00:00:01
Speaker 1: Despite its role as the central region of the frontier story in the West, the Great Planes in the twenty first century is requiring novel conservation approaches to recapture its former magic. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West, loving the planes, hating the planes, rewilding the planes.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: I know almost nothing useful about W. H.
00:00:48
Speaker 1: Auden, the twentieth century British writer critic, except that he once wrote these lines, which I committed to memory. I cannot see a plane without a shutter. Oh God, please, please don’t ever make me live there. Auten put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence. The sentiment is what I suspect a great many modern Americans would agree with as they drive through or fly over America’s vast plains country. The Great Plains is not, by any usual measure of landscape esthetics and admired part of America. These days, we no longer loved the plains the way we love mountains or oceans or even deserts. A few of us are outlier exceptions, though. In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, I built a house and a shallow canyon set into the horizontal yellow prairie sweeps of West Texas, and today I live in another house I’ve built in Pinon Juniper Foothills, only twenty miles west of the High Plains of New Mexico. In an experiential refutation of W. H. Auden, I can say honestly that no other landscape has ever moved me the way the plains have done. So try to suspend disbelief over that sentence for a moment. I grew up in southern forest, lived for two decades in the heart of the Montana Rockies, and impassionately in love with deserts, especially where souarros loom like cactus, redwoods. And I travel to ocean since, like most of us, I find something hypnotic and satisfying to my genetic memory on an ocean beach. But the woods, the mountains, the sea, even the deserts, all of which appear at first glance richer and more varied, lack the simple minimalism, the vastness of earth and sky that’s so powerful with an Aurora sunrise are on a glittering night on the plains. I realize few other Americans, even other Westerners, react this way. Driving a car across America’s prairies and planes. To many, the horizontal yellow spaces are hardly inspiring. What most of us see, if we bother to look, is emptiness. No water, no trees, no green, almost no people. What there is in abundance is when which buffets and rocks your car. As you drive, the horizon encircles the world like the rim of an enormous plate. No matter how fast you go, that horizon recedes in front of you, eventually placing you in a kind of twilight zone of suspended forward motion. There are stretches where if you roll down the windows, the country smells of ammonia, feed lots and hog farms, and those are pretty sense. At midday, the light can be almost too bright to look at, or else it’s a diffuse brown pall agriculture going airborne. As for our presence on the plains, the human infrastructure often looks beaten and discarded. Dying towns memorable for the amount of wind blown waste snagged on chain mesh fences loom and recede along laser straight highways. Billboards unintentionally advertise a kind of twenty first century great chain of being. Jesus cowboy boots, farm machinery, banking loans, moving truck deals, maybe diversions like the Minnesota Vikings or the Denver Broncos.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: Beyond the frequent site.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: Oddly, in these seer expanses of thousands of waterfowl threading the blue bowl overhead, you’re in a world of erasures. Maybe you see prong horns if you look hard, or a coyote rocking across the road. Are the occasional prairie dog struggling for a comeback after the prairie dog holocaust. This is the West that everybody prefers looking down on from twenty thousand feet. If you feel this way about the plains, maybe what I’m about to say next will nudge you in a different direction. It was not always this way, not very long ago, reactions to the plains West were very different. Let me quote a few of those past reactions. They’re about the same place I just described, and that most of us have experienced. Two hundred and a few years ago, a Scottish scientist from Natchez, Mississippi, who President Thomas Jefferson engaged to help him plan Young America’s Western explorations, recreated for Jefferson the sense of excitement Western travelers had about traversing the Great Plains. Raised in Elgin, Morayshire, on the northern coast of Scotland, and educated at the University of Glasgow, William Dunbar spent his early life in a very different kind of landscape than the American plains, now situated on the forested edges of fascination with that country farther west, Dunbar recreated for Jefferson a thrilling world by the expression plains or prairies. He told the President, it is not to be understood a dead flat without any eminences. The Western prairies are very different. The expression signifies only a country without timber. These prairies are neither flat nor hilly, but undulating, in gently swelling lawns and expanding into spacious valleys.
00:07:06
Speaker 2: Dunbar went on, Those who have viewed only.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: A skirt of these prairies speak of them with a degree of enthusiasm, as if it were only there that nature was to be found truly perfect. They declare that the fertility and beauty of the vegetation, the extreme richness of the valleys, the coolest and excellent quality of the water found everywhere. The salubrity of the atmosphere, and above all, the grander of the enchanting landscape which this country presents, inspires the soul with sensations not to be felt in any other region of a globe. In later letters, Dunbar told Jefferson what he called wonderful stories of wonderful productions on the great prairies. Especially compelling were the accounts of the wildlife riches there in this natural pasturage. There were buffalo and other grazers in numbers beyond imagination, even herds of wild horses like zebras in Africa. There were bears, tigers, wolves, all the animals that lived off those grazers. There were accounts of giant water serpents, which a scientist like Dunbar did not credit. All of it he passed on to an American president, whose house at Monticello was.
