Imagine America's Serengeti: Building the Largest Wildlife Reserve in the Continental United States

morning everyone thank you for coming I look forward to talking with you and answering your questions after we take a few minutes here to get you oriented to the project so imagine standing on a landscape right here in the continental United States where you can see seventy-five to a hundred miles to the horizon with nothing man-made impeding your view no cars no telephone wires no fences but what you are surrounded by is pure nature small mammals grassland birds ungulates of incredible variety and numbers and imagine standing there in realizing that from a sheer size standpoint and as a wildlife phenomenon this place is on par with Africa's Serengeti historic historians tell us that one very special spot on the northern Great Plains just one looked like this for thousands of years up until about 1860 and this is what we are well on our way to recreating again on the northeastern plains of Montana so I want to tell you a story about this special place because it has incredible historical significance and as I tell you I launched I want to tell you how we picked it and also how we're going about the unfolding of this project to get you oriented I'll be mentioning the size the number of times we're going for for this park or this reserve it's about three it's a three and a half million acres that equates to around five thousand square miles depicted by this green oval here that's about the size of the state of Connecticut for you Californians if you put it in the Bay Area it would reach to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada I had to throw at least one International slide in here a little west of London beyond the Cliffs of Dover out into the QI English Channel it's big as I go through this there are a few points I hope you will take away four or five key points and this is the first one really critical there are only four places left on earth to do something at the scale only four places left and all of them are shrinking as we are here today they're being plowed up at the edges in order to grow food for us we're working right here on the northern Great Plains on the corner right on one of the four areas right in this area here as we go the northern Great Plains are made up of portions of five states and two provinces of Canada and we're working in the very best spot right there and it's best for a number of reasons one unlike other areas it has not been plowed up yet the sod as we say is still right-side up and I'll tell you more about why that's so important there's a wildlife history here that didn't exist anywhere else on the Great Plains we'll talk about that as well there's an opportunity to not have to buy all this land to put together all these acres only a small sliver of it and use it as glue to bring together existing wildlife oriented lands and the demographic changes are important for a variety of economic reasons people have been leaving this area steadily for over a hundred years these conditions and others make it ideal to build here now as you fly over the rest of the Great Plains this is what you tend to see it's very fragmented and chopped up and under cultivation growing food for us now that makes a lot of sense our species is slated to go from around seven billion now to about nine billion in not too long you have to grow that food somewhere but our contention is there's one very special spot left this place we're talking about it has not yet been tilled up it's got an amazing history and that we should save this for future generations and put everything back that used to be there now the interesting thing all these animals here we talk about the wildlife history how do we know that these and hundreds of other kinds of species used to be there these big big numbers so to follow that story first we have to go back quite a ways and understand the the effects of that has been on North America over the thousands of years North America has been subject to a variety of ice ages I know you know the last one was called the Wisconsin glacier came down about 13,000 years ago not quite that fast but I'm in a hurry and it when I pull back it put it pulled back all the topsoil left a very hardscrabble area called the northern Great Plains that's right we were working up there so we can go out on the northern Great Plains we're seeking evidence of these animals and more using archaeological techniques that are very common today we can go back in time and find examples of what people were using and also carbon-date organic material and find the bones and remnants of these animals right in conjunction with people living there we can drive further back find different artifacts different testing and go all the way back in fact to the very front edge of that glacier just as it receded about ten thousand years ago before bow and arrows or developed before even atlatl when people are still hunting with thrusting spears that's what that point is and still we find around the campsites fragments of these bones the insight tells us for 10,000 or more years people have been living and killing in conjunction with these animals they're there for a long time the first time people started writing about it actually where we could have actual history you don't have to do archaeology we have written records is the French fur trappers from the Hudson Bay Company in the late 1700s we have their journals of telling us what when they hit this particular area here Louis this trail you're seeing here is of Lewis and Clark in the early 1800s they walked and paddled four thousand miles round-trip they were a 40 man military expedition looking for a commercial waterway to the west coast it was very interesting they took copious notes they were told to do so by the President and when they hit here their journals changed remarkably here they talked they wrote back to the President Thomas Jefferson and said the physical beauty of this place is absolutely astounding but what's really unique as compared to anything else on our journey is the wildlife we found here bighorn sheep on almost every cliff thousands upon thousands of ELQ everyday we see being followed by the ever-present packs of wolves grizzly bear sometimes attacking us every single day as we go through here and the bison in such incredible numbers they sometimes impede the