.  Beekeepers found themselves struggling to maintain their bees.  As it turned out, the arrival of the exotic Varroa mite in 1987 was part of the problem along with the subsequent appearance of the mysterious colony collapse disorder[xii], and the approval of a new generation of insecticides, the neonicotinoids, certainly didn’t help.[xiii] But much of the problem stemmed from a fundamental change on the American farm landscape— a lack of flowers.  Without a succession of nectar- and pollen-producing plants through the growing season, honeybees were struggling to survive.

At first glance, a loss of honey bees would seem to be of little concern, except to a few people with a sweet tooth, but bees are responsible for pollinating a variety of crops, from almonds and apples to citrus fruit and cherries, that are crucial to American food supply.  It’s been estimated that pollinators are responsible for one in every three bites of food in the United States.  Their activities support $15 billion in agricultural income.[xiv]  With those stakes on the table, the Department of Agriculture and even the White House began to take notice.

As the trouble with bees began to emerge, an even more popular icon on the American landscape was  also showing signs of distress.  Sometime in the early to mid-1990s, numbers of monarch butterflies started a long slide.[xv][xvi]  The cause of the decline appeared to be the steady loss of nectar-producing wildflowers on the American landscape and, particularly, the loss of several species of milkweed, the only plants monarchs use for egg-laying and the sole source of food for their larvae.

 

And so, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the interests of an unprecedented spectrum of conservationists converged on the need for wildflowers and insects across the farmscapes of America.  Pheasants Forever had already been at work on the problem for more than a decade, thinking in terms of forage for birds, but this surge in public interest presented a new opportunity.

Pete Berthelsen remembers the discussions that led the organization to an even broader view of wildlife habitat.  When the idea of providing habitat for pollinators arose, there was some initial concern among the leaders of the group that the members weren’t interested in bees and butterflies, but the staff quickly recognized that “pollinator habitat is pheasant habitat is grassland songbird habitat, duck habitat.  It didn’t take long,” he recalls, for the organization to make the commitment to that broader mission.

“And the members,” he says, with a smile, “never skipped a beat.  They got it immediately— that it was all the same thing.”  The Pheasants Forever effort on behalf of pollinators and other insects reached from the grassroots to Washington.  Dave Nomsen, PF’s tireless champion for conservation in the farm bill, built alliances with other groups that led to a significant change in the 2008 farm bill, a provision that emphasized the creation of habitat for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.[xvii]  Two years later,[xviii] that provision crystallized into Conservation Practice 42— Pollinator Habitat Establishment— that required a minimum of nine species of wildflowers to be planted, three blooming in the spring, three during the summer, and three in the fall.

Jason Beich, one of PF’s conservation specialists in the seed program, says Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever saw the CP42 program as a great opportunity.

“We knew those mixes for CP42 and pollinator habitat were the exact same mixes we want to see on the ground for pheasants and quail.  So we jumped on that before anybody else did and ran with it.  We started doing landowner workshops, partner trainings, habitat tours, everything that we could to absolutely promote the tar out of CP42 throughout that farm bill.”

By 2019, there were more than 507,000 acres of CP42 pollinator habitat across the country— 220,000 acres in Iowa alone, 106,000 in Illinois.[xix]

Jason convinced his granddad to plant some of the pollinator habitat on his farm in central Illinois.  Back in the 1950s, this landscape had been stiff with pheasants, but over the next fifty years, roosters were thin on the ground.  Last fall, the birds were back on the family farm.

“Me and my dad and some of our buddies— I think we killed around 120 wild birds.  That might not be much for South Dakota, but for east-central Illinois, we had a heck of a year.”

With thirty-nine habitat specialists and 155 farm bill biologists scattered across pheasant country, Pheasants Forever was in a unique position to “promote the tar” out of programs that support pollinators . . . and insect forage for game birds.  In addition to the organization’s long-standing cooperation with state wildlife agencies and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Pheasants Forever sought out state highway departments to help establish pollinator habitat on roadsides and median strips along with state departments of agriculture and soil and water conservation districts to open conversations about pollinator habitat with farmers.  PF reached out to beekeepers through organizations like the Minnesota Honey Bee Producers Association and the Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund.

It also found an ally in the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, based in Portland, Oregon.   Xerces began its work in the early 1970s as a champion of butterflies but quickly broadened its focus to include all invertebrates.  Today, in the Lincoln, Nebraska, office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Xerces biologist and pollinator conservation planner Rae Powers works with the ag agencies and Pheasants Forever farm bill biologists on a common goal: building habitat to support insects and the wildlife that depends on those insects.  She’s one of ten Xerces biologists who work with the USDA across the region.

Rae is enthusiastic about her connection with the Pheasants Forever specialists.

“It’s been awesome,” she says of her work with Pheasants Forever.  “Honestly, I’ve been really impressed with the depth of knowledge on the Pheasants Forever staff here in Nebraska.  I feel like they’re called ‘Pheasants Forever,’ but really they’re thinking about all kinds of wildlife, and I love that. They’ve been knowledgeable about pollinators and what pollinators need.  Obviously, that team had been having a lot of conversations about pollinators and monarchs. I’m consistently impressed with their thoughtfulness.”

