Each fall and winter, thousands of elk from Yellowstone National Park leave behind the deep snows of the park’s harsh and unforgiving high country and descend to surrounding ranch lands to feed on native grasses. Access to this forage is vital to maintaining the health of these herds. But because this food is often on private land, there is no guarantee that elk will continue to have access to it, or even that the native grasses will remain.
A group of conservationists that I work with proposed a simple idea: What if our nonprofit groups paid landowners to restore critical areas of winter-range habitat so that Yellowstone’s elk herds could thrive?
In 2021, we struck a deal with a rancher to install wildlife-friendly fencing, eradicate invasive cheatgrass and promote the growth of native plants. The habitat lease restored 500 acres of prime elk habitat in Montana’s Paradise Valley and was celebrated by environmentalists and ranchers alike. These leases pay landowners to create, maintain or improve landscapes in ways that benefit wildlife.
Now, under new guidance issued by the Biden administration last month, the Bureau of Land Management, the nation’s largest manager of public lands, with some 245 million acres under its control, is set to begin leasing land to conservation and other groups to carry out similar habitat restoration work. This is a major turn for an agency that was required by law to give priority to extractive industries, leasing lands for grazing, logging, mining and energy development — but not for conservation.
For more than a century, narrowly defined “use it or lose it” rules have required public land leaseholders to graze, log, mine or otherwise develop the land, or risk having their leases canceled. Such rules prevented conservationists from participating in the leasing processes that determine how vast swaths of Western lands are managed. Instead, conservation on public lands has been treated as something to be legislated, designated or regulated, rather than empowered as a legally valid lease.
Such restrictive leasing rules may have made sense long ago to prevent land speculation and encourage Western development. But these policies created significant barriers to conservation efforts. The land management agency’s new approach will provide opportunities on public land to do the type of conservation work we have done on private land in Montana.
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