progress of our journey well these fantastical journals inspired other people to come out and see this for themselves people like the famous American painter George Catlin he came out 20 years later based on those journal stories to see and interestingly he paid in many pictures here interestingly he was the very first one to call for the establishment of a nation's Park even Europeans were coming essentially on safari to America's Great Plains based on these incredible stories and to see the unique American wildlife and see they meet uniquely American landscape out west here as an example in Prince Maximilian vide of Germany brought with him a young 22 year old painter his name was Karl Bodmer he did over 50 images in this area and they too when they got back and put their journals together said the Americans ought to save this before it's all gone well we didn't save it and in fact just the opposite occurred sadly all these animals I showed you a few minutes ago and more were 100% extirpated completely wiped out not one left from this area we're talking about in just a matter of 30 to 40 years and it wasn't just here but it's happening all across the u.s. is simply and a result of manifest destiny people coming out setting up shop and for the very first time in 10,000 years the difference with these people who set up fences and we put livestock inside the fences the wildlife for one way or another had to go for instance this is what elk distribution look like in Lewis and Clark's time not very long later it looked like that right about that time this is where grizzly bears were in what is now the United States in just 30 years they trunk back to this perhaps most astounding are the bison experts still debate this all that's I'm the low-end is about 30 million the top-end fifty to sixty million but nonetheless thirty to thirty to fifty million bison in just 25 years shrunk down to that there is only 200 left we almost lost that species but while all this bad news was happening at least for wildlife luckily there are some good news on the upswing right about this time as where all these species were blinking out some really bold thinkers like George bird Grinnell Teddy Roosevelt and others began dreaming up the idea of our nation's reserves refuges and national parks and they began to establish these treasures all around the Everglades Glacier Park Yosemite the first one was Yellowstone 7:17 1872 and the last one is was Grand Teton really and around the 1950 this was the Golden Age in America for establishing landscape-scale parks and reserves and saving them but interestingly ironically I think we at the time we did not save one on the grasslands and the grasslands because there are very low elevation and terrific forage of availability have a carrying capacity for wildlife that exceeds all of those other parks combined so our idea we're here at the idea festival is to create right there the biggest reserve that's ever been created the United States doing where the private philanthropy for the public and secure it for hundreds of years into the future this is excellent I'll stop now I better tell you a little bit of how we're doing it so you can believe it's going to happen I did work in Silicon Valley for about 20 years traveled around the world working with industry helping organizations go faster smoother better more efficient and focus is one key thing you have to think about when you're doing that so we are very very focused my my staff my our board and ourselves one the habitat accumulation is extremely important you have to put the landscape together and have the to work with as a canvas essentially once you get that it has to be remodeled from its current use to what we want to do which is emphasizing biodiversity value and this is tempting to wait till later figure out how people fit into the equation but we want to do it now and stay very focus on and learn as we go so the human element is very important so let's take things one at a time the land accumulation is it's really important to understand land ownership patterns and they're very complex in the West this is just a picture of Montana for those of you who aren't for the US the colors are important the light gray is private land the brighter colors are different kinds of public lands and we're working right up here there's that Connecticut size or Serengeti size piece of land up there so if you're drilling a little closer you can see that we actually went for the most complicated place possible and that was my intention because it's less expensive to work here for one reason our model is to buy up about 500,000 acres of this white land the grayish land there the private use it to glue like glue or mortar to pull together the existing chunks of public land over time take down thousands upon thousands of miles a barbed wire fence and create one seamlessly managed reserve does it mean a little closer and simplifying the colors here the light gray or white is the private and the rest of various forms of public there's that oval of course the parks not going to look like an oval there's no way it come out like that to date though we started buying land in 2005 we've done 13 property deals so far one after another this is what you see a snapshot in time right now we have 272 thousand acres so far we've raised about sixty million dollars from scratch when we started to do this we have a long ways to go we're on a pace of adding roughly thirty five thousand acres a year to this to this model looking in the rearview mirror we can speed that up with more funding as any project has really the money is the fuel for us now now there's no way the park the reserve is going to look this it's conceptual it's more likely to look something like this it could be 2/3 south of the Missouri River it could be 50 miles to the west or not it all depends on who sells to us we work only on a willing seller willing buyer private property basis so we wait for people to call we start to do the deals but the current situation that is existed for the last three or four years is more people have called and are stacked up in the pipeline than we can address from a funding standpoint and we think that will continue for quite some time so a couple of important things to take away from this one actually let me go back a little bit in terms of affordability people asked 500,000 private acres this