 

Pheasants Forever’s commitment to the pollinator effort reaches even further, right down to the ground itself.  In the early years of the farm bill, many CRP fields were planted with one or two species of grass because it was hard to find seed for anything else.  Recognizing the need for a greater variety of plants on the land, Pheasants Forever got into the business of finding sources of seeds, for food plots and for diversified planting of native grasses and flowers.

These days, they offer seed mixes with up to forty-five species of plants, far and above the nine species required in CP42 plantings.  Their mixes are tailored to region, climate, slope, and moisture, and they’re happy to create custom mixes tailored to individual needs.  They provide seed and planting advice to state wildlife agencies, highway departments, farmers, and, in small quantities, to city folk who are interested in helping monarchs and other charismatic insects in their backyards.

Pheasants Forever president and CEO, Howard Vincent, saw the growing concern over pollinators as an opportunity to show a wider public that the organization was doing more than trying to produce pheasants.

“The tools that we’re using like buffers, native prairie, deep-rooted forbs,” he says, “are the single best tools to benefit a wide spectrum of wildlife, including pollinators, monarchs, pheasants, quail, deer, neotrops, the list goes on and on.”

The question the organization faced, a generation ago, was how to get more people involved in the effort to maintain diverse, productive habitat in farm country: “How could we be more relevant to a broader constituency, not just hunters of pheasants and quail— who else would benefit by this?”

And the pollinator effort proved to offer a powerful way of doing just that.  Vincent remembers a story Pete Berthelsen brought back from a speaking engagement in California.

“There was an older woman who was at an almond growers and Xerces conference,” he says.  “She stood up after Pete Berthelsen had made a presentation to these five, six hundred people.  Stood up and said, ‘Pheasants Forever is a hunting organization and I’m anti-hunting.  I don’t believe in that.  I sent my membership in this morning because nobody does more for pollinators than Pheasants Forever.’  And she sat down.

“That’s it, right there, in a nutshell.”

So it is.

The pollinator effort is not, in itself, a panacea.  Even with the improvements our new-found concern for insects has wrought, CRP and the rest of the conservation title of the farm bill have not turned the tide for grasshopper sparrows and field sparrows and bobwhite quail.[xx]  According to the long-term surveys, the declines in the populations of these species continues, although at a much slower rate.  What we’ve done to build habitat on the working landscape, so far, isn’t enough.  But the alliances that are forming on behalf of butterflies, bees, and game birds hold hope for the future.

Well over a century ago, John Muir found poetry in a basic ecological truth.  “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”[xxi]  That goes for my meadowlarks and monarchs, for aphids and pheasant chicks, for beetles and bobwhite.  It’s just as true for birdwatchers and beekeepers, hunters and hikers, farmers and city dwellers, lovers of wildflowers and consumers of clean water.  Pheasants are the miner’s canaries of American farmland, unimaginably tough, remarkably resilient, but ultimately dependent on the health of the land that supports them.   Their future is ours.

For all the political and ecological complexities the Pheasants Forever pollinator effort entails, its bottom-line message is simple and compelling: We’re all in this together.

————————

[i]  Breeding Bird Survey, U.S. Geological Survey.  https://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/.  Accessed March 10, 2020.

[ii] BBS. Ibid. 

[iii] BBS.  Ibid.

[iv] Helms, J. Douglas, 1985.  Brief History of the USDA Soil Bank Program.  Historical Insights Number 1, United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service.  https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1045666.pdf.

[v] O’Brien, Doug, nd.  Summary and Evolution of the U.S. Farm Bill Conservation Titles.  The National Agricultural Law Center.

[vi] Osborn, C. Tim, Felix Llacuna, and Michael Linsenbigler, nd.  The Conservation Reserve Program: Enrollment Statistics for Signup Periods 1-12 and Fiscal Years 1986-93.  Natural Resources and Environment Division, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Statistical Bulletin No. 925. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/47094/32455_sb925.pdf?v=0.

[vii] BBS, op cit.

[viii] p. 192.  Potts, G.R., 1986.  The Partridge: Pesticides, Predation and Conservation.  Collins Professional and Technical Books, London, UK.

[ix] p.108, Potts.

[x]  Patterson, Matthew P. and L.B. Best, 1996.  Bird adundance and nesting success in Iowa CRP fields: The importance of vegetation structure and composition.  The American Midland Naturalist 135 (!): 153-167.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2426881.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Acf003524f550ba51ff36991159b9fe5c. 

[xi] Millenbah, Kelly F., et al., 1996.  Effects of Conservation Reserve Program field age on avian relative abundance, diversity, and productivity.  Wilson Bulletin 108(4): 760-770.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4163755.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-5055%252Fcontrol&refreqid=excelsior%3A80a595028a5684a90eacffcade934e7a.

[xii] Anon, nd.  ARS honey bee health and colony collapse disorder.  Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.  https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/br/ccd/index/.

[xiii] Hopwood, Jennifer, et al., 2016.  How neonicotinoids can kill bees: The science behind the role these insecticides play in harming bees.  Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, Portland, OR.  http://xerces.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/16-022_01_XercesSoc_How-Neonicotinoids-Can-Kill-Bees_web.pdf.

