What we literally have in common – own in common – are our public lands, our national parks and forests. In the West especially, glance at the photo library on your phone and it will probably look a lot like the person’s next to you in the coffee shop. Your parents’ and grandparents’ faded photo family albums probably have similar pictures too. That’s because our public lands shape us. They hold our uniquely American stories.

Memories of that backcountry trip. High meadow lakes. Campfires. A bird dog, smiling next to grouse. A successful deer hunt. A first fish. A family picnic. Close your eyes for a second, and you can probably see your own moments in a wild place.

All of this comes from the wild public lands we all still own. Which is why it is so unsettling that the administration continues to try to hand those places over to the highest bidder. And why it’s so disturbing that they are pushing deeper into our forests, threatening future generations’ freedom to experience what we have been lucky enough to know.

It’s hard to keep up, but the direction is clear: sacrificing our wild public lands.

Recently, the president tossed aside executive orders from Presidents Nixon and Carter that formed the foundation for how agencies manage recreation on our public lands. The process is called travel management planning and it helps identify the best places for ATVs, dirt bikes, horses, hikers and mountain bikers so people can enjoy public lands safely, responsibly and without undermining each other’s experiences. We have enough public land to support many different ways of getting outside, but only if we plan carefully. 

These agreements can be hard to forge, but they help protect access, reduce conflict and keep public lands healthy for all. By ending the basis for them, the administration has left many public land users rightfully nervous about what will happen now.

Meanwhile, the media reported that the administration plans to direct the Forest Service to open lands recommended for wilderness designation to development and other damaging uses. Through an ongoing review, the administration has also signaled it plans to take a similar approach to more than 100 million acres of wildlands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The result would be permanent and intentional: wild places degraded so badly that they would no longer qualify for wilderness designation. Because once wildness is gone, you can’t bring it back.

Most troubling of all is the largest proposed rollback of conservation protections in American history. The administration has announced it intends to remove protections on 45 million acres of national forests and instead allow roads to be punched into some of our wildest public lands.

Here’s what happens when roads get built: they bring wildfire. They pollute streams. They harm wildlife. In my home state of Montana, 97% of summer elk habitat is on unroaded forests, away from civilization, high in the mountains, in cool, deep cover. Such forests also provide clean drinking water for millions of people. They are where people go to hunt and fish and camp and hike — where memories are made.

So why these attacks on our wildest forests? Why steal from future generations? Why open remote places to development when there is an enormous and urgent need to manage the forests near communities, to protect them from wildfire? Why develop wild lands when we could instead put people to work improving access and maintaining trails?

Our country is blessed with lands that are still wild, where wildlife can roam freely, cold creeks still flow, and a person has the freedom to wander. These lands are our common ground. They are where we go to remember what freedom feels like. In a way, conquering them conquers us.

One force can stop this: the people who own these lands, all of us. We can demand better of our elected officials now, and at the ballot box in the months and years ahead. Future generations are counting on it.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and The Wilderness Society Action Fund.

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He also started a UN Foundation to help bring peace to the world, thanks to his starter $1 billion contribution, and he tapped former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado to lead it. Wirth recalls how Turner, once dubbed “Captain Outrageous,” liked to shoot from the hip and could never be bothered by whatever passed as political correctness. A plaque on his desk in Atlanta said it all: “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”.

Most of all, Turner left a significant swath of private lands in better condition than he found them. In Montana and other parts of the Rockies, Turner bought huge ranches and made sure the land was healthy enough to grow a bison herd to over 55,000 animals at its peak.

Turner never subscribed to the notion that property rights trumped the common good. He also challenged the conviction that landowners ought to be able to do whatever they want on their land—even if it resulted in environmental harm.

As an entrepreneur with green intentions, Turner believed he could operate better and cheaper in recovering wildlife and rivers on his ranches that had been degraded by overgrazing. He was able to show that smart management also offered safe harbor to wildlife without sacrificing profit.

Some locals around Bozeman, Montana, in the 1980s thought Turner was out of his mind when he placed a conservation easement on his 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch, one of the largest easements in America at the time. The easement limited development in perpetuity, and had Turner exploited the Flying D as a real estate play, he could easily have made hundreds of millions in profit. 

Turner could make a big impact on people. One was the billionaire businessman Thomas Kaplan, who likens Turner to a combination of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. Kaplan says Turner inspired him to co-found Panthera, now the leading global wildcat conservation organization, as well as The Orianne Society, named after his daughter  and dedicated to perpetuating the survival of snakes.

