It is 8:33 a.m., and I have already been driving down dirt roads for hours when I find myself in a standoff with four cattle who won’t get out of the road. These are not the first cattle I have encountered in the middle of the road here in remote northern Montana; they are, conservatively, the 60 or 70 millionth of this morning alone. These are just the first four who absolutely refuse to get the hell out of my way. Foot on the brake, I stare at them, a mama and three babies. They stare right back. These cows know who has high status here. They know what the top industry is in this part of the state. They know I’m just here for five days, visiting from the coast. And, somehow, they know I’m writing about American Prairie. They know I’m the bitch who needs to drive off-road over plants and rocks to go around them.
I do.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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American Prairie is controversial, so right up top, let me disclose my bias: I wanted to write about American Prairie because I like nature, I like wildlife, I don’t like climate change, and I’d prefer not to die in any number of climate disaster–related scenarios the imagining of which can really invigorate any sleepless night. And for someone with those likes and dislikes, American Prairie’s mission is bold, possibly inspiring, something you want to see up close: the creation of a 5,000-square-mile wildlife reserve in the middle of Montana’s Great Plains.
Temperate grasslands like the Great Plains are the least-protected biome on the planet, for a couple of reasons. Reason one: They just ain’t as thrilling as, say, a mountain. It’s a lot easier to feel God when you’re standing on a craggy peak seeing the earth spread out before you than it is when you’re standing in some prairie grass getting bit by a tick. Reason two: Grasslands are good for farming and grazing. It’s hard to protect land that could be used to feed a hungry world, so almost everywhere, plains have become the planet’s breadbaskets or, in the case of cattle grazing…cow baskets. Less than 2 percent of temperate grassland worldwide has been permanently conserved, and in the United States alone, a million more acres are plowed each year. But while these areas may seem as if “they’re just grass,” protecting prairie grasses and the ability of their long roots to store carbon underground may be one of our best chances to avoid climate collapse. Even better would be restoring some of the plains we have already lost.
By the turn of the century, only four areas of temperate grasslands large enough to be meaningfully protected remained in the world: the Kazakh steppe, East Asia’s Daurian steppe, the Patagonian steppe, and the Northern Great Plains. It was to protect the last of these that, in 2001, the nonprofit American Prairie was formed.
Perhaps because the need to protect grassland was so great, and the opportunities were so few, American Prairie came to the problem with an unorthodox, corporate-esque, definitely capitalist, kind of “fuck it, we’ll do it live” approach. Led by Sean Gerrity, the founder of a management consulting firm in the Bay Area, who had recently moved back to Montana, American Prairie announced it would protect land simply by buying it. By buying 700,000 acres, the group would be able to connect parcels of land managed by various federal and state agencies and—if it could somehow get all those government agencies on board—create a 3.2-million-acre wildlife reserve. It would be the size of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks combined. It would be big enough, American Prairie said, to actually function as an ecosystem. And not only would the group make sure this land wasn’t plowed; it would actively restore the plains to what they were before Montana became a state, full of prairie dogs and pronghorns, beavers and coyotes, grizzly bears and wolves. Most notably, the movie star that gets the whole project funded, the animal big enough to hang a vision on, bison would be returned to north-central Montana, finding a home there for the first time in 120 years.
The bison population of North America has fluctuated over the millennia, ever since the Clovis and Folsom people wiped out the continent’s mammoths and other megafauna and opened the grasslands to a new, enormous two-horned grazer. (No matter how deep we go in human history, it seems, it’s impossible to find a universe where none of it was ever our fault.) But at the birth of our nation, bison numbered in the tens of millions. By 1890, after years of overhunting and government-incentivized slaughter, fewer than a thousand remained. Never say never to tens of millions of bison, maybe, but what American Prairie hoped to do was simply bring back enough to play their historic role as a keystone species shaping the landscape.