must be an extraordinarily expensive project well think about some of the things that are going on in America today a big city Performing Arts Center can cost 500 million the wing of a new hospital can be six hundred million dollars sports stadiums just in the last three years the Dallas Cowboys Cleveland Minnesota is going to build one each new football stadium comes in at just a little over 1 billion dollars they last about 25 years by the way this project with all the endowment all the operating costs over 20 years of construction and all the land purchase expenses total 450 million dollars another way to look at it the biggest reserve ever created in the United States is going to cost a little less than half of a new football stadium so a couple of key things here that another point I said before there are only four places left in the world I want to remember that second point is the land accumulation we figured the model out and it's going well and lastly at this point is it extraordinarily an affordable project when you think about what we have when we're finally finished the second area focus has to do with how we do this biodiversity restoration now I told you this land and the wildlife were the way they were for thousands upon thousands of years but for the most recent history the last hundred years or so it's been used most primarily for cattle ranching so we're going to we want to do a conversion from cattle-ranching to what we want to use it for emphasizing wildlife value and biodiversity the trick though is and I learned this working in my previous business is how do you we're going to need a lot of people to help us universities scientists conservation organizations how do we get them to see this project all through the same lens and use the same language as they begin to take a look at how we move in the direction we want to go one of them oh there's a number of conditions that are important I'm sure you know this too one thing that causes alignment in people is having a clear vision what's the destination what's the desired outcome we're very fortunate in this project in that we know exactly where we're going there's no question it's very exciting we know what the done thing looks like that's really helpful another condition that's important though is being able to have a common language and see it all through the same lens so how can we do that with all these people on such a big long term project dr. kurt freezy one of the better-known conservation biologists working in the world today and a number of his colleagues put together something we call the Frazee scale and what they did is agree on and identify it we call ten ecological drivers these are the ten top things there are more but the ten top things you have to have present and I have to be humming really well for you to be able to feel like you've got a fully functioning grassland ecosystem so we took that serendipitous agreement on these ten drivers and turned it into a scale on this side of the scale is there's no good or bad to the scale by the way going that direction is where you'd want to be for the most part if you're running a commodity production trying to take livestock off the land it makes perfect sense this end of the scale is where you want to be if you're emphasizing biodiversity and messiness and all kinds of different kind of shaggy areas out on the landscape there for instance number three was fire if you have livestock you tend to want to suppress fire for the most part you know why burn up grass that could have gone into your animals to make it way more at shipping time for us we want fire very well very well integrate because fire can help reduce rank grass as they call it put nitrogen back into the soil and help develop more diversity of plants we want a lot of diversity predators of course number eight it's a justifiable that around the world you it's easier if you don't have leopards and cheetahs in our case wolves and grizzly bears it makes it more complicated to run a livestock operation when they're present but for us we want those big top tropic predators because they fill out the entire menagerie of wildlife food on the landscape so on and so forth now the neat thing about this what I like is you can bring people together collaborators and they all go out using the same scale from different organizations and get a piece of property our new piece of property it's thirty five thousand acres for instance and they raid it together and they have to agree so they go out and say what does this property look like and let's create a baseline so here's how the scoring goes they give it these kinds of scores three on numbers of herbivorous manual mammals habitat fragmentation to get to two and remember we want to be this direction we want to get six and sevens so one it gets everybody aligned on the baseline and two it keeps them aligned as we think about how do we begin to move the needle year by year on this particular piece of property it's this works very nicely this particular place obviously scale is seven on 10 items you possible seventy we get a 28 here and we together say how do we get this to a 30 for next year and the year after that to a 42 and the year after that we chase 51 we're trying to move the needle together here are some examples of some other things we're working on that fit on this scale the very first one is vegetation sometimes not all the time sometimes we'll get properties that have been a bit over grazed for a variety of reasons so we take a look at year one take some of that unnatural grazer off lower the stocking rigs perhaps perhaps replace it with bison and hopefully we start to see some early gains now more than just taller and greener we're actually looking for diversity of plants if we are in a room area the size of this room out on our Prairie you'd expect to see 350 400 species of grasses forbs mosses and small woody woody plants that variety creates food for the widest variety of animals right you don't want homogeneity once we start to see some of that diversity coming back we can move on to the next level and start to carefully incorporate fire in the landscape which pushes the variety quotient by putting more nitrogen in taking out that some of the taller plants letting the other ones that are not quite so aggressive come in and the mix gets much more diverse and later on you start to enjoy the fruits