American Prairie

The American Prairie Foundation is working to reintroduce thousands of bison and other native species to parts of Montana, with the hopes of luring eco-tourists.

In response to the devastation, Otter this month has drummed up support for a statewide, citizen-led volunteer effort to rehabilitate all that torched land by replanting it with millions of sagebrush seeds. The greenish shrub is native to rangeland in Great Basin states such as Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Nevada, where it’s the official state flower.

"It makes no sense – and the report agrees – for taxpayers to fund growing crops on these lands," said Scott Stevens, Ducks Unlimited conservation director.

Thus far in 2007 we have had more than 200 children visit the American Prairie Reserve from surrounding towns and around the country. Our hope is to steadily increase the numbers of youth visiting the Reserve annually and to become a meaningful force to help kids reconnect with nature.

We hope you enjoy this August newsletter and hope you will come experience some prairie adventure for yourself very soon.

New approaches such as APF’s — approaches that break out of the traditional land-management paradigms and leave the land open to public access — offer great hope for the region’s future.

The American Prairie Reserve http://www.americanprairie.org/ is being assembled from ranch land, but genetically pure buffalo are grazing the landscape rather than cattle.

The grass seed is in high demand because of the trend to restore damaged land – gas-well pads, burned forests, highway strips and overgrazed property.

There’s an undercurrent of despair and even hopelessness in recent reports about global warming — a drift that carries a real risk of paralysis, the sense that it’s too late to do anything. But while our landscape is scarred by centuries of environmental abuse, there are also monumental environmental victories, and therefore hope.

At the root of the institute’s mission is giving people a greater sense of the beauty, wonder and uniqueness of prairie ecosystems. Using place-based education programs, the institute will attempt to foster a greater tie among educators, the community and the prairie.