Lots of living things shape their landscapes; in fact, while reporting this piece, I saw American Prairie refer to at least three other keystone species: prairie dogs (make holes), beavers (make ponds), and cottonwoods (be trees, I guess). It’s not just humans (make microplastics) who affect the world around them! Bison do it by creating habitat for other animals in the patchwork of grasses they leave behind after grazing and moving on. They do it by wallowing in the dust or mud, to try to get rid of flies and parasites, and creating shallow depressions that fill with water and become micro-wetlands. They even do it by dying, feeding carnivores and scavengers and plants that use the nutrients of whatever’s left over. The minimum genetically viable bison population that could play this role on American Prairie’s targeted 3.2 million acres, the group says, is 5,000.
Here’s where it gets tricky: Outside of a few places, like Yellowstone and Wind Cave National Parks (and, as of recently, the state of Colorado), bison in the United States are not allowed to exist as wildlife. They are instead classified as livestock. Also tricky: When American Prairie began purchasing ranches to assemble its reserve, the properties were a mix of deeded land that ranchers owned outright and semipermanent Bureau of Land Management leases; the latter effectively allowed the lessees to manage the land in perpetuity as long as they kept grazing livestock there. But there was nothing in the rule book saying a dog couldn’t play basketball: Instead of grazing cattle, American Prairie hoped to start grazing bison.
From the beginning, American Prairie has sought to build a coalition to support its efforts. As Gerrity explained in a 2015 talk at Google, this means persuading people to “cherish [the project] so much that they will go berserk if the government tries to do anything” to stop it. That coalition involves environmentalists and nature lovers worldwide (duh). Perhaps less obviously, but crucially for Montana, it involves hunters. I speak to local hunter Sydney Williams of Livingston, Montana, who “harvested” a bison (a livestock animal, so technically, she had not “hunted” it) on the reserve in January 2025. She tells me that the experience was unlike any other she’d had, that she remembers thinking, “This is like Oregon Trail—what the hell?” As Gerrity would hope, Williams doesn’t hesitate when asked her view on American Prairie. “I think they’re doing some really great work,” she says, “and I think it’s a pretty great way to save a lot of really amazing territory and to get some bison back on the prairie.”
Central to American Prairie’s outreach has been its relationship with neighboring Indigenous communities on the Fort Peck, Fort Belknap, and Rocky Boy’s Reservations. Gerrity writes in his memoir–cum–business book, Wild on Purpose, that American Prairie routinely attends tribal council meetings and high school assemblies to give updates on its work, that tribal members are welcome to use the meeting room in American Prairie’s National Discovery Center (its visitor center and headquarters), and that American Prairie invites tribal members to events such as bison reintroductions. He says, “After 22 years of relationship building, not everything that could be done has yet been done, but it feels like we are on a sustainable, long-term track of continuous improvement based on sincere intentions and growing trust in each other.”
It seems to be working. I speak with Chris La Tray, Montana’s recent poet laureate, a citizen of the landless Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians who has deep family history in Lewistown, where American Prairie is headquartered. La Tray lives across the state in Frenchtown but tells me he thinks American Prairie is “doing better than just about anybody” at talking about and working with Indigenous communities. I ask whether there’s any part of him, as a member of a tribe with no reservation, that believes it is wrong for American Prairie to have this land. “I would say all those homesteaders and settlers, those people who say, ‘I’m a fifth-generation Montanan or a sixth-generation Montanan, my people homesteaded here’—they’re the ones who shouldn’t have it,” he responds. La Tray is no fan of private property, he tells me, but he “would rather see that land in American Prairie’s hands than in a bunch of white settlers’ hands, frankly.”
And there, finally, is the controversy. In all its focus on relationships with neighbors and building public support, American Prairie failed to build relationships with—infuriated, actually, possibly irrevocably—the people who owned the land it was trying to buy: ranchers.
The reason there isn’t already a 5,000-square-mile wildlife refuge in northern Montana isn’t a lack of imagination on the part of the grizzly bears. It’s because people live there. When Gerrity first traveled the area with a map that had a Connecticut-size oval drawn around those people’s homes, telling ultra-wealthy donors and the press that he wanted to “save” everything inside it, those people—largely ranchers—were pissed. I wonder whether they are still just as pissed, almost 25 years later.