of your labor grassland birds that have been in diminished size come back in bigger numbers others that haven't been there at all because there's no food for them start to repopulate the area and that's that's the goal other an area number 10 on the driver I don't on the ecological drivers was about unit size we want huge unit sizes if you're in agriculture smaller ones for your rest rotation patterns are easier it's more organized we want big huge messy unit sizes how many people have seen this animal before I'll go in a little closer how many folks have seen that animal in the wild looks like less than 10 percent that's a pronghorn antelope it's a North American native animal very exotic amazing looking athlete it can run 60 miles per hour top speed more than double the closest predator which would be a wolf at about 30 miles per hour they can run at 30 miles per hour for a long time and they're just amazing to watch across the landscape and how fast they are until they hit a fence unlike other day animals who can navigate a fence and elk and can jump pretty high these guys are built for speed and that wrist right here is very small and thin they're reluctant to jump because they might snap that and break their legs all right many times though the wire is too low and that creates a barrier so the pronghorn comes at all that speed but then it stopped it is going back and forth along that fence sometimes for miles weather can push them against the fence and freeze them to death the snow might be so deep here you see windblown grass over there but you can't get there starvation occurs or you're simply trapped against the fence coyotes and other predators can get you in a corner and take you or at least your young fences don't help for these guys so defencing and opening up prot the area is really important here's an area at property for instance one of our smaller ones actually it's about 31,000 acres and for scale anybody's been to New York City Manhattan Island in New York is fifteen thousand acres so you can fit two New York cities in here we identify the fences there's ninety seven miles a barbed wire fence on this one property here's here's here's nineteen miles and we identify that and it's our staff would kill me if I did it this fast but we just take them out it's a lot harder than that but eventually you have this huge breathing landscape now and that's year one and then the next year we go over there to the far right identify which ones can come out which ones can go further to the route West and so on and so forth and now you're beginning to open things up for animals that people don't even think of grassland species like bighorn sheep and elk Fatty's elk are standing right about where a fence used to be and now they can walk nine miles to the west before they hit a fence in a year or two we'll take that fence down they'll be able to walk nearly thirty miles to the west and so on and so forth hydrology was on the scale we're taking out agricultural dams to let water flow down its natural course a lot better reintroduction of of a native herbivores this is one of the most fun progress projects for me these little guys they're about 300 pounds that one right in the middle there he'll grow to 2,000 by the time he's a big bull they come from Elk Island National Park in Alberta to us probably the best source in the world for bison they can only grow to four hundred and fifty animals and that's it they have to get rid of them they come to us because we're going really big they have the best genetics we can find anywhere in the world and they have no disease unlike other places like around Yellowstone Park etc we add them to our growing population and our first target and not too long in the future is ten thousand making it the largest bison herd anywhere in the world more than four times the biggest existing one now which is Yellowstone top predators we cannot load them in trucks and bring them in like bison it's not just because they bite it's illegal but the good we want them back for sure but we can't help them at all they have to get back on their own but our observations and working with the fishing game and understanding how the movements are happening you just read in the newspaper actually wolves are coming up from what is Yellowstone Park that's Yellowstone Park right there heading our direction moving from mountain range to mountain range they're not very far away it's pretty obvious where they're headed we think they'll get there grizzly bears are coming from a terrific success of regrowth in the Rocky Mountain Front and are now moving back on into the prairies following the rivers the son of the Missouri River and coming getting closer and closer to the reserve each year so a couple of things to take away from this point four places left in the world it's affordable land up accumulation is going well but we had to figure out a way to allow for a lot of collaborators over many many years over a huge landscape to work effectively together we figured that out and we're all well on our way to beginning these restoration processes we know how to do it they make sense and we know what the end goal is this last one we talked about the human element and focusing on that again it'd be so easy to push it off but we think it's important now because we have plenty of other things to do believe me with our small staff with the first two in the human element we look at at at least two ways one are the people that live and work in the surrounding area right now and two it's the visitors who are just beginning to learn about this growing reserve and are starting to come and we think will come for hundreds of years so let's take the first one up in this area this landscape again is pretty complicated right here or something called Fort Belknap Indian Reservation that's occupied by two tribes it's about 750,000 acres about 2,800 people there and it's the Grove on tour in Dakota tribe and the Assiniboine or they call themselves the white Cley we have been interacting with them for quite some years this fellow his name is George horse capture jr. jr. is on our national APRs National Council and has been a terrific liaison between us for a number of years as we try to get understand each other's cultures and what are our goals and definition of success out in this landscape he's he brings his friends his family his wife his kids