[xiv] Pollinator Health Task Force, 2015.  National strategy to promote the health of honey bees and other pollinators.  The White House.  https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/Pollinator%20Health%20Strategy%202015.pdf.

[xv] Pelton, Emma, et al., 2016.  State of monarch butterfly overwintering sites in California.  Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, Portland, OR.  https://xerces.org/publications/scientific-reports/state-of-monarch-butterfly-overwintering-sites-in-california.   

[xvi]  Petition to protect the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) under the Endangered Species Act.  August 26, 2014.  https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/invertebrates/pdfs/Monarch_ESA_Petition.pdf

[xvii] Anon, 2009.  USDA bill addresses FWS conservation initiatives.  Fish and Wildlife News, Summer 2009, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C.  p.8. https://books.google.com/books?id=BzJmQu6W_zkC&pg=PT200&lpg=PT200&dq=%22pheasants+forever%22+%222008+farm+bill%22+pollinator&source=bl&ots=pw6KnzAlNj&sig=ACfU3U3l86BZnGkFRALJ6Um4_4_kz3nUlA&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiI8_XigJboAhUcHzQIHQuoDxAQ6AEwBnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22pheasants%20forever%22%20%222008%20farm%20bill%22%20pollinator&f=false

[xviii] p.124. Gemmil-Herren, Barbara, ed., 2016.  Pollination Services to Agriculture.  Routledge, New  York, NY.   https://books.google.com/books?id=0Xf7CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=Conservation+Practice+42+new&source=bl&ots=8vKOhgOdEL&sig=ACfU3U34f-3voP3uEvTt8dbrQigWsaCYEQ&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwimnP_Zi5boAhWpHzQIHcahBLsQ6AEwBXoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=Conservation%20Practice%2042%20new&f=false

[xix] Ross, Jackie, et al., 2019.  National Agricultural Statistics Service Agricultural Statistics 2019.  U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.  https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Ag_Statistics/2019/chapter12.pdf

[xx] BBS, op cit.  https://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/

[xxi] Muir, John, 1911.  My First Summer in the Sierra.  Entry for July 27. p.245 in John Muir: Nature Writings.  Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY.

Pronghorn herd on the move, Sweetwater valley.  (Photo by Chris Madson)

IN THE AUGUST 2025 EDITION OF WYOMING WILDLIFE MAGAZINE, ANGI BRUCE, DIRECTOR of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, outlined her interpretation of the Game and Fish mission.  In that essay, she made several statements that should concern anyone with an interest in the wildlife heritage of the state.

First— and most alarming— was her contention that the Game and Fish Department should not “advocate or speak for wildlife.”  She argued that the department’s real business was serving people, which makes me wonder whether she’s confused Game and Fish with the Public Service Commission.  Clearly, every agency in state government was created to render a service to the public.  However, in every case, that service is to advocate something the public has decided it wants.

The Wyoming Department of Agriculture’s stated mission is “the promotion and enhancement of Wyoming’s agriculture, natural resources and contribution to Wyoming quality of life.”

The Department of Transportation’s stated mission is to “provide a safe and effective transportation system.”

The Department of Environmental Quality’s mission is “protecting, conserving and enhancing Wyoming’s land, air and water for the benefit of current and future generations.”

The Department of Education strives “to significantly increase the percentage of Wyoming students that are college, career, and military ready.”

Family Services is dedicated to keeping people “safe at home, giving families opportunities for success, and supporting people who support the families.”

The Health Department aims “to promote, protect and enhance the health of all Wyoming citizens.”

The Office of Tourism works to “promote and facilitate travel to and within the state of Wyoming.”

The Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust exists to “enhance and conserve wildlife habitat and natural resource values throughout the state.”

And the statutory mission of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, first adopted into law in 1937, is “to provide an adequate and flexible system for control, propagation, management, protection and regulation of all Wyoming wildlife.”

These missions all have a common theme— they call on a specialized group of state employees to advance a specific set of values and outcomes the public supports.  The agencies exist to advocate.

Game and Fish’s statutory mission is unusual in this list because it arose out of a public conference in the depths of the Great Depression.  The conference itself represented a groundswell of public demand for a more effective, professional approach to wildlife conservation, sheltered from the political infighting in the state legislature and funded independently by income from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses.  Few state agencies can claim to represent the will of the general public more directly.

Ms. Bruce is mistaken when she says that the Game and Fish Department should not advocate or speak for wildlife.  That is precisely what the people who established the modern agency nearly a century ago intended, what the generations of Wyomingites who have supported it ever since expect.  In fact, it’s what they demand.

Ms. Bruce goes on to argue that Game and Fish should always try “to understand the social inputs to our work— conversations with our public partners are vital in making effective management decisions.”  And she is right about that, of course.  She encourages anyone who is interested to email, write letters, attend public meetings, or stop in at a Game and Fish office for a chat.