00:08:35
Speaker 2: Decorated with maps of the West.
00:08:39
Speaker 1: Americans in the Jeffersonian Age were obviously not the first to see the wonders of the continent savannahs, but they were among the first since the sixteenth century Spanish explorers to write extensively of what they saw.
00:08:53
Speaker 2: Meriwether Lewis, for.
00:08:55
Speaker 1: One, as his party was just entering the plains in today’s South Dakota, described how the shortness and verdue of the grass gave the plains the appearance throughout its whole extent of beautiful bowling greens in fine order. The party could hardly believe the wildlife spectacle on those bowling greens. This scenery, already rich, pleasing and beautiful, was still farther heightened by immense herds of buffalo, deer, elk, and antelopes, which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. Zebulin Pike, exploring farther south two years after Lewis, found the high plains along the Arkansas River more barren than green. In fact, he thought the southern plains a match, as he put it, for the sandy deserts of Africa.
00:09:52
Speaker 2: This was the same part of the.
00:09:53
Speaker 1: Plains that would inspire the Stephen Long exploring party a few years later to pronounce the central and southern stretches of the plains unfit for agriculture, and thus a barrier to any advancing frontier settlers planning to farm. Yet traveling over this dusty plain of sand and gravel barren as the deserts of Arabia was never tedious, they said, because the wildlife spectacle was absolutely thrilling. Returning to civilization down the Canadian River in today’s western Oklahoma, Long’s party traveled through inconceivable numbers of herbiferous animals and innumerable birds and beasts of prey. Herds of wild horses five hundred strong surrounded them. All These animals were so teamed that they peered wholly unaccustomed to the side of men, they wrote.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: The bisons and.
00:11:05
Speaker 1: Wolves moved slowly off to right and left, leaving a lane for the party to pass. Long’s official report claimed that the western plains seemed peculiarly adapted as arranged for Buffalo’s wild goats and other wild game. As a result, these explorers thought the plan’s best left just as they had found them. Other nineteenth century Americans were amazed and too curious not to go see. The famous writer Washington Irving was enthralled enough to go himself and then write Travels in the Prairie. New York novelist James Finnimore Cooper wrote a leatherstocking novel about the planes. The painter of Indians. George Catlin was besotted and did his best, which often wasn’t so great, to capture prairie landscapes and wild life. Germans, who trained with the legendary naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, explored around the world, but one of the places they sought out was the American plains. Prince Maximilian of v Nuvid brought with him the amazing animal and landscape painter Carl Bodmer, whose collection of oils dawned on the Missouri in the early eighteen thirties are some of our very best great plains time travel machines. And of course there was John James Audubon, who left us wonderful accounts from his eighteen forty three trip up the Missouri. With his son’s accounts I’ve laid out in prior episodes. Even after the Civil War, when travelers, naturalists and artists going west were responding to America’s so called Hudson River School painters and their rapture over mountains, the plains remained unforgettable for many. America’s poet laureate of the nineteen teenth century, that ultimate lover of being alive in a vibrant time was captivated what Whitman saw the plans for the first time after the Civil War, when the animals and native inhabitants still held sway and the frontier was then hosting one of the greatest dramas in the world. His reaction was simple and direct. I can almost quote it from memory. While I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I’m not so sure. But the prairies and the plains, while less stunning at first sight, lasts longer fill the esthetic sense, fuller precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape. Consider that when you look out the car window for mountains as a signal that traversing the plains is finally over. As long as the wildlife spectacle lasted, the planes continued to intrigue the same set of eclectic adventurers from Europe who searched out the sources of the Nile in Africa or became wide hunters there. Prairie fever is what they called this fascination in the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, after five decades of killing had rendered the planes eerily silent. But before agriculture pulled the grass up wholesale, the region could steal entrance for New York bohemian Mabel Dodge, journeying by train to New Mexico. The plane seemed a desert, but a beautiful one that, in her words, rolled away for miles and miles, empty, smooth and uninterrupted. I thought I had never seen a landscape reduced to such simple elements.
00:15:04
Speaker 2: Young Georgia O’Keefe.
