FOR PHYLLIS YOUNG

A CRITIQUE OF AND AN ALTERNATIVE

TO THE WILDERNESS IDEA

J. BAIRD CALLICOTT (1994)

I gave a talk at a symposium in Bozeman, Montana, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the 1964Wilderness Act. I was preceded at the

podium by a well-spoken,Amherst College-educated cattleman, Chase

Hibbard, who described himself as the token redneck at this gathering

of the wilderness faithful. He proclaimed his love of things wild and

free and his dedication to steward the lands, private and public, grazed

by his stock. He urged us all to find consensus and strike a balance be-

tween wilderness preservation and economic necessity.

When it was my turn to speak, I began by saying that if Mr.

Hibbard was the token redneck, I was fixing to be the skunk at this

garden party-a little simile I borrowed (without attribution) from a

piece by Dave Foreman in Wild Earth. Thus at once I endeared myself

to the audience--people can't hate a self-proclaimed skunk-and put

them on notice that I might have something unsettling to say. There

are two debates about the value of wilderness, I went on to note. One

we just heard about, that between wilderness preservation and 'Jobs."

(And, I pointed out, prc1its, doubtless the most important consideration

to Mr. Hibbard, who doesn't work for wages, but one he never men-

tioned in his speech.) The other debate--within the community of

conservationists, not between conservationists and cowboys-is about

the value of the wilderness ideal to the conservation of biological

diversity. As a dedicated conservationist and environmentalist, I think we

172

must reexamine the received wilderness idea, that is, the idea that

wilderness is, as the Wilderness Act states, "an area where the earth

and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a

visitor who does not remain." I want to emphasize that my intent in

doing so is not to discredit the areas designated "wilderness," and thus

make them more vulnerable to development pressures. On the con-

trary, we need to multiply and expand such areas. Here I criticize rather

the concept of wilderness, that is, how we conceive of the areas that we

call wilderness. I do so hoping to strengthen conservation efforts by

helping to ground conservation policy in a sound environmental

philosophy. Mter the existence of an "environmental crisis" was widely ac-

knowledged the late 1960s, the benchmark of environmental quality

was the wilderness ideal of pristine, untouched nature. Accordingly, the

new breed of environmentalists believed that the best way to preserve

nature, if not the only way,was to exclude all human economic activi-

ties from representative ecosystems and designate them as wilderness

preserves. In them, some old-growth forests could remain standing, wild

animals could have a little habitat, and so on. In effect, we attempted to

achieve environmental preservation by zoning the planet into areas

where environmentally destructive human economic activities-like

livestock grazing, mining, logging, agriculture, mechanized recreation,

manufacturing, and real estate development-would be permitted and

areas where such activities would be excluded. Several recent and not

so recent realizations are subverting this simple philosophy of nature

conservation through wilderness preservation.

First, at the practical level, the original rationale for wilderness

preservation was not articulated in terms of biological conservation

by turn-of-the-century environmentalists like John Muir. Instead, they

emphasized the way wilderness satisfies human aesthetic, psychologi-

cal, and spiritual needs. Wilderness, in short, was originally regarded

as a psychospiritual resource. Often the most haunting, beautiful, silent,

A Critique ofand anAlternative to theWilderness Idea 173

and solitary places are too remote, rugged, barren, or arid to be farmed

or logged or even mined. Hence, an early criterion for identifying

suitable areas for national parks, such asYellowstone andYosemite, long

before the Wilderness Act of 1964 and public acknowledgment of the

environmental crisis, was their uselessness for practically any other pur-

pose. Consequently, as Dave Foreman puts it with his characteristic

bluntness, much designated wilderness is "rock and ice," great for

"scenery and solitude" but not so great for biological conservation.

Second, at the political level, the wilderness preservation phi-

losophy of nature conservation is defensive and ultimately represents a

losing strategy.The development-permitted zones greatly exceed the

development-excluded zones in number and size. More acreage of the

contiguous United States is under pavement than is under protection

in wilderness areas. Less than 5 percent of the lower forty-eight states

is in a designated or de facto wilderness condition. As the human popu-

lation and economy grow, the pressure on these ragtag wild areas be-

comes ever greater. In temperate North America, wilderness reserves,

national parks, and conservancy districts have become small islands in

a rising tide of cities, suburbs, farms, ranches, interstates, and clear-cuts.