As a long-time employee of the department myself, I can testify that the agency holds a staggering number of public meetings, the vast majority of which are sparsely attended.  The scattering of people in the audience nearly always have personal interests in the topic under discussion, quite often financial.  Those are the public meetings.  There are others, the ones that take place behind closed doors and involve individuals or companies with a “special interest,” which generally means they have exceptional political, legislative, and/or fiscal leverage.

Neither one of these formats results in a clear understanding of what the public, writ large, wants.  And so, when Director Bruce emphasizes the agency’s responsibility to “serve people,” many of us have to wonder just which people are being served.

Ms. Bruce hired on as habitat protection supervisor with Game and Fish in 2017 after a career with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, stepped up to deputy director for external affairs in 2019, and was appointed director in July of 2024.  As I look back over her tenure in the agency’s head office, I recall several high-profile situations that involved Game and Fish decisions and wonder whether those decisions served a majority of Wyoming’s people or just a conveniently small minority.

In 2023, the department hired contractors to kill 129 elk wintering on a ranch in southeastern Wyoming.  It’s hard to say whether the shooting solved the problem of hungry elk or just moved it to another ranch.  This much is certain— there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of resident big-game hunters who live within forty miles of that ranch.  It would be interesting to know how those hunters and others across the state feel about the hired slaughter of their elk on a ranch practically in their backyards.  Game and Fish never asked.

In February of 2024, a snowmobiler in the Pinedale country caught a lone wolf in the open and ran over it, injuring the animal so severely that it could be bound with duct tape and taken to town.  A video of the subsequent bragging session over the crippled animal in a Daniel bar found its way onto the internet, where it stimulated an outpouring of rage across the nation and around the world.  Initially, Game and Fish contended that predators are exempt from animal cruelty statutes— the department eventually cited him for illegal possession of warm-blooded wildlife, and he was fined $250.  A grand jury later indicted him for felony animal cruelty at the behest of the county prosecutor.  I’m not aware of any public comment from Ms. Bruce or the department about the legal or ethical issues involved in this case.  I suspect a majority of the Wyoming public was revolted by this gratuitous torture, but Game and Fish has expressed no views on the matter, at least in public, nor does it seem that the agency exercised its full enforcement authority until the incident generated public outcry.

Two months after Ms. Bruce took over as director of the department, the agency was finishing a detailed analysis of several big-game migration corridors, including the now-famous Sublette antelope migration corridor, the “Path of the Pronghorn,” which meanders through the heart of the oil and gas fields on the Pinedale Anticline.  The department’s technical analysis, based on extensive radio telemetry over many years, provided a clear picture of key routes, stop-overs, wintering areas, and summer range.  Strangely, when the department approached the Game and Fish Commission for approval last fall, it didn’t recommend protection of the entire route. Instead, the proposal lopped off a chunk at the southern end, apparently believing that, since that piece was on BLM land, it was somehow secure.  Luckily for the herd, the commissioners thought differently and adopted the entire route instead.  I think most Wyomingites support the broader protection, but there’s no way of knowing for certain— Game and Fish hasn’t taken steps to find out.

Then there is the case of the mule deer migration corridor up above Dubois.  The initial map of the corridor stopped abruptly at the eastern edge of the Teton National Forest because the winter range was on the Wind River Indian Reservation and controlled by the tribes there.  The bulk of the corridor was on the national forest itself, and, because of that, the department decided to stop short of an official designation of the corridor, which would have mandated protection against inimical land use changes.  It was simply “identified” instead.  The biologist who defended the ultimate decision argued that, if something bad happened in the corridor, “we can always redo this threat evaluation.”  Trying to undo a change in land use is always harder than preventing it in the first place, but the department seems confident that there is no problem, even though the mule deer herd using the corridor is sixty percent below the target population the department has set for it.  It would be interesting to know how the Wyoming public feels about this decision— not just the people who attended the public meetings and submitted written comments, but the public in its entirety.  Game and Fish has never asked.

And sage grouse.  I honestly don’t know how much elbow room Game and Fish has in the arena of sage grouse conservation or even comment.  There are gubernatorial executive orders, ESA petitions, court proceedings and decisions, independent advisory groups that seem to have quasi-legal authority, federal resource management plans, and species management strategies.  I suppose I should grant Ms. Bruce and the agency some latitude when it comes to their general silence on sage grouse.  For example, it may be too much to expect that the department would object publicly to the recent gutting of the BLM sage grouse management plan.  There was a time when Game and Fish would have made objected strenuously to proposals like this that threaten the state’s wildlife, but, in the case of sage grouse, I guess those times are long gone.

The on-the-ground management of sage grouse is controlled by a remarkably narrow set of “special interests.”  The best scientific analysis shows a staggering long-term decline in population, and recent analysis suggests that, contrary to the political rhetoric, the Wyoming “core-area” approach may not be sufficient to maintain the species, here in Wyoming or elsewhere.  The Game and Fish response to that analysis has been to deny outside scientists and agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey access to some of the data the department is collecting during lek surveys.  Ms. Bruce is fond of saying that the first requirement of good wildlife management is science, but, with sage grouse, she seems inclined to support what she likes and ignore— or even undermine— the rest.