over explains to us and our visitors how these people used to be out there for six or seven hundred years before they were forced onto the reservations explains the teepee rings the Buffalo jumps it's just been delightful to learn from him and his colleagues and his family he also brings helps bring a lot of the young people over who are absolutely thrilled to tell us more about their culture through song through drumming and through dancing and what we want to go we want to go further than the next step for us that's coming up is more than just getting used to each other's cultures and building relationships and we're careful about starting any tangible projects but we're beginning to think about these not long ago we took we're trying to learn from everybody around the world and take the best practices to incorporate it of this project we visited Botswana in Namibia going to reserve after reserve as guests talking to their managers there and learning how they were doing everything from their wildlife management politics management tourism etc and we learned a great that's so amazing to have their mentorship there at least 20 years ahead of us in Africa what we're wanting to do is really really nice to have a model some models to follow right here is a reserve we visited it's called Tomorrowland Tomorrowland interestingly is the same size of Belknap about 750,000 acres the same number of people and sadly oftentimes the same bleak prospects for the kids that are there not much hope up until recently in terms of what they could be when they grew up on this reservation they're put on about 20 years ago but a company called wilderness safaris came in and said you know your landscape is actually quite beautiful and there used to be a lot of wildlife here cops we could get it back and you can start some tourism that kind of thing well pretty soon kids like this are growing up and are entering into the hospitality industry not working for wilderness safaris after a 10-year period they own 90% of the camp and wilderness Safari is mostly demands it's a woman owned business which I think is pretty interesting and working very well I had but even beyond that one of the things I like a lot I had the chance to meet this young woman she's just 20 years old she's in her third year of a four-year naturalist guide course in Johannesburg South Africa and when she's finished she can also look at being a naturalist guide on her own homeland showing their own indigenous animals and owning her own business that's the kind of we took a liaison with us from fort belknap when we went on this trip and was for the first time just a month ago after two years of thinking about it a fellow came to us named Terry Brockie and said I'm ready to quit my job and want to be a guide so it's just kind of just beginning to happen so we'll see where things go over the next ten years or so looking at other constituencies we have cattle ranchers this is very strong cattle country run by very adept cattle ranchers are doing quite well and the industry is robust the by the way these green numbers are not people that's numbers of cattle in the counties in which we operate there's four hundred and forty thousand head surrounding the American prairie reserve so if we have 10,000 head of bison in our dream there'll be they'll be surrounded by nearly half a million head of cattle prices are high shipping volume is at an all-time high but unfortunately it's the only industry in town and as you know if you don't have diversification it gets a little bit dangerous in terms of sustaining communities mechanization means they're seeing them out of cattle going off but you need less and less people to do it year by year since 1915 the population decline in these counties has dropped by about 10 percent per decade and continues today with no end in sight because there's only one industry now that industry is a good one and the people are doing very well we intend not to try to replace it at all but we hope we get in some small way add some diversification diversification to an industry that's probably going to be there for another hundred years or more as an example our direct economic impacts we buy fuel there we do our banking there we hire a lot of local contracts for fencing or defensing whatever about four-wheelers tractors trucks everything and as you can see it's going up every year even as a non-profit and we pay the exact same taxes that a for-profit pays so we help with the tax base as well and you can see where it's going in 2013 because we have more it'll be far off this chart but we want to do more like with the Native Americans rather than just be there and coexist and not be a problem we want to see if we can push it a little bit our first idea for that we just started about a month ago we opened a new company called wild sky and that is a beef company believe it or not even though this is Americans there and getting session its wholly owned subsidiary by American prairie reserve and what we've done was have begun to identify four and five star chefs in cities around the United States who were interested in a wildlife friendly label until last month there was no wildlife friendly beef label the United States we've also identified ranchers on the other end in the local area up here who are interested in selling into that label and going directly to these high-end restaurants what we can guarantee is a minimum of three percent profit margin over what they would get selling into the commodity markets exact same cow much much better price as long as they adhere to our protocols and our protocols come from that Frazee scale we're asking them to move more towards the middle and be more biodiversity more ecological friendly and we can measure that so there's no green washing whatsoever we think this is going to work we thought about it quite a bit many of us who started been in business for a different kinds of businesses I've started different businesses but you never know we'll do this and many more ideas will come up so we can have value to the ranchers looking at the visitors we're very interested in all kinds of visitors from all over the world so we went ahead and built our first campground it's become very popular it's right out in the middle of this wildness we've taken down all the is around us so the wildlife can come right through people are enjoying it very much