The first “Save the Cowboy, Stop American Prairie Reserve” sign I see is on the road from Lewistown to American Prairie’s Antelope Creek Campground. The sign sits on the back of an old, sun-bleached truck parked at a crossroads, in the yard of a taxidermy shop with a “Back the Blue” sign in its window. The next day, on the way to visit American Prairie’s most developed property, which offers semi-fancy-ish yurt and cabin accommodations, I see many more. I even pass a handmade sign saying “Don’t Buffalo Me,” which leans heavily on people’s understanding of the word buffalo as a verb, an understanding of which I have functionally zero.
The ranchers I speak to who oppose American Prairie have a long list of complaints. Some—that American Prairie pays no taxes; that its bison could infect neighboring cattle with diseases like brucellosis—do not stand up to fact-checking or events as they’ve actually played out over the course of decades. Ranchers don’t like that American Prairie received Bureau of Land Management approval to graze bison year-round, while cattle and sheep are allowed to graze only half the year, and various rancher associations and politicians have filed appeals. (Today, American Prairie is only 940 bison toward its 5,000-bison goal. In January, the Department of the Interior canceled the group’s BLM permits, and American Prairie can now graze its bison only on land it owns.) I hear stories of bison breaking out and American Prairie failing to come get them and stories of American Prairie trying to purchase land in ways that the ranchers consider aggressive and unneighborly. Central to the complaints, the ranchers tell me, is this: American Prairie has let it be known that there can be only one winner, the ranchers or the reserve.
Vicki Olson, a third-generation rancher who has served as president of the Montana Cattlewomen’s Association, chair of the Montana Public Lands Council, and co-treasurer of Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, carefully tells me, “They came in with a big story and were not very neighborly. And I’m trying to say this nicely. When we tried to talk to them, they said, ‘No, you need to be gone. The only way we can succeed is if you are gone.’ ” She adds, “When you’ve been here 100 years, that doesn’t make that person your favorite friend.” The sentiment is repeated by another third-generation rancher, Deanna Robbins, president of the United Property Owners of Montana, the group behind the “Save the Cowboy” signs: “In order to succeed in their stated mission of a 3.5-million-acre ‘American Serengeti,’ the family farms and ranches and supporting communities in that area must be removed, including my family’s ranch. It really is either them or us.”
American Prairie’s vision of a 5,000-square-mile stretch of plains empty of almost everything other than wildlife was only remotely plausible because this part of Montana had already been depopulating since the end of World War I. As agricultural technology improved and fewer people were needed to run a ranch, more cowboys had to find employment elsewhere. That meant fewer customers at Tractor Supply, fewer kids in local schools, and so on in a downward spiral. For 100 years, the area had been losing about 10 percent of its population per decade. As of 2024, an estimated 38,000 people lived in the seven-county region where American Prairie owns property.
Just as important to the mission’s viability as a lack of people was the presence of large amounts of undiminished land. As I read in the brochure I pick up at the National Discovery Center, “the good stewardship of landowners in northeastern Montana has resulted in a special place that is largely unplowed and intact.” The subtext being: Now get lost.
The ranchers I talk to consider themselves conservationists. “Stewardship is everything,” Robbins tells me. “Cattle ranching depends upon healthy grass and water to sustain the cattle we raise and sell. If we don’t take care of the land, we lose our ability to generate income off of it.” Says Olson, “We enjoy wildlife as much as anybody else. And in the process, we do a darn good job of providing food and fiber for the world.”
Recently, American Prairie has tried to repair its relationship with its agricultural neighbors. I sit down at the group’s National Discovery Center with Corrie Williamson, who was hired as American Prairie’s director of community outreach in 2021. Before that, the job did not exist, “which probably tells you a lot about how needed it was and why things are the way they are,” she says. As Williamson sees it, her job is not only to be American Prairie’s ambassador to communities but also to bring the concerns of the communities back to American Prairie.
Williamson runs an advisory board of local leaders, manages a newsletter for the surrounding communities, works with the area’s tribes, hosts listening sessions, and reaches out to individuals whenever something goes wrong. Just as important to community building is the fact that she, like a growing number of American Prairie employees, actually lives in Lewistown instead of hours away in Bozeman. “When you go to church, when you are on the EMT squad, when you are volunteering, when you have kids in the schools, your American Prairie hat doesn’t really come off,” Williamson says.