Kaplan likes to recount how, when he visited Turner’s Flying D, he saw a wolf pack and howled back and forth with them. The ranch was home to the one of the largest, free-ranging wolf packs in North America, co-existing with Turner’s buffalo, and a population of elk, deer, moose and other wild animals that moved on and off the property.

Turner issued an edict that wolves visiting his land were never to be hunted or lethally controlled. Emulating the Turner model, Kaplan acquired thousands of acres in a vast wetland area of southwest Brazil called the Pantanal, and there he advanced a model of co-existence between cattle ranchers and jaguars. The Pantanal is considered the best place in the world for watching jaguars, and even cattle ranchers, who used to shoot the cats, now have eco-lodges on their estancias.

Turner was aware of his foibles, for which he hoped he would be forgiven. Biologist Mike Phillips, who oversaw a number of rewilding projects for Turner, told me, “In these recent years, as he was in decline, Ted once asked me, “Mike, we did okay, didn’t we?’ And I replied, “Ted, we accomplished exactly what we set out to do so long ago. I reminded him that he had done more as a private citizen to benefit native species than any other individual in the history of the world.”

Phillips said that Turner choked up with emotion.

Jane Fonda, Turner’s “third and favorite wife,” according to those who knew the couple, told me that after a brutal childhood with a hard-driving father who took his own life, along with a sister who died young from lupus, Turner found solace in nature.

“What did he want most of all? asked Fonda. “To be recognized as a good guy. There was a part of Ted who believed that by trying to save nature and bring more peace to the world, he could save himself. But he saved much more than that.”

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and founder of Yellowstonian.org, who wrote an award-winning biography about Turner.

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The slaughter of the buffalo was a tragedy for all Western Indian tribes—including every tribe in Montana—because the animals were everything to Native people. Bison provided food, shelter clothing and tools. They were central to spiritual practices. Their destruction was also a central part of the federal campaign to subdue and dispossess tribal nations.

But before the last smoke from the buffalo guns had cleared, Native visionaries had acted. A Salish man known as Attice trailed a few surviving bison across the Continental Divide to Montana’s Flathead Valley. That small herd would become critical seedstock for rebuilding bison herds in both the United States and Canada.

Through Attice’s efforts, state and federal agencies across the West were later able to establish small herds on refuges and wildlife management areas. Over the last 50 years, Western tribes have also led determined efforts to restore buffalo on reservation lands.

Tribes have also benefited from partnerships with conservation organizations that share a vision of big, healthy bison herds grazing across large landscapes. Chief among these partners is American Prairie, which for the past 25 years has worked to restore intact grasslands on public and private lands adjacent to Montana’s Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. As part of its work, American Prairie has also provided both technical expertise and buffalo to many tribal nations rebuilding their herds.

Yet even with these initiatives, there are only a few thousand truly wild buffalo today, and they occupy just a tiny fraction of their former range across the American and Canadian prairies. Why?

The persecution of bison continues—nowhere more so than in Montana. Governor Greg Gianforte’s administration has opposed any expansion of wild buffalo populations and has relentlessly pressured the federal Bureau of Land Management to reverse earlier, positive bison decisions.

Bowing to this pressure, the BLM has denied a request by American Prairie to convert existing federal grazing permits from cattle to bison in eastern Montana. What’s worse, the BLM has terminated other bison grazing permits the organization had lawfully held for years.

Given the stakes, the Coalition of Large Tribes—advocating for more than 50 tribal nations, including the Blackfeet Nation and the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana—has filed a formal protest of the BLM’s unprecedented and unlawful decision. Federal law is clear: statutes affecting tribes must be interpreted in their favor, and ambiguities must be resolved to protect tribal rights.

The consequences of the BLM’s illegal action are immediate and profound. Terminating these permits disrupts herd genetics, intertribal gifting traditions, treaty territories, and longstanding cooperative relationships. It also establishes a dangerous precedent for other federal agencies engaged in tribal co-stewardship and wildlife restoration, not only for Montana tribes but for tribes everywhere.  If bison being managed for conservation can be categorically excluded from federal lands, decades of collaborative progress are jeopardized.

Perhaps most alarming, this decision amounts to rulemaking by fiat. In order to reach the result demanded by the Gianforte administration, the BLM acted without meaningful consultation with either tribes or the public.

Federal law is clear. Actions and decisions affecting tribes require consultation, yet no meaningful effort has been made by either the BLM or the Gianforte administration to fulfill this binding obligation.  If this failure to consult is allowed to stand, tribes across the West will be harmed by the precedent. 