00:15:06
Speaker 1: Sentenced to a career as an art teacher in outback Texas during World War One before becoming an internationally known painter out on the undulating sweeps near Amarillo, marveled at how you could just drive or walk off into space. As she said, it’s absurd the way I love this country. Writing her friend Daniel cat and Rich As late as nineteen forty nine, O’Keefe told him crossing the Panhandle of Texas is always a very special event for me, driving in the early morning, toward the dawn and rising sun. The plains are not like anything else, and I always wonder why I go other places. The Western writers Mary Sandoz and Willa Cather reacted in a similar way to the country that produced them.
00:16:00
Speaker 2: Catherine told a.
00:16:01
Speaker 1: Back home newspaper in nineteen twenty one. I go everywhere, I admire all kinds of country, But when I strike the open plains, something happens.
00:16:10
Speaker 2: I’m home. I breathe differently.
00:16:13
Speaker 1: That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea, It’s the grand passion of my life. I’ve tried for years to get over it. I’ve stopped trying. It’s incurable. Even without the great herds, without the wolf packs, or the side of a grizzly suddenly standing upright in river Willows. When the landscape itself was still intact, the Great Plains could excite the eye with a rhythmic, ocean like topography. There’s an obvious question to pose here. What’s happened to make the modern reaction to the Great Plains so different? How, in other words, do you get from Walt Whitman and Willa Cather to flyover country. That answer has to do with the stunning transformation this part of the West underwent at our hands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the relative wink of an eye, we dismantled and demolished a ten thousand year old ecology, one of the most exciting natural spectacles in the world. For the women tuned into the Plains sand O’s O’Keefe Cather, it was not wildlife beyond imagining that stunned them, but in their case a sense of freedom at being in vast natural spaces that appealed a country like the ocean was a phrase that served as a code for feeling free, but historical forces that mounted as railroads and ranching and farming around I’ve destroyed much even of that great plains. True enough, reducing thirty million bison to one thousand, fifteen million prong horns to five thousand, rounding up all the wild horses for pet food, erasing all the wolves entirely, all done so the cow and the sheep could replace them was the unkindest cut.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: But there was more.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: Act two was the agricultural assault. Level grasslands didn’t present the obstacles to mono crop market agriculture that other landscapes did. So. From the eighteen fifties to the nineteen thirties, homesteading policies privatized the vast bulk of the former American Serengetti in Kansas and Colorado. The big breakout took place on either side of the twentieth century. In Oklahoma, the land rushes resulted from Indian reservation allotments. Settlers broke out in Nebraska, the Dakota’s east in Montana, and plains New Mexico after Congress passed an enlarged Homestead Act in nineteen oh nine. In Texas, with its anomalous lands history and long devotion to privatization, the breakup of the Gigantic X Ranch in nineteen fifteen brought farmers by the train load to the Yanos, Toccado and the Rolling Plains of Texas. Entirely transforming a ten thousand year old ecology in the space of one hundred and fifty years is a staggering thing to contemplate on the southern Blackland Prairie of Texas. In Oklahoma, agriculture has by now reduced to ancient grasslands there to only one percent of their original coverage. By two thousand and one, even Saskatchewan had only nineteen percent of its native prairie left. North Dakota possessed only twenty eight percent of its remaining prairie at the beginning of this century, and that was before the Bacan oil boom. Texas has an overall average of twenty percent of its prairie left today, although the part of the high Plains I know best, the Yanos Tacado, is in far worst shape. Lubbock County, where I once lived, by nineteen eighty had lost ninety seven percent of its native grasslands. Literally all that remained was in Yellow House Canyon, a grassy gorge. Ranchers had settled because there was a little stream threading it and it was too rugged to plow and put in cotton. Economics left Yellow House to the cows and to me. Back in the West of eighteen oh six, homeward bound Lewis and Clark were desperate to escape the wildlife poor in difficult Rocky mountains and return to the plains.
00:21:00
Speaker 2: Two centuries of history.
00:21:02
Speaker 1: Have accomplished a reversal of that. Now, the National Forest of the Rockies are home to most of the West wildlife, but in one of the more exciting plains developments in recent years, elk, grizzlies and wolves have once again started to push out of the mountains and into their former Great Plains homelands.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: This is a three act story.
00:21:32
Speaker 1: Once, when its ecological health was fulsome and intact, we thrilled to the plains part.
00:21:38
Speaker 2: Of the West.
00:21:40
Speaker 1: Then we homesteaded it and wreaked havoc on its natural world, creating flyover country. For the past three quarters of a century, a third phase has been building momentum. Phase three is still a vision, a vision to reimagine and recreate the setting that once infected us with prairie fever. Rewilding the Great Plains with its traditional charismatic big animals means finding places where the antelope can still play. Natural grasslands and prairie ecosystems are now among some of the most under preserved natural regions on the continent.
