Selective Billionaires

The Montana Stockgrowers Association and our government officials cheered revoking American Prairie’s grazing leases for its livestock bison, saying it “marks a significant precedent for public lands grazing policy across the West.”

This sense of entitlement from heavily subsidized ranchers is staggering. It should frighten all Americans who care about public lands, healthy wildlife populations, clean water, and opportunities to enjoy public resources. Grazing livestock for pennies-on-the-dollar on public lands apparently takes precedence over every other use.

For background, American Prairie, a nonprofit organization, has been buying private lands from willing ranchers at market prices in north-central Montana for two decades. It works to restore these lands, provides abundant public access to its lands and adjoining public lands, and pays property taxes on its lands while employing dozens of people in the region.

It’s running a disease-free bison herd of roughly 950 animals on its deeded lands and the Bureau of Land Management lands it holds grazing leases on. Also, American Prairie leases land back to area ranchers and currently has about 8,000 cattle on its lands.

The rub for the Stockgrowers and its closely aligned “Save the Cowboy” group is that American Prairie’s stated goal for its bison is conservation. That’s the threat.

Coincidentally, the No. 3 official at BLM headquarters who made this decision, Karen Budd-Falen, was the plaintiff's attorney in a lawsuit challenging American Prairie grazing leases.

American Prairie followed the rules to run its bison, performing extensive environmental analysis showing improved rangeland and water-quality health. They worked for years with BLM officials getting the leases approved. The only difference is that American Prairie’s bison aren’t for “production-oriented” purposes, according to the twisted logic from this administration and stockgrowers.

This has become a popular rallying cry among the Stockgrowers Asso., who decry billionaires buying ranches. But it turns out the Stockgrowers Asso. – and Gov. Gianforte and our congressional delegation who supported efforts stripping American Prairie of its leases – are fine with their billionaires.

When the billionaire Yellowstone Club bought a ranch along the Crazy Mountains and illegally pumped water to irrigate their golf course, the Stockgrowers and our officials did nothing. Their scorn of billionaires is selective: fine for oligarchs but against a nonprofit conservation organization that opens its lands and adjoining public lands to the public.

The Stockgrowers didn’t mind a billionaire blocking off public land to hunters in Wyoming, stating in court records that it was his right to keep the public off public lands so he could profit from elk there. In fact, the Montana Stockgrowers joined that lawsuit on behalf of the “right billionaires” and against the public.

Here’s the real reason the Stockgrowers – and our politicians who answer to them – scorn American Prairie: The organization has shown that Montana landscapes can be more than cattle grounds. Healthy rangelands and abundant wildlife, including bison, frighten them. Wildlife threatens the grass they get for less than 6% of what they’d pay to graze on private lands.

It is such hypocrisy for one of the most socialized industries in our country to talk about socialism. A classic case of privatizing profits and socializing the costs – socialism for me, but not for thee.

As a public lands hunter, I’m fed up with tiny minorities of people holding total veto power over my public lands.

JW Westman
Park City, Mont.

Bison roam the American Prairie property.