Montana and the federal government face a defining choice: They can cling to outdated policies that ignore history, science, and treaty obligations, or they can honor tribal leadership, uphold the law and help restore a species that once defined this land.

The future of Montana’s prairies depends on that choice.

The writers are Montana state legislators and contributors to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Tyson Running Wolf is a member of the Blackfeet Nation who chairs the Montana Native American Caucus in the state legislature. Tom France represents Missoula in the Montana Legislature and works with the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council on buffalo conservation issues.

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As Miracle’s story spread, the cub became the object of fascination for thousands of people. Perhaps that’s no surprise, as many of us are intrigued by the grizzly’s power and strength, along with the reality that it’s an apex predator, like us.

Miracle’s survival is precarious. Since she left the protection of her mother so early, she’s on her own finding food before hibernating. Seventy-seven grizzlies died in the Yellowstone area last year—the highest number yet. As of September 2025, 63 bears had been killed; at this rate, the number of dead bears will surpass last year’s record. What’s going on?

You could say that grizzly bear recovery in the Lower 48 is a success story. Prior to European settlement, an estimated 50,000 bears roamed throughout the Lower 48. By 1970, though, only about 800 remained, with perhaps 130 of them in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

In 1975, grizzlies were listed under the Endangered Species Act, which ended their indiscriminate slaughter, and bear numbers slowly rebounded. Today, the Forest Service says an estimated 700 grizzlies live in and around the Yellowstone area, with maybe 1,000 more in the Northern Continental Divide region of Montana. Despite the increase in numbers, mortality rates are on the rise.

Most wildlife managers say the current rate is not a matter of concern. They say the species is stable.

And yet, is it? Roughly 200 cubs are born in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem recovery area each year, but of those, only around 40 survive. Wildlife managers assure us bears are doing well, but is this sustainable—especially when the mortality rate keeps inching upward year after year?

The most obvious reason for bear deaths is us. We are everywhere. 2024 marked the second-busiest year in Yellowstone National Park’s history with more than 4.7 million visitors. In August of 2025, the park was on track to see a 2% visitor increase over 2024.

On top of increased visitation, the human population in the Rocky Mountain West where grizzlies roam is growing steadily. Teton County, Wyoming has seen a 10% increase in residents over the last decade. The population in Teton County, Idaho is up 74% since 1990. Gallatin County, Montana has grown about 40% in the last 10 years.

On the ground, you can’t miss the impacts of growth: Trails are crowded. Parking is at a premium. You need reservations at restaurants, and the traffic is often stop and go. Not surprisingly, bear-human conflicts are more frequent: Vehicle collisions kill bears, interactions with landowners kill bears.

Grizzlies might do fine with more people if their habitat were intact and healthy, but much of their home ground has been in moderate to severe drought for several years, according to U.S. Drought Monitor. This year’s berry crop was dismal. Whitebark pines, whose seeds are an important food source for bears, are threatened by beetles and blister rust.

All this forces grizzlies to search out new food sources, and some of the best ones turn out to be ours. Our cows and sheep. Our apple trees. Our bee hives.

Wyoming U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman has introduced legislation to take away endangered species protections for grizzly bears, which would be a major blow to their survival. “People shouldn’t have to live in fear of grizzly bears rummaging through their trash or endangering their children,” Hageman said. Such comments are deliberately inflammatory.

I have heard three people describe surviving a bear attack decades ago. All three insisted that the bear was only acting in self-defense. One even remembers how awed he was by the diamond-like glint of water droplets on the bear’s fur as she ran toward him.

I’m not sure what would happen if I faced a charging bear. I just want enough wherewithal to pull out my bear spray. While I hope I never have to deploy that spray, I am willing to take the risk to know wild bears roam the landscape. If grizzlies were gone, something vital would be missing from our world.

While grizzly bear mortality may not yet be alarming wildlife managers, I hope we’ve gotten a wakeup call.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She hikes and writes in Yellowstone bear country.

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I would earn, the representative explained, $340 for “this one-time use.” Is that one-time use like a wet wipe—disposable, expendable, easily sacrificed?

Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier collected 20 years’ worth of my essays to argue that 20th-century Montanans developed unique views of how nature worked, as captured in the wilderness-adventure and resource-extraction connotations of “the frontier.” The book felt particularly foreign to anything in the world of AI.

All the writers I know feel particularly vulnerable to AI. Most of today’s commercial AI programs are “large language models,” with skills not in logic, reasoning or math but merely in generating text. That directly threatens writers’ jobs.

Worse, replacing a human writer with today’s generative AI is like replacing a wild raspberry with an artificially flavored Crystal Light. The error-filled, uncreative products of AI threaten not only writers but also the joy and usefulness of reading.