it costs $10 a night if you're wondering Alex driving it it is and what's cool about it just like Yellowstone our 300 bison can come through like ghosts right in the middle of the night which is pretty exciting depending on your point of view but so this is people like this quite a bit we're also so these are people on self tours in the middle age we're bringing in people on more organized educational things folks from Audubon maybe the Wilderness Society and here's something for instance National Geographic developed called a Bible blitz that they do all over the world citizen scientists come from all over the United States and for 48 hours they stay up all night - they spread out and look for every sign of life they take a picture of it or bring it back that doesn't bite and catalog it and we figure out what what they found in this particular BioBlitz they're just totaling it up here they found over four hundred and sixty species of life nematodes bugs grasshoppers snakes elk everything we want to help people go around and be able to navigate themselves and so we put a lot of signage how far things are what kind of a four-wheel drive you have to have how you can get back those sorts of things then really important to me personally is the interpretive nature I've had a good deal good fortune to be able to go all over the world visit wildlife areas but also music calls and museums and all continents and what I want it to be like is all range of ways to learn from static signs like this one that's explaining the ecology of our prairie dog town to two or three hundred downloadable six to seven minute podcasts that'll tell you the stories of Lewis and Clark of the geology of the archaeology of the Native Americans of a rabbit of a bison etc you know what it's like when you walk inside the met in New York and you put those headphones on and there's a gorgeous picture but you don't want to what it is four minutes later it's come alive because of the story that's been woven to compliment the visual experience that's what we want to do at the we also learned in Africa they've really got the formula down for bringing people in and making a very exotic romantic experience so we've also started that up as well frequently will begin by coming in on the Missouri River and people experience in very small groups and quiet people experience almost like being in a Karl Bodmer painting it's really amazing to come here because it hasn't changed for thousands of years so they get used to being out here and the quiet and the dark skies at night where their cell phones don't work which is terrific you can't connect with the outside world and eventually after a few days and nights on the river we bring them out on to the Prairie and so they can see the grassland situation as well so those are tents there they're coated canvas tents but tents nonetheless actually York's that can withstand winds over a hundred miles an hour because we get those not too infrequently however inside these tents they're more comfortable than many tents so people who don't want to lie on the ground and have bison stepping on their tent can be inside and if you are pretty protected and will have smores and things like that but they also get to eat like this in fact we were just there a few days ago before we flow down here it's quite nice and that thread count is really important as many of you know but for a lot of people to have a bathroom and sinks and you know to have to have us and climate control and protection from the wind and the dirt and the bugs just to respite each day before you go out again is really important but finally to be able to sit on the deck and look out and see bison and sea mule deer and see a hundred miles as you're watching the Sun go down is quite an extraordinary experience so what we're wanting to do is have people come out and realize most people don't know this place exists in the United States anymore something this huge something this dark at night there are no lights something this quiet and and and and romantic this fire by the way just a couple of weeks ago we were out here at that that's called Kestrel camp I just showed you we stayed up until about 11 o'clock at night finally doused the fire time to go to bed and we turned to the north and up came the Northern Lights nobody went to bed it's just as an amazing experience out there sometimes so a couple of things that take away from this piece is we're thinking both about the people in the surrounding area making sure over time we provide benefits to them it will take time for sure but also thinking about like those national parks a hundred years from now two hundred years from now what are the experiences we want people to have and begin practicing and designing and trying things out now I think one of the things that's most interesting to me is I think Richard Louv may have actually spoken announcement I'm not sure but he's the Guru of nature deficit disorder the idea that we're all spending too much time inside plugged in wired up and are more and more distant from nature and that diminishes us as a society we hope that some in some way this can be just the opposite of that and we're thrilled to see how kids respond to what we have out here they like the big stuff the Bison the elk whatever they might see but it's really interesting they go down market and they like the smallest things they can find particularly things they can pick up and the more they wiggle in the more slimy they are the better but when they're again when their cell phones aren't working they're pod iPods have died because the batteries that can't get plugged in then real naturalist comes out I was here last year with Edie Wilson yo Wilson is our science advisory council and this is Edie talking about why it's important for kids to mess with things it's very valuable to see other forms of life and I'll say more handle other forms of life not just walking wrong and seeing something pointed out to them but walking along with a butterfly net and whisking a butterfly up and taking a close look kids have to mess up nature just a little yes and they need to participate we absolutely let them participate in fact that is a rattlesnake that they're touching right there a live one but the biologist has its head in a plastic tubes that can't bite them but the kids absolutely love this and we talk to them about the little stuff