And they are all seriously compromised by human recreation and by

exotic species colonization. Big wilderness has receded to the subarctic

and arctic latitudes. Even these remote hinterlands are threatened by

logging, hydropower schemes, oil exploration, and other industrial

intrusions, not to mention the threats posed by global warming and

by exposure to sharply increased levels of ultraviolet radiation. The

wilderness idea, hopefully and enthusiastically popularized by John

Muir's best-sellers at the close of the nineteenth century, has played it-

self out, here at the close of the twentieth, in the pessimism and despair

of Bill McKibben's recent best-seller, The End ifNature. McKibben's thesis needs no elaboration by me because his title says it all.

Third, at the international level, the uniquely American wilder-

ness idea is not a universalizable approach to conservation. But the

174 J Baird Callicart

environmental crisis, and particularly the erosion of biodiversity, is

global in scope. Thus we need a conservation philosophy that is

universalizable. In western Europe, conservation via wilderness pres-

ervation is meaningless. In India, Africa, and South America, American-

style national parks have been created by forcibly evicting resident

peoples, sometimes with tragic consequences. The Ik, for example,

were hunter-gatherers living sustainably, from time immemorial, in

the remote Kidepo Valley of northeast Uganda. In 1962 they were re-

moved in order to create the Kidepo National Park, an area where the

community of life would henceforth be untrammeled by man, where

man would be a visitor who does not remain. When the Ik were forced

to settle in crowded villages outside the park and to farm, their culture

disintegrated and they degenerated into the travesty of humanity made

infamous by Colin Turnbull.

Fourth, at the historical level, we are beginning to realize that

wilderness is an ethnocentric concept. Europeans came to what they

called the "new world" and since it did not look like the humanized

landscape that they had left behind in the" old world," they thought it

was a pristine wilderness, where, as David Brower put it, the hand of

man had never set foot. But the Western Hemisphere was full ofIndians

when Columbus stumbled upon it. In 1492 the only continental-size

wilderness on the planet was Antarctica. The aboriginal inhabitants

of North and South America, further, were not passive denizens of

the forests, prairies, and deserts; they actively managed their lands-

principally with fire. Some paleoecologists believe that in the absence

ofIndian burning, the vast, biologically diverse open prairies of North

and South America would not have existed, that the American heart-

land would instead have been grown over with brush. Some believe

that the North American forests would not have been as rich and di-

verse in the absence of the Indian's pyrotechnology.

By the seventeenth century, when English colonists began to

settle the eastern seaboard of North America, the native peoples had

A Critique of and anAlternative to the Wilderness Idea 175

suffered the greatest demographic debacle of human history. Their

populations were reduced by perhaps 90 percent due to the ravages of

Old World diseases, which had swept through the hemisphere trans-

mitted first from European to Indian and then from Indian to Indian.

So the Pilgrims did find themselves in a relatively desolate and howl-

ing wilderness, as they lamented, but it was, ironically, an artificial

wilderness-though that combination of words seems oxymoronic.

Europeans inadvertently created the New World wilderness condition

by means of an unintended but utterly devastating biological warfare

on the aboriginal inhabitants.

Fifth, at the theoretical ecology level, ecosystems were once

thought to remain stable unless they are disturbed, and if they are dis-

turbed, to return eventually to their stable states, called climax com-

munities. To be constantly changing and unstable is now believed to be

their usual, rather than exceptional, condition. Thus, whether we hu-

mans interfere with them or not, ecosystems will undergo metamor-

phosis. But wilderness preservation has often meant freeze-framing the

status quo ante, maintaining things as they were when the "white man"

first came on the scene. Hence the wilderness ideal, so interpreted, rep-

resents a conservation goal that would be possible to attain, paradoxi-

cally, only through intensive management efforts to keep things the

way they were in defiance of nature's inherent dynamism.

Sixth, at the philosophical level, the wilderness idea perpetuates

the pre-Darwinian myth that "man" exists apart from nature. Our

oldest and most influential cultural traditions have taught us that we

human beings are exclusively created in the image of God, or that we

are somehow uniquely endowed with divine rationality. Thus we, and

all the products of our essentially supernatural minds, were thought to

exist apart from and over-against nature. For wilderness purists, en-

countering any human artifact (not their own) in a wilderness setting

spoils their experience of pristine nature. But Darwin broadcast the un-

welcome news that we self-exalting human beings are mere accidents

176 J Baird Callicott

of natural selection, no less than any other large mammal. We are one of five living species of great ape.We are, to put it bluntly.just big

monkeys-very precocious ones, to be sure, but monkeys nonetheless.