While most people fulminate abstractly about AI, this query about buying my book presented a clear choice, sharpened by the specificity of “$340.” If I took the offer, would the knowledge I poured into these essays become available from an AI, decimating my book sales? If my royalties thus fell to zero because I had signed a death warrant for a book-that-is-like-a-child-to-me —was the $340 worth it? 

Perhaps $340 was better than nothing. Many technology companies train AI models by stealing from authors. Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier was among four of my books pirated for the “LibGen” database, which was used to educate AI programs from Anthropic and Meta. Although Anthropic recently settled a resulting lawsuit, Meta and others may yet escape punishment.

What is the proper value of my book? Although $340 is not much compensation for all the work I put in, neither is a royalty of $1.19 per book sold. If my main goal was adequate market compensation for my writing, I probably shouldn’t have published a book in the first place. The book is now 12 years old. At current sales rates, it would take a few years to make $340 in royalties.

When I talked with friends about this dilemma, it felt like none of us knew how to think about the situation. Maybe, as with previous technologies, making the book more widely available will stimulate sales—or maybe not. Maybe AI will thwart young people’s ability to engage in intellectual careers—or maybe its perils are overhyped.

Maybe AI will swallow my entire output without fair compensation—we know that Anthropic and Meta have already tried.

My publisher wouldn’t say which AI company made the offer, how it arrived at that take-it-or-leave-it price, or how it would use my book. Would I feel differently about the deal if AI contributed to the world’s knowledge rather than merely helping students cheat?

As I thought about this, I realized I was reflecting a distinctly human desire, rather than an AI desire. A large language model consumes a book as data. Its model requires ever more data to predict what the next word in a sentence should be.

It’s certainly ego-deflating to think of the product of my research, extensive reading, interviewing, thinking and finally writing as “data.” I’d prefer it to be “knowledge” or even “wisdom” that the AI wants to suck from me. I’d prefer to think that it needs my well-told stories, my keen insights, my brilliant larger points.

But AI doesn’t think in such big-picture terms. It just predicts a word, and then another word, and then another. I realized that this is also a model for how nature works. There’s no grand plan. No knowledge. No story with a satisfying ending. There’s just a single cell reproducing. One leaf reaching for sunlight. A predator seeking its next dinner.

John Clayton writes in Montana and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West, writersontherange.org. Read his newsletter at naturalstories.substack.com.

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There’s a proud literary canon of women telling their stories of studying wildlife in remote places—Mardy Murie in Alaska, Jane Goodall in Tanzania, Dian Fossey in Rwanda. Now, Boyd’s memoir, A Woman Among Wolves—My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, runs in that pack on the strength of her personality and the drama she documents in both the natural and human worlds.

Boyd was raised in Minneapolis, where her suburban upbringing included regular escapes to local swamps and a zoo. At the zoo, alarmingly, one of the caged wolves bit her dog. Nonetheless, Boyd emerged enamored with both wolves and the wildness they represent.

After becoming a biologist, Boyd found a mentor in the famed wolf researcher David Mech, working with him in the upper Midwest. A woman of statuesque frame and Nordic features, Boyd stood out in a field dominated by burly alpha males, all studying wolves that were then an endangered species.

Her career gained momentum when she moved to Montana in the 1980s, just as wolves were trickling into Glacier National Park from Canada. These wolves would reset the ecology of the American West and, along with it, set a course for her life.

The main setting of Boyd’s book is Montana’s North Fork of the Flathead River, which remains a remote valley flanked by fir forest and glacier-sculpted mountains. This is one of the only places south of Canada that still has all the native predators it had before settlers arrived—grizzlies, mountain lions, wolverines, lynx and more. It’s so spectacularly scenic that Hollywood Westerns have been filmed there, yet so remote it still lacks electric power, pavement and phone lines.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the North Fork of the Flathead was also a unique natural laboratory. A decade before the Clinton administration and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt began relocating wolves into Yellowstone National Park, in 1995, the animals recolonized the North Fork on their own. Boyd and her cohorts were there to document their dispersal, compiling data while force-feeding wood stoves to heat drafty cabins in subzero winters.

Boyd’s memoir vividly paints that place and time, spiced by tales of derring-do—trapping wolves for radio-collar research, surviving close calls with grizzly bears, crossing icy rivers and flying small planes low over dangerous terrain. It also paints colorful portraits of fellow scientists along with neighboring hermits and poachers, outfitters and loggers. 