“And I think that’s meaningful, and that moves the needle.”
In her time at American Prairie, Williamson has seen the organization’s rhetoric shift from the Connecticut-size-oval approach. Before, she says, the nonprofit messaged directly to donors. “If you had looked at the website six years ago, it would be like, Save the prairie, save the prairie, save the prairie.” She had to impress upon her superiors that “we can’t and won’t save the prairie from people who really view themselves as actively stewarding it.”
Repair has been slow. Williamson says she routinely speaks with people who say they appreciate her, but also say, “I’m still getting over the way you disparaged my lifeway for a long time.” Robbins says she doesn’t trust American Prairie’s change in messaging: “Their regrets have only come when they have been exposed for hypocrisy.” When I ask Olson what American Prairie could do now to be good neighbors, she responds, “At this point, I think people have given up.”
As I think about this impasse, as I wonder how it went so wrong and try to figure out how it could have gone right, as I speak to multiple Montanans who tell me to read Billionaire Wilderness (the subtitle is The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West), as I speak to one New York City–based hedge fund guy who tells me his boss “runs that” when I tell him I’m writing about American Prairie (he doesn’t, but he is on the board), I develop a theory. The theory is, basically, fuck the rich. Just kidding. Kind of. American Prairie developed a mission that would attract massive checks from ultra-wealthy “environmentalists” who could see this Connecticut-size oval as their legacy. And from there stemmed all its problems.
American Prairie raises money from all kinds of people, in all kinds of amounts, from across the state, the country, and the world. (In the National Discovery Center, on a wall of donors, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation catches my eye. “Makes sense,” I think. “American Prairie is 24—the exact age of all of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends.”) But the nonprofit gets much of its funding from the ultra-wealthy, and most of its top donors—Swiss financier Hansjoerg Wyss, candy heir John Mars, and tech titan’s daughter Susan Packard Orr, for instance—do not live in Montana. And arguably, you cannot amass the kind of wealth that makes you a millionaire or billionaire philanthropist without harming the environment. Gerrity says that critiquing this is hypocritical, because “the person who puts the gas in their car, or uses the coal in their house to heat, or the person who gets on a nonessential jet trip to take a vacation or go to a wedding or something like that, is the person actually creating the business and encouraging the oil companies to keep on doing what they’re doing.” And sure, no one’s hands are clean. But do a hedge fund boss and I really have the exact same amount of blood on our hands?
I can follow directions, and I do read Billionaire Wilderness, in which Yale professor Justin Farrell introduces the concept of connoisseur conservation—essentially, reputation laundering via environmental donations. It consists of three parts: feel-good altruism, or “the vague feeling that purifying and protecting nature is a selfless act of virtue”; conservation therapy, the idea that nature soothes the overworked soul; and selective science, which claims to support a vaguely scientific approach to what’s best for nature in a specific area, yet ignores “systematic causes of global environmental problems.”
Of course, the thing is, nature does actually need to be protected, and biodiversity is terrifyingly on the decline, and our water is full of chemicals, and it keeps getting hotter and hotter out there, which is to say: This work does need to be done, and just because a billionaire funds it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And the “let’s just buy a bunch of land” model of conservation is appealing for obvious reasons. If you have money, it can happen fast, and you don’t have to find a way to convince people that land doesn’t need to be monetized, that its highest and best use can be something related to carbon storage, and to black-footed ferrets, and to beauty.
Where the “wrong” comes into it, as I see it after reading countless articles and seven books, conducting half a dozen official interviews, conducting at least twice that many unofficial interviews, talking about it way too much at parties, and going fully insane over a one-month period cutting this article down from an initial 150 pages (sobbing), is this: Many ultra-wealthy donors who care about the environment hope to leave some sort of conservation legacy, but that focus on legacy is anathema to actually doing good work. Gerrity and others writing about American Prairie often reference John D. Rockefeller Jr., who bought up land that eventually became Grand Teton National Park. At the time, ranchers protested the move, but they eventually came around. The key difference, I realize, is that Rockefeller didn’t call his shot; he bought the land secretly and announced himself only when he had already finished purchasing it. American Prairie came in with a mission statement that was also a threat: One day, who knows when, you will be gone.