There are ways to find out what the public is thinking— reliable, statistically significant ways.  A barrage of public meetings by itself is simply not reliable; in fact, I think it often serves as a smoke screen to give the appearance of seeking public consensus without bothering to do it.  Same with a call for “public comment.”  If, as Ms. Bruce claims at every opportunity, she wants to use the public’s views to shape wildlife management in the state, she could invest in far more sophisticated techniques.  They don’t come for free, but they would be cheap compared to the cost of the wildlife surveys the department has used for decades to inform its habitat management and harvest regimes.  I suspect she’d find such public survey data inconvenient.  It all comes down to how many people she really wants to serve.

I spent more than 40 years in professional wildlife work, 36 of them with two state wildlife agencies.  I believe I understand the pressures that are brought to bear on wildlife managers, particularly in a state like Wyoming where wildlife shares the front page with politics and economics.  Still, I expect the representatives of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to speak truth to power . . . and to me.  The department is indeed an advocate in the legal as well as the general sense of the term.  The department makes a case for wildlife in the court of public opinion.  It is not responsible for the final decision, especially when that decision is ultimately controlled by majority vote of the legislature, the governor’s fiat, or a directive from Washington, D.C.  However, it is responsible for presenting the facts as they affect the well-being of the public’s wildlife.  My wildlife.

That information should be readily available, not only to decision-makers, but to researchers and the general public.  Game and Fish should go out of its way to tell us what’s happening to the wildlife and wild places in our state, and we should have the benefit of its best technical recommendations on how to proceed.  That’s why we have a competent staff of wildlife professionals.  They aren’t paid to decide how to stimulate the state’s economy, encourage industry, keep more young people in the state, or placate special interests.  They’re paid by the public— you and me— to be advocates for wildlife.

A number of years back, Game and Fish invented a terse little aphorism to describe its mission.  The agency claims it is “conserving wildlife; serving people.”  If I had it in my power, I’d make one small change to that credo: “Conserving wildlife; serving the public.”  Wyoming’s wildlife belongs to us all; we should all have a say in its future.  Before you grease the squeaky wheel, Ms. Bruce, it would be a good idea to find out what’s going on with the rest of the wagon.

I’M ABOUT TO TURN SEVENTY-FIVE, SO I GUESS IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE THAT I HAVE ARTHRITIS IN JUST ABOUT EVERY JOINT BELOW MY EARS, a knee that probably needs to be replaced, and a general feeling on an average day that I should find a chair and sit down a while.  I’ve hunted elk in the high country for more than forty years, and I’ll go again this fall with a couple of permits in my pocket, but I have to say the mountains look a little taller than they once did; the canyons, a little deeper.

When I think of that coming hunt, my thoughts run back to a present I was given for Christmas in my ninth year: Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the story of Mowgli, his adoption into the Seeonee wolf pack, and his vendetta against Shere Khan, the tiger that killed his parents.  For many years, I identified with Mowgli the Man Cub in that tale, but these days, I think more of Akela, the leader of the wolf pack, infinitely wise, gray at the muzzle, earning his authority by providing meat for the pack.  There is that moment in the book when Bagheera, the black panther, warns Mowgli, “It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill— and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck— the Pack will turn against him and against thee.”

Some thirty-eight elk have made their way into the family freezer over the years.  That exquisite meat has been a staple in our household ever since we moved west, but I have to admit I’m more than a little gray around the muzzle— at each hunt, it costs me more to pin the buck.

When the word came a couple of months back that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins intended to roll back the roadless rule in national forests, I guess I should have joined the geezers who have long argued that every back-county road on the mountain should be thrown open so they can hunt it all from the back of an ATV or the cozy confines of a pickup.  But even in my decrepit state, the idea of a road on every ridgetop, along every creek, turns my stomach, and I’ll tell you why.

In forty years of elk hunting, I’ve learned one thing for certain: elk don’t like roads.  When I start hunting a new area, the first thing I do is look at the maps and find the spots that are a mile or more from the nearest two-track.  That’s where the elk will be, especially after the first thirty-six hours of the season.  My boot-leather impression is backed up by substantial research— one extensive study in Oregon found that elk tended to stay away from a road if more than one vehicle passed during the day.  Just a couple of pickups or ATVs a day were enough to move elk, the researchers found, and the effect intensified as traffic increased.[i]

My experience hunting elk on public land suggests that, if the elk can’t find an adequate roadless refuge from vehicles, they tend to move downhill to private land where hunting is restricted or prohibited.  More vehicle traffic on a larger proportion of the forest simply means fewer elk on the public domain.  That’s an effect my aging bones don’t appreciate.

One of the most compelling arguments in favor of roads on national forests is that they help firefighters deal with wildfires.  The notion that more roads could save timber and even private property— people’s houses— would seem to trump any other concern . . . if it were true.  But it isn’t.

Five years ago, the Forest Service took a hard look at “recent assertions that roads are needed to prevent fire and keep forests healthy.”  Their researchers looked at fire records between 1985 and 2016 and found that fires burned 19 percent of national forest that was classified as “roadless” and 17.7 percent of national forest outside roadless areas.  There was essentially no difference in the amount of timber burned in roadless areas compared to the rest of the nation’s forests.