but also they are interested in the big ecology phenomena as well so show them these pronghorn Loeb and say you know the American prairie reserve when it's finished is pretty big the size of Connecticut but it's not big enough when you think about Antelope it's just the southern anchor of what is the longest pronghorn migration in North America they leave the US and go to Canada numerous times during the year and then come back in the spring to have their fawns they need places like this there that are all over the place not just the American prairie reserve but if this isn't here if it gets all plowed up their lives are diminished as well even more interesting to the kids often are birds and their migrations these are long-billed curlews if you're from California pride looks like a shore bird you would be right what they nest in the summertime they come to the American prairie reserve they nest and raise their young in the wintertime they go to the Gulf the Sonoran Desert and the ghost coast of California to rest then they turn around and they come back to Montana they're commuters like this even more impressive I think our Swainson Hawks Swinton's are about just a little smaller than a golden eagle about a 5 foot wingspan unbelievable fliers similar the curlew they nest up here but they go even further 7,000 miles one direction to the tip of South America turn around and come back a 14,000 mile round-trip they need big spaces on either ends of the Americas if we lose one and that's one is shrinking right now being plowed up not good for that species so the kids take terrific delight again the naturalist and them comes out they enjoy listening to our scientists and interpreter they even you know helping us build trails and things like that or just spending time with their families out there it's very rewarding for us my kids have been going out since they're this tall they're all graduate and gone in college now but one thing I always liked was how it opened up their senses not just sight and touching something but their hearing too and learning how to hear in a quiet place the sounds of the Prairie can be very instructive as well so we're here at the festival talking about big ideas I think big ideas become really fun when movement begins to happen you get the sense that the vision could actually be realized I think this idea is on its way and I think this vision is definitely going to happen the habitat assemblage is going very well and importantly the entire project is extraordinarily affordable when you think about what will have a society when it's done and how long it will last we'll have developed we've developed a mechanism to enable no matter how big it gets a constant alignment of purpose and coordinated action amongst our growing group of collaborators and the human element as I said is a key component for us we believe that over time people in the surrounding area including cattle producers including Native Americans and others will experience real benefits real value for living do our due to the existence of this reserve and visitors hundreds of years from now or recall their experiences here as some of the most memorable of their entire lives that is our goal so definitely it is happening and in the end we'll have created something of incredible beauty something that will inspire and awe people from a couple come from around the world and in a world where things so many things seem impermanent and ephemeral I think what cures something of lasting value and provide a wonderful gift to future generations I'm looking back on it I think maybe kind of as a legacy I think the many supporters and all of us involved will feel like at least for the portion of our lives during which we were engaged in creating this uniquely American and historical treasure maybe our time was well spent the entire world that was a big idea but it gets really exciting when the idea finally takes off and appears headed for success we have a long way to go but I think we have hit the exciting phase with this idea and I hope you'll come and see it and enjoy it someday soon for yourselves thank you I think we have just a few minutes for some questions I'm glad to take them I don't know if we have any microphones we have mics here's one right here's one right here couple thank you how do we finance it permanently and is this the name in baked into that 450 million dollars is a hundred and fifteen million dollar endowment it's being financed all private philanthropy and the name in fact is a placeholder until someone wants to give us the entire price the reserve and name it for themselves we'll stay afterwards if you want talk about that no quite seriously it's a placeholder it just gets getting us there we needed a website seriously yes Turner embraced your idea there and is he is he one of the supporters Ted Turner has a thing called Turner endangered-species funds his scientists are top-notch and they've been supporters of us for a long time Turner himself is busy with other enterprises his bison is a production thing for Ted's Montana grill it's a livestock operation Ted himself is a terrific ecologist and does a very good job of restoring ecosystems but we're not matched up on this project yes yeah I belong to the Nature Conservancy and it sounds like this is something that the Conservancy would be very interested in do you have any relationships there or with with the idea of making this into a national park with Wildlife Conservation Society World Wildlife Fund National Geographic and other organizations now that we're getting into the restoration phase which they have lots of work done lots of work more and more people are coming saying we want to be a part of that I can't speak to Nature Conservancy specifically they have lots of going on worldwide a terrific restoration organization itself doing great work all over the world I would expect me to intersect at some point it's not on its way to a government-owned National Park we think a public-private partnership is the best way to go when we're finished though we'll be the smallest player five hundred thousand acres of deeded land gluing together two and a half to three million acres of public land mostly Bureau of Land Management land but we think that in Yang combined ownership is good if all of a sudden 100 years from now we decide we need to drill in that area they have to deal with