Ultimately, this is a story about a lot of people who all care about the land—people including, I am forced to admit, the billionaires. What might work well here, it seems to me, admittedly a stupid person, is a Connecticut-size oval that includes not just a wildlife reserve managed by American Prairie but also protected land managed by other agencies and nonprofits and also ranches that tolerate wildlife and don’t plow up the grass and are managed, as much as possible, for conservation. (Outside the oval, it should probably also include ultra-wealthy donors not working so hard to profit off fossil fuels that they then need to fly their private jets to their second homes in Montana to unwind.)
Though its ultimate mission has not changed, American Prairie is functionally working toward that patchwork vision with its Wild Sky program. Wild Sky pays or cost-shares with ranchers to implement conservation practices on private lands. I spend a morning with one of those ranchers, David Crasco, a former member of the Fort Belknap Tribal Council whose family has ranched on the reservation for 100 years or more.
Crasco was initially suspicious of American Prairie, even introducing himself to an employee by saying, “Hi, you’re my enemy.” But he heard good things about Wild Sky from others, kept an open mind, and started working with the project in 2014. What was the deciding factor? “Money,” he tells me, laughing. “Incentives. That was it. I thought, ‘Hey, if they’re gonna provide the material and whatever, what the heck. Give it a whirl.’ ”
Wild Sky did an audit of Crasco’s land and gave him a grazing plan to follow, then had him replace his fences with wildlife-friendly fencing. These days, the program’s main focus is on wildlife toleration, which it encourages through its Cameras for Conservation effort. Wild Sky installs motion-activated cameras on ranchers’ land and then pays them for each photo captured of various animals. So far, the cameras on Crasco’s land have photographed turkeys, deer, elk, coyotes, mountain lions, and black bears. And yet, he has had no problems with lion or bear predation. In fact, he never even suspected that black bears were on his land. “I’ve heard people say that they’d had sightings, and I was like, ‘No,’ ” he tells me. “I’ve been down there all the time. I’ve never seen anything, not even a track or scat or anything.”
This is exactly what Katy Beattie, Wild Sky’s program manager, says she loves about Cameras for Conservation. “In the conservation world, we talk so often about coexistence, but oftentimes it’s happening invisibly.” Because you don’t normally see all the times a bear is peacefully passing through your property, what you focus on is conflict, because that’s what is visible. “So it’s really moving for me to be able to show landowners that they are coexisting every day,” Beattie says.
After we finish chatting in his dining room, Crasco, his hired hand, and I climb into Crasco’s truck, and he shows me around the property. He drives me past the place where his grandmother raised 13 children in a house with no toilet. He points out the place where he scattered the ashes of his mother, his father, and his sister. He shows me one of the cameras. He drives us over a thermal creek, and he tells me how he once parked his pickup with two wheels in it and slept in the truck bed, over the water and under the stars. We pass wild plum bushes, and he and the hired hand speculate on how soon they’ll be ready, telling me they’re really good for jam. He drives up a rise and pauses at the top so I can look out at the sweeping view. It’s beautiful. Everything the light touches is yours (or some guy’s cows’).
One of the members of Corrie Williamson’s advisory board is a local rancher who is also a Zen Buddhist priest. One day, Williamson says, that rancher—Bill Milton—told her, “Your project isn’t big enough.” Williamson understood this to mean “not that American Prairie needed to be bigger itself, but that American Prairie needed to essentially think about itself as a player at a table.”
American Prairie has had to partner with tribes, and the federal government, and other environmental and stewardship groups, and agriculture, and to reckon with people’s lives and communities. “When we make it about us, we alienate everyone,” Williamson says. “When we think about ourselves as part of a future that balances wildlife and working lands and community vitality and local priorities and tribal priorities and conservation, that’s where the beautiful vision is.” It will have to be about everyone.•
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of the books How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?