00:22:20
Speaker 2: And indeed in the world.
00:22:22
Speaker 1: Despite acclaimed examples of grassland parks that now preserve the charismatic wild animals of the African Plains, such as the Masai, Mara and Krueger Parks in Africa and the Elmas in Brazil conservation in the United States, for a very long time overlook the plains. Irony doesn’t even capture knowing that the first call for an America National Park by artist George Catlan in eighteen thirty two was for a park on the Great Plains, but all of us are aware that the most famous Western national parks are nowhere near the plains. The National Park Service during its early history was embarrassingly apathetic toward parks on the grasslands.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: East of the Rockies.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: That began to change in the nineteen thirties, but not before there were huge misses during the initial phase of national park history. The scenic ideals of the Romantic Age was for scenery thought to be sublime. Sublime landscapes were always vertical.
00:23:25
Speaker 2: The more monumentally vertical, the better.
00:23:29
Speaker 1: The horizontal was decidedly not sublime, So the major conservation initiatives that gave us our national park public lands a century ago focused on Western terrain that was like the European Alps, in other words, soaring mountain peaks, gasp inducing canyons. This meant that the Rockies, the Sierras and Cascades, and the Colorado Plateau became the bastions of the parkland public lands. The powers that fashion the Western scenic parks in the lower forty eight almost entirely ignored landscapes like the western deserts and the plains, grasslands, Yellowstone and Glacier and Rocky Mountain National Parks, along with the Great Canyons like Yosemite, Zion, and the Grand Canyon, thus became the neplu ultra examples of American parks. These landscapes aren’t just vertical, they’re monumentally vertical. No landscapes on the plains seemed very interesting to an American public with an esthetic taste based on European ideals, or a park service with this value of scenery. Except for tiny Wind Cave Park in South Dakota, the only significant plains nature preservation in the early years of the twentieth century. The heydays of the Grand Parks came when Teddy Roosevelt’s administration proclaimed a small mountain range in southwestern Oklahoma, the Wichita Mountains wildlife Refuge. With the emergence of the science of ecology by the nineteen thirties, the Park Service gradually began to appreciate the idea of preserving ecologies. But now a new problem surfaced. Until the creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in nineteen sixty four, the Park Service in America had no budget to acquire parks. That hadn’t been an issue when parks and monuments came from the public lands, but it became an almost insurmountable obstacle on the prairie, where widespread privatization had meant that almost every potential site for a prairie National Park would have to be purchased. In the nineteen twenties, the American pioneer of the science of ecology, Victorshell, and a group called the Committee of Ecology of the Grasslands began to press for large Great Plains preserves based on ecological factors rather than seenic spectacle. They studied eleven sites, found four more than acceptable, and eventually submitted one spanning three quarters of a million acres in Nebraska and South Dakota to the Park Service and Congress. But lacking an acquisition budget for new parks, nothing came of their work. The philosophical direction the Park Service took in its early years was the result of the personal vision of its first director, New Englander, Stephen Mather. The prime directive in Mather’s criteria was that new parks had to possess scenery so extraordinary as to be of national interest. While scientists like Victor Shelford were thinking of representative eCos systems. The Park Service still had the Mather scenery inertia to overcome, so as the NPS began to look beyond mountains and canyons to heed the scientist’s interest in the Great Plains, they concentrated not on the rolling, grassy uplands most typical of the region, but on the more dramatic ban lands and canyonlands country the plains erosional equivalents of the Colorado Plateau. The success of Yellowstone had them thinking about animals too, about game parks like Africas, but scenery was always first. The problem was that little on the Great Plains measured up against the Grand Canyon or Zion. Thus, in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, the Park Service disappointed the ecologists by turning down one proposal after another one area, though the South Dakota Badlands did set the planes on the road eventually to a.
00:28:03
Speaker 2: Sizable national park.
00:28:11
Speaker 1: Local advocates had proposed the Yellow and Cream South Dakota Badlands as a park as early as nineteen oh nine, since much of its acreage consisted of Indian lands left over from a lotmanth and parcels passed over in the home setting process. It was a good candidate for an agency with no money, but it was a bad lands. Its sparse grasscover seemed too thin for wild herds on the Yellowstone model at the time. The broadly experienced Roger Toll, a man who would lose his life in a tragic car accident a few years later, was the chief investigator for New Parks. Told visited the area in July of nineteen twenty eight and within days decided that it is not a supreme scenic feature of national importance.
00:29:05
Speaker 2: The bad Lands, he explained to his Washington.