The same can be said for high-intensity fires, the ones that make the evening news.  According to the analysis, five percent of roadless areas were consumed by high-severity fires over the 31 years of records in the study; 3.2 percent of forest outside the roadless areas were swept by high-severity blazes, a difference not worth mentioning.[ii]

There’s no doubt that fires are harder to suppress in roadless areas, but they’re also less likely to start there.  More than 80 percent of all wildfires are started by people,[iii] and the overwhelming majority of people get into national forests on roads.  While a fire closer to a road may be easier to extinguish, the fact that so many start along roads explains why these roadside fires burn 44 percent of the entire forest area consumed by fire.[iv]  Weighing the advantages of roads for fire suppression against the fact that people on roads actually cause most fires, the researchers concluded that “fire risks are approximately equal inside and outside of roadless areas.”

Back roads bring a set of problems into the forest, not often considered by their advocates.  Increased vehicle traffic inevitably carries the seeds of invasive plants into the trees.  These may outcompete native species and can actually increase the risk of wildfire.  Add to that the fact that silt from unpaved roads and ATV trails often finds its way into high-country streams where it causes problems for trout and other aquatic life.[v]

Many of the opponents of the roadless rule argue that the nation needs the lumber currently out of reach in protected areas.   While we may need the wood, opening our roadless areas to timber operations won’t supply it.  The U.S. Forest Service estimates that roadless areas contain about 9 million acres of harvestable timber, just 20 percent of the timber available for harvest across the entire national forest system.[vi]

The very fact that roadless areas are roadless strongly suggests that building and maintaining them through these mountain landscapes is difficult and expensive.  The private sector can’t make a profit from the timber in these areas if it has to bear the cost of building roads into them, so it’s reasonable to conclude that there’s a massive subsidy for industry concealed behind the proposal to rescind the roadless rule— if the timber companies can’t afford to build the roads, the government will.  And, if competition from Canadian lumber is holding prices down, the government will impose massive tariffs to discourage the imports.  It’s a strange position for an administration that claims to support the unrestricted function of the free market.

The debate over roadless areas ultimately comes down to an argument over access: Those who hate roadless areas want to drive anywhere their fancy takes them, for fun or profit; those who like roadless areas prefer to have some places they can go only on foot or horseback.  It seems some compromise is in order.

And compromise is what we have.  Thirty percent of the nation’s forests are protected by the roadless rule.  Throw in official wilderness areas and the roadless acreage rises to 49 percent of all national forests.  Half our national forests are more or less accessible by motor power; half require the visitor to get out of the truck, off the ATV, and walk.  That strikes me as fair.

 

MANY YEARS AGO WHEN MY HEART WAS STRONGER AND MY LEGS NEVER TIRED, my dad announced his intention to come out to Wyoming in search of a trophy mule deer, so we applied as a party and drew permits for a spine of mountains in the center of the state, buttressed on both sides by impressive palisades.  The occasional two-track led through the sage to the first timber and ended suddenly at the edge of the timber.  In a normal year, it would have been an excellent place to find a big deer, but the previous winter had been one for the record books— the old mossy-tined bucks had died for lack of forage along with most of the previous year’s fawns.

We spent a couple of hard days without seeing as much as a fresh track.  I was convinced the big bucks had moved up the mountain when the season opened, but, every time I tried to reach the summit, I ran into a vertical rimrock winding through the trees, unclimbable without ropes and pitons.  Late on the second afternoon, I was easing along below the rim when I saw a disturbance in the snow ahead— the tracks of two bull elk walking straight up the mountain to get away from some hunter far below.  The two seemed confident of finding a way over the rimrock, and I figured anywhere they could go, I could probably follow.  A hundred yards straight up, the tracks led into a crack in the rock wall, barely wide enough for a set of antlers.  It was the way to the top.  Too late in the evening to follow, I thought, but tomorrow . . .  I headed down toward camp with a rush of optimism.

Dad was attending the Coleman stove when I got back, warming some of the beef stew Mom had canned for the trip.  After I’d run an oil rag over the rifle and cased it, I grabbed a plate and helped myself.

“See anything of note?” Dad inquired.

“No deer,” I replied, “but, say, I finally found a way up over that rim.”

“Well, good enough,” he said as he buttered a slice of bread and sat down.

I was a little let down— he seemed remarkably unenthusiastic about the discovery.

“Two elk headed to the top,” I continued.  “If the elk are moving up, I figure the big bucks will, too.  If we start an hour before light, we can be up over the rim before sunrise.”

He nodded.  “You should do that.”

“Heck, you’re the one spoiling for a big rack.  We can go up there together and cash in that tag.”

He paused a moment, considering.

“You know, what I think I’ll do— this next canyon over has a good stand of aspen and a creek.  I found a place up above where I can glass everything.  If a buck moves anywhere in there, I’ll have a shot.  Think I’ll find a rock for my back and watch that tomorrow.”

“But, Dad, I think the big ones will be up high . . .”

“You’re probably right.  But listen, Tiger, I’ve hunted up a lot of ridges like that over the years.  Good places.  Places I’ve had all to myself.  Places a man has to earn.”  He looked up at the summit, silhouetted far above us against the night sky.