In those early days, scientists weren’t sure that wolves would regain a toehold in the American West. By the end of Boyd’s career in 2019, the population of wolves had grown from a rumored few to thousands of animals.

The wolves proved resilient, reproducing faster than the rigors of the wild and the hand of man could limit them. From a conservationist’s perspective, recovery of the animals has been a remarkable success of the Endangered Species Act.

Yet Boyd also illustrates the dark side of that story. Some of it is personal—a man who grabbed her leg and tried to assault her in the backwoods of Minnesota; two pursuing men she scared off with a hunting rifle at a remote cabin.

Nearly as unsettling is her more recent tale of representing the Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks at contentious public meetings in rural Montana. Elk and deer numbers go up and down like the stock market, but when numbers of game animals seem low, wolves are the favorite scapegoat.

At times, Boyd and her colleagues had to stand before a crowd of armed and angry men, fueled both by alcohol and politically driven disinformation. Such can be the reality of being a public servant in today’s West.

“Wolf management is people management. Period,” Boyd concludes. “My hope is for a more tolerant world, with wolves living out their lives as a valued wildlife species. We can live without wolves, but the world is a much richer place with wolves in it.”

Reading Boyd’s memoir, it seems we’ve come a long way, though wolves still have a lot of enemies who wish they’d disappear.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that aims to spur lively conversation about the West. He is the author of Hunter & Angler: Field Guide to Raising Hell and can be found at www.conservationforthewin.org

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If you look at a map of the region, big tracts of land run in a “checkerboard” pattern of mixed public and private land ownership. The West is literally diced up into alternating square-mile sections of federally managed land and private ground, which is generally owned by a timber company or ranch.

This is not a small problem. Researchers have found that 8 million acres of public land are “landlocked” in 11 states. That’s roughly equal to the area of four Yellowstone national parks.

This land ownership pattern has been causing headaches since it was rolled across the West in the 1860s. It dates back to the days of Abraham Lincoln, when the federal government granted land to railroads as incentives to span the continent with tracks, thus opening up the West for development.

Unintended consequences continue to fill up courthouses. This year, in Wyoming, the absentee owner of a 22,000-acre ranch wasn’t happy when four hunters crossed from one section of public land to another, thanks to a makeshift ladder they raised at the corner of his private land.

Once the hunters from Missouri accomplished their “corner crossing,” the ranch owner convinced a local prosecutor to file trespassing charges. After a jury failed to convict, the ranch owner was not satisfied.

He filed a civil case, claiming that by merely crossing his land at the corner, the hunters had decreased the value of his property. To be clear, the hunters never stepped foot on his land. But the landowner claimed they violated the “airspace” over the corner where properties met. The suit charged that the loss of exclusive access to his land caused millions of dollars in damages.

The case is being watched closely around the country. Access advocates have raised tens of thousands of dollars in donations via GoFundMe accounts to help pay legal costs for the hunters involved. They hope that a victory in Wyoming will have beneficial consequences elsewhere. 

But a victory for public land access is far from automatic, even if a Wyoming judge or jury agrees with the hunters in civil court. The question remains: Where do public rights stop and private property rights begin?

Legislatures across the West will be under political pressure to resolve the issue, and conservative legislatures could pass a law giving private landowners authority to block “corner crossing.”

Under that scenario, the public would lose. Yet there are proven tools to protect access in checkerboarded landscapes.

All that’s required are private landowners who don’t hanker for a showdown.

Where I live in northwestern Montana, checkerboard landscapes were the norm, and when I went hunting I often had no idea whose land I was on. Public or private, though, didn’t matter, because visitors were welcomed by both.

That changed when timber companies shifted their focus from sawing lumber to selling real estate. Thousands of acres suddenly fell behind “No Trespassing” signs or fences put up around trophy ranches.

Luckily for me, groups like the Trust for Public Land and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks worked with willing landowners and elected officials to secure public access. Today, every major timber company in Montana has a conservation easement allowing the public to enter at least part of their domain. This has helped secure access around fast growing resort towns like Whitefish and Columbia Falls.

Meanwhile, then-Sen. Max Baucus brokered a huge deal where the federal government bought thousands of acres in the Swan River Valley, making the land state forest or national forest. Thankfully, there are sources of money through the Land & Water Conservation Fund that can pay for such solutions. Land trades are another way to settle the issue.

David-vs-Goliath fights between hunting parties and wealthy absentee landlords generate a lot of passion, and perhaps the disputes will conclude by securing more rights for everyday folks to enjoy public land.

But larger solutions will require more people willing to work together, and a lot more money on the table. Not everything needs to be settled in court.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director for Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana.

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