00:29:07
Speaker 1: Superiors, are surpassed in grander beauty and interest by the Grand Canyon National Park and by Bryce National Park. Toll would have had to tour Mars to find another Grand Canyon. Sixty percent of the bad lands had remained part of the public domain, though, and when South Dakota agreed to acquire and transfer to the Park Service ninety percent of the remaining private holdings, Told proposed a consolation. He recommended that the Service used the Antiquities Act, whose targets were usually landscapes of unusual archaeological or geological interests, to proclaim sixty eight thousand acres of the area a new national monument. Congress approved bad Lands National Monument in nineteen twenty nine. Eventually large to some two hundred and fifty thousand acres, it became the Great Plains largest chunk of public lands.
00:30:07
Speaker 2: When the monument opened in nineteen thirty.
00:30:09
Speaker 1: Nine, bison were gone from it, pronghorns very nearly so, and across the Gray and Saffron Mounds, hunters had long before wiped out the famous local population of Rocky Mountain big horns. All three species could be and were recovered, but the bad lands sparse grass cover and small size has kept it from becoming a Plain’s Yellowstone. Something similar happened with North Dakota’s Little Missouri bad Lands, which the NPS initially found too barren for a national park. At first, local ranchers there vehemently opposed a park, but rancher opposition swirled away with the dust Bowl and the Depression, and the Park Service finally acquired the area in nineteen forty seven, but as a history historical memorial park based on President Theodore Roosevelt’s presence in the area, with its pronghorns and bison, heard and eventually wild horses. North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park came closer to the Great Plains Ecosystem Park Shelford and the ecologists were calling for. But the park’s two units were small, barely seventy thousand acres total, and the Park Service had promised that none of the big original predators like grizzlies or wolves would ever return. The public lands reserved on the Northern Plains that would eventually have the most promised as a catland like wild possibility began life modestly in nineteen thirty six as the Fort Peck Game Range, initially managed by the Bureau row of Biological Survey. The Survey had sent its well respected ecologist O. Loss Murray to report on the area surrounding a damned reservoir the core of engineers was creating on the Missouri called Fort Peck. Expecting Muri to suggest a waterfowl refuge, Murray surprised his bosses by arguing that the broken badland studded valley held much greater promise as a preserve for big wild animals from small things.
00:32:34
Speaker 2: Large results.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: By the nineteen seventies, what had now become called the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge was the second largest one in the lower forty eight, of a size that made it a real possibility for modern rewilding with its nineteen seventy eight Omnibus Parks Bill. That same day decade, the Park Service upgraded both the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt to full National Park status, along with wind Cave and Saskatchewan’s Grassland National Park established in nineteen eighty one, and eight National Grasslands. All these gave the Northern Plains at least a start in recapturing the wildlife spectacle and ancient poetry of.
00:33:27
Speaker 2: The American prairies.
00:33:32
Speaker 1: I’ve already told the story in episode twenty two of the NPS attempt to create a National Park of the Plains on the Southern Plains around Palloduro Canyon, a sixty mile long canyon carved by the headwaters of the Red River as it slices through the Texas Panhandle. One thousand foot deep roar of color, Palo Duro was certainly scenic and vertical, but it wasn’t scenic or vertical enough to suit Roger Toll. Plus, it had long since gone under private fence without a commitment from Texas to.
00:34:10
Speaker 2: Acquire the land.
00:34:11
Speaker 1: It failed as both a National Park candidate in nineteen thirty four and as one hundred and thirty five thousand acre National monument in nineteen thirty eight. Geologist Charles Gould argued that Palo Duro, as he put it, is well worthy of being made into a national monument. It is the most spectacular canyon carved by erosion anywhere on the Great Plains of North America. But no one in Texas stepped forward to help with the two hundred and ninety four thousand dollars roughly six point seven million today the NPS needed in the nineteen thirties to acquire a Palo Duro Canyon National Monument. Losing that, which ultimately would have also become a National park was among the biggest misses on the planes in the twentieth century. So the Southern prairies have ended up entirely lacking a National park. South of the Arkansas River, there are a handful of National Wildlife refuges and two small national monuments Albate’s Flint Quarry and the Texas Panhandle and Capulin Volcano in New Mexico. Today, on the southern plains, only three point six percent of the landscape is in public ownership here in the twenty first century, in a country its nineteenth century explorers said, seems particularly adapted as a range for buffalo’s, wildcoats and other game. No great, preserved or rewilded landscapes exist on the Southern prairies.
00:35:59
Speaker 2: In our time.