“I’ve had my time up there,” he said, almost to himself as he studied the loom of the mountain.  Then he turned and looked at me with a smile.

“It’s your turn.”

Forty years have passed since that hunt.  He’s long since passed on, although I swear I can feel him just behind me sometimes as the sun sets at timberline and the breeze sighs away to nothing.  Still, his words stay with me.  Like him, I can feel my hold slipping on the high country as my knees complain and I strain to get enough air in an aging pair of lungs.  But the memories of all the wild places I’ve seen stay with me, the places a man has all to himself, the places he has to earn.  And the memories, by themselves, are enough, even if I never top out on the far ridge again.

There are people of my age and even younger who believe they have a right to go anywhere they please on the nation’s forests, and by “go,” they mean “drive.”  If they ever left the road to feel the real backcountry, they’ve long since forgotten the experience.  They seem to think a road or an ATV trail has no effect on the country it penetrates when volumes of scientific research and generations of practical experience prove that the impact is profound.  There’s plenty of the public domain accessible by vehicle.  We don’t need more roads, not even for the septuagenarians who want to drive where they once walked.

I can’t speak for my generation, only for myself.  The roadless rule should stand.  And, to the new cadres of hunters, sound of wind and limb, raising their eyes to those places, I have this to say:

I’ve had my time up there.

It’s your turn.

 

————

 

[i] Wisdom, Michael, et al., 2004.  Overview of the Starkey Project: Mule deer and elk research for management benefits.  2004 Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Wildlife Management Institute.

file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/Wisdom2004OverviewDeerElkResearchMngtBenefits-1.pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[ii] Healey, Sean P., 2020.  Long-term forest health implications of roadlessness.  Environmental Research Letters 15: 104023.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba031/pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[iii] Balch, Jennifer, et al., 2017.  Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States.  Proceedings of the National Academies of Science 114(11): 2946-2951.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1617394114.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[iv] Balch, ibid.

[v] Al-Chokhachy, Robert, et al., 2016.  Linkages between unpaved forest roads and streambed sediment: why context matters in directing road restoration.  Restoration Ecology 24(5): 589-598.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/restoration/documents/cflrp/LinkagesUnpavedForestRoadsStreambedSediment-508.pdf.  Accessed September 11, 2025.

[vi] William, Mike, et al., 2000.  Roadless Areas Conservation FEIS: Forest management specialist report.  USDA Forest Service, Washington, D.C.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm8_035779.pdf.  Accessed September 14, 2025.

THIS ESSAY IS ESSENTIALLY A REVIEW OF A REVIEW.  ON AUGUST 4, THE JOURNAL NATURE PUBLISHED A REVIEW OF A NEW BOOK, CAPTURED FUTURES: RETHINKING THE DRAMA OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS.   The book was written by two Dutch political scientists, Maarten Hajer and Jereon Oomen.  The review was written by another political scientist in the Netherlands, Philip Mcnaughten.

I haven’t read the book.  The critiques I offer here are aimed at assertions in Mcnaughten’s review, which may or may not apply to the book itself.  The headline of the review— “Environmental politics is doomed to fail unless we tell better stories” — caught my attention because I’ve spent my entire adult life telling stories intended to move people to care for the planet.  After graduate study in wildlife ecology, I spent the next 40 years telling those stories in a variety of venues and media.  I tell them still.  And after a lifetime spent in the effort to galvanize public interest in the health of our communal environment, I fully agree with McNaughten’s opening statement:

“The book starts by marshalling evidence that environmental politics is falling short on global environmental health.  It’s a familiar list, including unmet targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and continuing losses of biodiversity, fertile soils and fresh water.”

Mcnaughten is right about that.  However, he immediately adds that the problem is not “a lack of political will, or regulatory or state obstacles, but because of the conceptual framework— the “dramaturgical regime”— through which the rules and conventions of environmental politics are being enacted and performed.”

My difference of opinion on this observation and others Mcnaughten makes may arise from a difference in geography— the situation may be much different in western Europe than here in the United States.  I can only say there is overwhelming evidence of a “lack of political will” in environmental debates here in the U.S.  This is, to some degree, the result of sophisticated influence campaigns mounted by well-funded special interest groups.  It leads to a variety of “regulatory and state obstacles,” as well as legal deliberations, that interfere with the adoption of sound environmental practices and/or their implementation.

These special interests have existed for at least as long as modern capitalism, but, here in the U.S., they’ve often been overwhelmed by populist movements that galvanized support for conservation and the environment from the public at large.  Such movements grew in power and influence from the 1870s through the 1970s and resulted in significant reforms.  The world’s first national park and park system; national forests and grasslands; federal wildlife refuges; effective protection of game and nongame wildlife, including endangered species; protection of wild and scenic rivers; massive conservation programs to protect water, soil, and wildlife on farmland; federal acts to control air and water pollution— the list of environmental programs adopted in the U.S. over the vehement objections from special interests is long.