the American prairie reserve which is a huge landowner there's a bit of a checks and balances there that slows down any fast things like let's plow it up and grow food for an immediate need thank you yes back there thanks up for you reintroduce species like bison what's your long-term strategy for maintaining genetic diversity thank you with a lot of spin using bison in general about genetic diversity what you it's a it's a race to get to a minimum of about 400 animals from now into about 400 animals what we've had to do is we've had to carefully pluck out the most prolific bulls that are spreading themselves around too much but they're happy somewhere in the Bronx Zoo they get fed every day they don't have to worry about predators there but we're close to 400 animals now seriously we've had to pull out about six Bulls we dark them with car fentanyl take blood tests of the calves we figure back track and figure out whose dad is if dad is too many has too many progeny he has to go away somewhere in Colorado ones at the Fish and Wildlife Service on display so they're living very happy lies but they're retired once we hit 400 once we hit 400 it's clear sailing thousands even better but we've managed that very carefully yes right next to you and then in the back in addition to your voluntary acquisition are you talking to the ranchers about land Trust's and dedicating their properties pending acquisition yes we indeed are for now 13 properties so far they're really one of the cash because the cash for their property finances their next dream they want to live their dream now now we do do life estates where we purchase from somebody they don't want to go anywhere and they can live for the rest of their lives we've not yet hit someone who actually wants to donate it for a tax deduction so far no one has fine that found that to be a tax advantage but we bring it up each time I think it'll hit sometime it's a great idea we just haven't hit the right seller yes in the back a few more in the frontier - you're encouraging the reintroduction of big predators yes does that go with your cattle raising neighbors at the moment you know the good news about people is we agree on most things and some things the edges we can agree to disagree and I think they would rather not see frankly wolves and grizzly bears come back it makes life more difficult and it took them a while to get rid of them but we're using private property rights and deciding what we'd like to do ourselves again we're not loading them into trucks they're coming back on their own and I think though in my travels in Namibia and Botswana and other places I see cattle ranches where they've never not been with predators and they've learned to live with them I think what has happened here is we've had a hundred year absence and ranching practices have developed sands predators will have to go back to what it was like for hundreds and hundreds of years I think it can be done there are good models around the world to copy yes there definitely is in Australia in South Africa and other areas people are trying lots of different things Allan savory's rest rotation method has been the way to do things from the 80s and the 90s but even the BLM is now beginning to question where the rest rotation is the best way to go or in fact wide-open big units is a better way to go both for offtake and production of meat with cattle or sheep and for the BI and getting along with biodiversity so it's a moving target but I think moving in the direction of more experimentation of bigger spaces yes because often you know water was was drained and and managed so that it could irrigate ranching so I'm curious as to how that works one we're only doing it on our own property so when we do it and they're downstream of us they actually like it just two days ago we blew two massive dams drained ponds that are five times the size of this room so actually more water is going downstream they benefit from that we're not doing anything on anybody else's property just our own last one in the back and tell me when we need to go to so okay we have one more question while we're waiting for him to ask this I know if you're going to have more questions my colleagues Allison Fox and dick Dolan are here they are essentially interchangeable with me if you want to text us and say I'll meet you at the bar we love that kind of text and we're glad to answer any questions we're here until late Tuesday afternoon so send us a text and we'll come see you blast them before the last question also Chris Rainier we're both National Geographic fellows we have another talk like this tonight we're going to focus on indigenous cultures it's at 8 o'clock at the what hotel hotel Jerome in town eight o'clock Chris and I will be there expanding on how indigenous cultures interact with big reserves and how it can help indigenous cultures be protected last question I'm a graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman so I want to thank you very much for doing this the area around where you are proposing this reserve is gorgeous and I know that it's going to be a great success my question is do you use graduate students from Montana State in the agriculture department as interns or something else to that effect well we use them as much as we can we get a lot of competition from the harbor of the West which is University of Montana Missoula but dick and I are both graduates from Montana State 1982 so I live we live in Bozeman now so as much as we can and it's on the increase absolutely come see us afterwards now you know the story we need to take you so come stay after thank you so much for coming hope you see you tonight all right

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 35,550

Rating: 4.9176955 out of 5

Keywords: Nature Reserve, Nature (Literary Genre), United States Of America (Country), Wildlife (Broadcast Content), Grassland (Geographical Feature Category), Montana (US State), National Geographic Society (Organization), National Geographic (Periodical), National Geographic Channel (Business Operation), American Prairie Reserve, conservation, park, Serengeti (Fictional Setting), Serengeti National Park (Protected Site)

Id: R7DoRnRJnLI

Length: 53min 55sec (3235 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Koh-the-Face-Stealer]

Love American Prairie. One of the big projects that got me into the idea of rewilding