00:36:00
Speaker 1: Restoring the Great Prairies to their former glory is assuming a different form than the last centuries grand national parks. Since the turn of the twenty first century, this new approach has conservation organizations like the Southern Plains Land Trust in Colorado and American Prairie in Montana employing a market approach acquiring Great Plains ranches that they then work to rewild. The Southern Plains Land Trust owns a forty five thousand acre ranch called Heartland in southeastern Colorado, where it’s now removed all internal fencing and recovered bison, pronghorns, wild horses, elk, and extensive prairie dog towns. Once five billion strong, prairie dogs are today down to just one percent of their former numbers, But a collegist find a ring correlation between existing prairie dog towns and the remaining populations of iconic prairie species like burrowing owls, peruginous hawks, golden eagles, and endangered species like mountain plovers, swift foxes, and blackfooted ferrets, which, prior to mass poisoning of dog towns, preyed on prairie dogs the way wolves called elk. In fact, in October of twenty twenty four, my wife Sarah and I had the thrill of helping to release thirty three endangered blackfooted ferrets into heartlands prairie dog towns. There’s more public land on the northern plains, though, and the best hope for a great prairie wild lands on the scale of the Game Parks of Africa is there, specifically in the state of Montana. Conservation biologists say that to work ecologically, a Catlanesque Plains Park should cover at least two and a half million acres the size of Yellowstone. And let’s be honest, fashioning something this grand is a conservation act on the level of creating the first national parks in world history or passing a Wilderness Preservation Act, and America achieved both of those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
00:38:22
Speaker 2: Do we still have that kind of vision?
00:38:26
Speaker 1: There’s something close to it although in our present political climate it must have necessity take a different form than the federal actions that got us parks and wildernesses. The bookends of a Grand Prairie Preserve emerge from President Bill Clinton’s two thousand and one proclamation of an Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument draped along one hundred and fifty miles of that river.
00:38:53
Speaker 2: Downstream of it is the Charles M.
00:38:56
Speaker 1: Russell National Wildlife Refuge I mentioned own to a whopping nine hundred and fifteen thousand, eight hundred and fourteen acres, and in between those two vast public lands private ranches looking for buyers. American Prairie opened offices in Bozeman, Montana in two thousand and one to see if the Rockefeller family strategy of buying up private ranches to create Grand Teton’s Park might work on the twenty first century Great Plans. The organization has money. There are big time donors on both coasts, although the vast majorities of AP’s donors are small contributors, and it has an epic plan to acquire a critical half million private acres in order to stitch together the existing public lands along the Missouri into a restored Great planes preserved that could approach three million or more acres in size, larger even than Yellowstone.
00:40:01
Speaker 2: Despite a rousing a firestorm.
00:40:03
Speaker 1: In the conservative media and the present strongly conservative Montana State government, major players, including National Geographic are all in on American Prairies project. It envisions a rewilded great planes preserved, including not just bison, elk, and pronghorns, but the full ecological array of animals and ecologies of the historic planes, including grizzlies and wolves. American prairie, in other words, would be what we never got a version of the Massai Mara or the Serengetti in America. Recreating our American Serengetti means a reversing of the arc of recent history on the Great Plains that enrages some people, But it is after all a realization of the Stephen Long idea from eighteen twenty that the best future for at least pieces of the plains is to preserve the region in the state we found it. That state of nature, after all, had ten thousand years of prior existence going.
00:41:16
Speaker 3: For it, all, right, Dan, So in this episode, you’re standing up for the planes as a as a landscape that should be celebrated. And I think you One of the things that I really appreciated about this episode is you describe driving across the plains and what you see, and a lot of times, I think the impression that it gives to folks is that time is standing still out here. And you point out that there’s this huge iron me between the impression that people have of a timelessness on the great planes and the tremendous amount of change that they’ve gone through that’s invisible to us now.
00:42:12
Speaker 2: And I kind of wonder.
00:42:15
Speaker 3: If you think we’ll ever wake up as a country to the reality of that history, right.
00:42:22
Speaker 1: You know. I wrote a book a few years ago that I titled American Serengetti, and I did it very deliberately to try to wake people up because I wanted them to realize. I mean, we’re all enamored on the Nature Channel and PBS of the wonderful documentaries about you know, the great game parks in East Africa and Tanzania and Kenya and South Africa and elsewhere. I mean, and those are kind of bucket lists things for a lot of people, including me. Sarah and I are going to Kenya in fact this October. Having tried to go in twenty nineteen. It was going to be the summer of twenty twenty that happened to be the summer of the pandemic, so we weren’t able to go that summer, and are finally going to get over to Kenya this coming fall. And the reason I wanted to make that kind of analogy is because of all of those quotes that I used in the script of this particular episode in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century after even after some of the animals were gone, but the landscape, as plains people put it, still had the hair on it, The grass was still there, and so that topography still had a kind of an appeal.
