Linda Poole can’t restrain herself when it comes to the most-polarizing topic in Montana: the reintroduction of purebred bison. As Poole sees it, the bison aren’t a cause. They’re cuddly fundraising mascots helping the American Prairie Reserve to raise money to advance its mission of land accumulation under the auspices of species preservation.
“If you can ignite people’s imaginations with free-roaming bison,” she says, “you get the bison to make your money.”
A heard of bison on the Fort Peck Reservation near Polar, Montana. Photographer: Matthew Brown/AP Photo
May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg Pursuits shows you how members of the mega-wealthy are snapping up vast tracts of the American West and returning them to their natural, pristine state. The American Prairie Foundation is looking to create a national park the size of Connecticut in northern Montana, but not everyone is pleased. Bloomberg's Adam Johnson explains.
Members of the superrich are snapping up vast tracts of the American West and returning them to their native state. Local ranchers aren't pleased. Illustration: Zohar Lazar/BloombergPursuits
The group plans to populate the sparsely settled scrubland with up to 10,000 genetically pure bison, descendants of the original animals that last thundered across the American frontier of the 1800s, as opposed to today’s tamer descendants which have been crossbred with cattle. Photographer: Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images
Billionaire German retail baron Erivan Haub is just one of the ultrarich on the donor roll of the American Prairie Reserve. Photographer: Alexander Hassenstein/Bongarts via Getty Images
The bison in question are grazing about 20 miles (30 kilometers) away on ranch land owned by the nonprofit Prairie Reserve, which has attracted some $60 million from well-known Wall Street and Silicon Valley financiers, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Summer 2013 issue.
Its plan is to buy out Poole’s neighbors and assemble as much as 3.5 million acres (1.4 million hectares) of contiguous private and public land -- about a million acres more thanYellowstone National Park to the south -- in a bid to build an American Serengeti, where the deer and the antelope can again play free.
The organization’s donor roll reads like a who’s who of the ultrarich: billionaire candy heirs Forrest Mars Jr. and his brother, John (combined net worth: $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index); German retail baron Erivan Haub ($4.9 billion); the foundation of Swiss medical device mogul Hansjoerg Wyss ($12.4 billion); and Susan Packard Orr, daughter of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and chairwoman of the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, which has assets of $5.6 billion.
Pure Bison
After cobbling the properties together, the group plans to populate the sparsely settled scrubland with up to 10,000 genetically pure bison, descendants of the original animals that last thundered across the American frontier of the 1800s (as opposed to today’s tamer descendants, which have been crossbred with cattle).
They’ll mingle with coyotes, prairie dogs and other scourges of the cattlemen with whom the Prairie Reserve is battling (when it isn’t buying them out). The group will then allow the public full run of the expanse, much like a national park.
“Think of it like an empty aquarium,” says Sean Gerrity, 54, president of and the driving force behind the Prairie Reserve and a former Silicon Valley management consultant. “What we sell is the possibility, and we sell ourselves as the people capable of bringing that vision to fruition.”
What especially galls some local ranchers is the presumption that they and their forebears have done little to preserve the environment.
Furry Tanks
“The way we’ve managed these properties, the wildlife numbers are as good as they’ve ever been, perhaps rivaling what Lewis and Clark saw -- other than bison,” says Leo Barthelmess Jr., who keeps 610 cattle and 700 sheep on 24,700 acres 32 miles southeast of Malta, the main town in Phillips County, where much of the Prairie Reserve’s land is located.
Bison, as far as Barthelmess is concerned, are furry, fence-busting, brucellosis-spreading tanks. (Brucellosis being a bacterial infection that causes abortion or premature calving in infected cattle.) “In order to build their 3-to-4-million-acre vision, I can’t live here,” he says.
Poole helped start the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, which promotes wildlife-friendly fences, the preservation of sage grouse habitat and other conservation efforts.
“This landscape was broken in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Poole says. “Ranchers and the Soil Conservation Service worked and brought this prairie back. It’s not pristine; it’s restored. It doesn’t need to be saved from ranchers; it was already saved by ranchers.”
Tempting Cash
Poole says she suspects the Prairie Reserve’s cash will prove too tempting for other ranchers to turn down.
“It’s really hard for some people to resist that much money,” she says. “Most of these people are land rich and cash poor.”
The organization doesn’t disclose how much it pays for property, but rancher Vicki Olson says it’s paid as much as $2,000 an acre, whereas the going rate is typically a quarter of that.
“They want it big, and we have to be gone if they want thousands of buffalo running free,” says Olson, who keeps 500 head of Black Angus cattle on 20,000 acres of private and government-leased land 30 miles south of Malta. “There ain’t room for the both of us.”
The barbs directed toward the Prairie Reserve echo many of the same complaints that accompanied the creation of some of America’s national parks and monuments. Former President Bill Clinton’s 2001 designation of the nearby 375,000-acre Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, for instance -- which limits both cattle grazing and oil development -- is still bitterly resented in the region.
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