It seems to me that the difference between that era and the modern circumstance is the public’s dwindling interest in such matters.  For 40 years, I’ve watched the conservation/environmental coalition fracture and erode while the vast majority of the American public has steadily lost interest in the natural world that supports us all.  As the consensus has fallen apart, the environmental community has fallen back on feel-good compromises, the search for “win-win” solutions and “positive-sum outcomes,” which, as Macnaughten rightly implies, are hard to find and seldom effective at large scale.  Real environmental reform has nearly always had winners and losers; the difference today is that the potential losers seem to have the upper hand in any debate over sustainable use of the planet.

Is this, as McNaughten suggests, because we aren’t telling the right stories or aren’t telling them well enough?  I guess that depends on which storytellers we consider.  Mcnaughten is critical of the environmental messages popular with what he describes as the “liberal establishment”— subjects like decolonization, market-based solutions, and “value-neutral facts.”  I might agree with him there, but he goes on to write that   “ecological politics needs to tell a more aspirational story.  We need to move from stories that evoke fear and despair towards ones that give hope and renewal.”

I wonder about that.  There are many stories being told that evoke hope and renewal.  Consider the recovery of iconic species like the bald eagle, trumpeter swan, whooping crane, and California condor.  These stories have been told over and over again since the first efforts to save them began.  Have these heartening examples of success resulted in redoubled support for the programs that saved them?  I think not.  Our efforts to avoid polluting our rivers and lakes have been overwhelmingly successful.  Have the stories of those successes led to more enthusiastic support for the programs and technologies that keep our water clean?  I think not.  Funding for soil and water conservation on the nation’s farmland has reduced loss of soil and pollution from fertilizers and pesticides and slowed the loss of many species of wildlife.  Have the stories covering those successes increased public support for farm conservation programs?  I think not.

It’s been widely asserted that all the depressing articles on environmental degradation have pushed the American public to despair.  People have lost hope, the argument goes, and have just given up.  I wonder about that.  I think it far more likely that the vast majority of Americans simply aren’t aware of the condition of the environment, and, when they happen to encounter the introduction to a story that might enlighten them, they turn the page, change the channel, or swipe to a different video.  Despair is not the problem.  Willful ignorance is the problem.  And all the good news stories in the world won’t solve that.

It may well be that a century of success in the environmental arena has led us to a paralyzing sense of complacency.  Conservation/environmental progress in America began in the nineteenth century, not with good news, but with the worst possible news.  The extinction of the passenger pigeon— five billion birds erased in the space of one human generation.  The Carolina parakeet.  The bison.  Catastrophic wildfires that killed thousands of people.  Floods that did the same.  The loss of millions of acres of fertile topsoil.  The Dust Bowl.  Rivers catching fire.  It took a drumbeat of gut-wrenching stories to move America to action, and I suppose we’re to be forgiven if the results of those actions have left two or three generations with the impression that nothing more needs to be done.

If there’s a silver lining to the black cloud of environmental emergency that afflicts us, it may be that the Public, capital P, is now being forced to confront problems they would prefer to ignore.  That pressure to pay attention is bound to intensify.  The first rule of communication is that it requires two people— one to speak, one to listen.  As the environmental realities of the twenty-first century reach out and touch people— wildfire, flood, drought, lethal heat, pollution, lack of food, lack of water— more will begin to listen.  The stories may not be pleasant, but people will want to hear them because the first step toward solving a problem is understanding it.

Set against that goad is our continued growth as a species, which steadily increases the tension between our demands on the earth and the capacity of the earth to fulfill them.  Can 10 billion humans make room for the rest of life on the planet?  And even if it’s theoretically possible, are we willing to make the changes, the sacrifices, necessary to accommodate the diverse ecosystems our fellow species require?  I struggle to find a good-news way of considering that future.

I can’t begin to guess where the contest between these two forces will finally come to rest.  My ecological training tells me that we’ll find our way to a sustainable relationship with the earth simply because there’s no other workable option, but it also whispers that the way will be long and fraught with pain.  We’ve painted ourselves into a corner— there’s no comfortable way out.

Mcnaughten thinks we should sugar-coat that message.  I don’t see how we can.  Or why we should.  Nothing in the history of the conservation and environmental movements suggests that a focus on good news moves the broad majority of people to action.  People respond to trouble, particularly the kind of trouble that touches them personally.  As the gravity of the environmental situation impinges on more lives, more people will begin to pay attention, not only to the difficulties they see themselves but to the broader forces that cause the trouble.  If the stories we’re telling now haven’t motivated more people, it’s because many people aren’t ready to listen, not because the stories lack force.

Like many people who have labored in the movement, I mourn our communal inertia over the last 40 years, the loss of time that could have been put to such good use, but changing the stories we tell won’t move people to make the hard choices we face.  They have to be ready to listen, and it’s increasingly clear that the trajectory of environmental problems will inevitably open their minds.

As for hope: it’s an overrated commodity.  The most casual review of history will reveal dozens of examples of people continuing to strive without any hope; in fact, those are some of the people we most admire.  What we need is a clear-eyed understanding of what needs to be done, even if the outcome is in doubt.  With hope or without it, the choice boils down to Andy Dufresne’s hard-edged line in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

That’s damn right.