00:43:46
Speaker 2: I wanted to.
00:43:50
Speaker 1: Make the point with American Serengetti and with an episode like this, that we Americans had one of the natural marvels of the world, like East Africa, right here in the near American West, the West, on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, and we sort of myopically and without very much thought, it seems, just frittered it away.
00:44:22
Speaker 2: We destroyed all the wildlife. We deep buffalo dewolfed.
00:44:28
Speaker 1: The entire countryside of the Great Plains that had so inspired so many people. And then, unlike the mountainous West are the Colorado Plateau or even the deserts of the American West, all of which ended up getting a lot of public lands, the plains looked to American policymakers like the perfect place to plunk down farmers and ranchers, and so we ended up privatizing most of that world, and those two steps wiping out all the wildlife that had been there, that had made it into an American Serengeti. And then the next step of tearing up even the grasslands themselves in many cases in order to produce farms and ranches and privatize empires, made it really difficult for us to sort of redress the historical error of not preserving some of this Great Plains country as some semblance of what it once had been. I mean, I try to point out in this particular episode that it’s beyond ironic that the first call in American history for a national park it wasn’t in Yellowstone, it wasn’t in Glacier, it wasn’t in Yosemite. It was for a national park on the Great Plains. But we ended up instead with the Great Plains being almost completely ignored by the great movement to establish America’s Western parks, and so we’ve only in the twenty first century begun to, I think, circle back and try to try to come up with some sort of of new twenty first century solution to how we get some rewilded part of the planes back again.
00:46:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:46:19
Speaker 3: You, I think a lot of people when they imagine the Western national parks like Yosemite, Grand Canyon, all the Utah Parks, Yellowstone Glacier, it’s like, I think there’s sort of an unconscious assumption like, yeah, that’s exactly where the park like landscapes are. Where else would they be, you know, it’s like these are natural settings for these parks to be. But you point out in this episode sort of how the site selection for National parks has been based throughout the Park Service’s history on sort of a changing set of criteria that in some instances privileges certain landscapes over others or maybe ecological values, Like there’s been sort of an always shifting set of rules about what’s the national park and what’s not. And it’s not etched in stone anywhere on a tablet that these places are fit to be parks and these other landscapes are not.
00:47:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I try to provide the audience for this particular episode with some sense of the history of that, and it’s pretty clear. In the early years of the designation of parks, and of course we designate quite a number of parks before we ever have a National Park Service in order to kind of codify what sort of landscapes we’re looking for. But when we do have a National Park Service, that happens in nineteen sixteen and we have an initial director, Stephen Mather is his name. He’s a New Englander, very wealthy, Hervart educated New Englander who sort of imposes his will on site selection for additional national parks. What you start to realize is that in these early stages, from the time that Yellowstone had been set aside down through the creation of a park service, is that we had looked for parks based on a kind of a European model that centered around what was thought of as the most scenic part of Western Europe, which was the Alps. And so we were looking for mountain ranges that looked like the Alps.
00:48:44
Speaker 2: We were looking for in the more.
00:48:47
Speaker 1: Arid parts of the West, at least really vertical walled canyons because verticality was regarded as the sublime scenery. And of course the Great Plains is anything vertical. It’s basically a horizontal landscape. And so that kind of model immediately put the Great Planes, and a privatization has taking place too, but that model put the Great Planes on a back burner. And then when we finally start getting ecologists beginning to weigh in and telling the Park Service or what you need to do is you need to have some representative pieces of different ecologies to preserve, to preserve American nature. By this point many of the public lands parks had been created, and since the Plains has been privatized, the Park Service is now confronting, Wow, so how do we actually get a park? If we want one on the Plains, that means we’re going to have to buy it, and we don’t have an acquisition budget. Our Park Service has always just created parks out of existing public lands, and that then becomes the next big hurdle and an effort to try to turn back towards the Great Plains and begin to preserve some of those landscapes that are there.
00:50:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, you allude in this episode when you’re discussing American prairie and this new model that’s emerging here in Montana. You allude in that discussion to the case of the Rockefellers in Grand Teton National Park, and I think that’s a story that maybe is not as well known because you look at that place and you think, well, of course, this has always been a park. It’s a postcard, you know. But I wonder if you can tell that story in a little more detail for folks that aren’t familiar with the role that the Rockefellers played in that.
00:50:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean so Grant Teitan National Park obviously, as you say, it’s a piece of the West that we would say, okay, that right, along with Yosemite and Glacier and Yellow Zone, that is a part from the very beginning.
00:51:01
Speaker 2: Well, it’s actually not.
00:51:02
Speaker 1: It’s a part of a forest reserve in western Wyoming, and so the peaks themselves, the Tetons become a part of the public lands. But in order to create a national park there, you need some of the valley floor, you need a longer stretch of the mountains, and much of the country around the peaks themselves had been taken up under the Homestead Acts. By ranchers. And so what the Rockefeller family did, starting in the nineteen thirties was very quietly, as ranches came for sale, they began buying up the ranches around the Great Tetons and the Grand Tetons and in the Jackson Hole Valley and quietly conveying title to the National Park Service. I mean, it reached the point in the nineteen forties where the ranchers realized what was going on, and there was a tremendous kind of pushback, some ranchers refusing to sell no matter what the price was because they were steadfast against turning the Titans and the Jacksonville Valley into a national park. But the Rockefellers basically managed to get most of the lands that went into Grand Teton National Park by buying up private ranches. So that was kind of the model when American prairie began imagining the possibility of Okay, here’s this big public lands that Bill Clinton has just created along the Missouri River as a national monument. And we’ve long had this now almost million acre size Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge downriver, and here are these ranches in between, many of which are being offered for sale, and so let’s do the same kind of thing in Montana the Rockefeller family had done in Wyoming.
00:53:03
Speaker 2: And I think that’s part of.
00:53:06
Speaker 3: Sort of the popular maybe it’s a blind spot and sort of popular discourse surrounding American Prairie is that this isn’t sort of a brand new invention. The Rockefeller story is actually a sort of very insightful.
00:53:22
Speaker 2: It’s a precedent.
00:53:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:53:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, And today, you know, we think of Grand Teton National Park and we don’t associate it with controversy. Is how sort of short the historical memory is with that place.
00:53:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Randall. And I mean I first heard of American Prairie in fact, when a friend of mine, a historian named Bob Ryder, who had written about the creation of Grand Teeton National Park, was invited by this organization that was forming in Bozeman to come over and talk to them about the creation of Grand Teeton Park. So I remember, you know, having a con because Bob and I he was one of my backpacking buddies for many years, and we were off on a backpack and I was saying, so, what are these folks and Bozeman have in mind. He said, well, I think they’re going to try to do something kind of like what the Rockefellers tried.
00:54:17
Speaker 2: That’s what they wanted me to talk about.
00:54:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think I was up on American prairie two weeks ago helping out with a bison hunt, and this is sort of a non sequoror or we’re just getting up, but it popped into mind because we were talking about the Grand Teeton precedent up there and we were watching the prairie dogs and it’s one of those prairie dogs are one of those animals you mentioned this in the piece that they don’t get the credit that they deserve a sort of native fauna. But we were watching him and I was thinking to myself, Man, if these were African animals, that’d be the most popular animal at the zoo, right. You think of like the meerkat, and it’s sort of just the the exoticism of that animal gives it like a spark in your mind that the prairie dog just doesn’t seem to elicit. And I don’t know, I find sometimes when I kind of rearrange the furniture in my head and try to take a different perspective on what’s right in front of me. I get this new appreciation for it, and you kind of begin to really see the prairie dog for what it is. And I don’t know, I think you went through that experience in all your time living on the on the planes. But I just wonder what more there is to do to to rebrand some of our local serengetti, Right.
00:55:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think that we in a lot of ways. One of the reasons we’re struggling with this today is that because we didn’t act the way, for example, a colonial power like England did in Kenya and Tanzania, where they moved to help these emerging governments establish parks to preserve all the wildlife that they had. Because we didn’t do that here, in some respects, we allowed the American public to sort of lose interest in a lot of these creatures. I mean, when you read those accounts in the nineteenth century, people were fascinated by animals like prairie dogs and blackfooted ferrets and swift foxes, and I mean everybody was just you know, they were prairie fever in fact, is the term that everybody used for a fascination with being on the Great planes and seeing all these animals, and because of the way our history played out, we lost the sense of the magic of it, and so along with the creation of the landscapes themselves, I mean, we’re kind of going to have to, I think, reacquire the magic. And I think if American Prairie does succeed in its grand vision of not just having buffalo and elk and prong wars, but also having gray wolves, grizzly bears, prairie dog towns, all of the complete kind of ecology that so thrilled people in the nineteenth century, I think we’ve got a chance to get it back.
00:57:35
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
00:57:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too, Randall, all right, thank you,
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