And everything we do-e-from bowling and bungee-jumping to writ-

ing fliads and engineering space shuttles (and committing acts of eco-

tage, most defmitely)-is monkey business. For many people, Darwin's

news was bad news because it seemed to demean us and to undermine

our noblest pretensions and aspirations. But I think it's good news. If

we are a part of nature, then we have a rightful place and role in nature

no less than any other creature-no less than elephants, or whales, or

redwoods. And what we may do in and to nature-the transformations

that we impose upon the environment-are in principle no better or

no worse than what elephants, or whales, or redwoods, may do in and

to nature.

I say "in principle" because I certainly do not wish to leave any-

one with the impression that I think because we are just as natural as all

other organisms, everything we do in and to nature-every change we

impose upon the environment-is okay. Most anthropogenic change is

certainly not okay. Indeed, most of what we do in and to nature is very

destructive.

But other species, too, may have either beneficial or harmful

effects on the rest of nature. If there were 6 billion elephants on the

planet instead of 6 billion people (or, remembering that an adult ele-

phant is more than a hundred times as heavy as an adult human, if

there were as much elephant biomass as presently there is human bio-

mass), then planet Earth would still be in the throes of an ecological

crisis. Elephants, in other words, can also be very destructive citizens of

their biotic communities. On the other hand, the biomass of bees and

other insect pollinators of plants is probably greater than the human

biomass (I don't know, I'm not a biologist) and certainly the bee popu-

lation far exceeds the human population, but the ecological effect of

all these bees is undoubtedly benefIcial. So, if the ecological impact of

A Critique ofand an Alternative to theWilderness Idea 177

the activities of bees and elephants can be either good or bad, then

why can't the ecological impact of human activities be good as well

as bad? Measured by the wilderness standard, all human impact is bad,

not because human beings are inherently bad, but because human be-

ings are not a part of nature--or so the wilderness idea assumes.

Personally, I hope that those of us affluent North Americans

who wish to do so can go on enjoying the luxury of respectfully, wor-

shipfully visiting wilderness areas. In my opinion, the greatest value

of the Wilderness Act of 1964 is ethical. It formally acknowledges a

human commitment to humility, forbearance, and restraint. But as the

centerpiece of a nature conservation philosophy, we need to find an al-

ternative to the wilderness idea. Fortunately, we need not look far.We

find the appropriate alternative in the concept of biosphere reserves, a

concept hatched in Europe, focused on the tropics, and given the im-

primatur of the United Nations. Thus, it has genuine international

currency. Further, biosphere reserves are selected not on the basis of

scenic qualities and not because they are otherwise useless, but on the

basis of ecological qualities. Such reserves, intended to preserve bio-

logical diversity and ecosystem health, should be desigoed to harbor

not only the charismatic megafauna-bears, wolves, bison, and the

like-but also the entire spectrum of indigenous species, invertebrates

as well as vertebrates, plants as well as animals.

A policy of invasive human management-by means of, say, pre-

scribed burning or carefully planned culling-----is cognitively dissonant

with the wilderness idea, but not with the biosphere (or biodiversity)

reserve idea. Indeed, one of the signal differences between the old

wilderness idea and the new concept of biosphere reserves is a provi-

sion for compatible human residence and economic activity in and

around reserves. Had the Kidepo National Park been conceived as the

Kidepo Biosphere Reserve (though of course to think that it actually

might have been is anachronistic), then the Ik and their culture could

have been part of what was preserved. Looking toward the future, the

178 J Baird Callicott

idea of a restored American Great Plains-the Buffalo Commons

envisioned by Frank and Deborah Popper-was, upon first hearing,

so violently opposed because it was originally uncritically cast in the

wilderness mode. It is becoming politically more palatable, even attrac-

tive, as residents of the target regions see an opportunity to stay, not

leave, and switch from farming and livestock ranching to various ways

ofsustainably exploiting bison, elk, deer, and pronghorn antelope. As I

envision a Buffalo Commons, private herds of cattle and sheep wonld

be removed all over the arid and semiarid West.Absent domestic stock,

the native vegetation could reclothe the range. And with the fences

down, the native ungulates could roam free and wild. Erstwhile ranch-

ers and farmers could retain a home forty and form management

co-ops to allot themselves culling rights, proportional perhaps to how

much land each put into the commons. If the Blackfeet, Arapaho,

Cheyenne, and Lakota could cull the unowned elk and buffalo herds

without compromising biological diversity, why can't the contempo-

rary residents of the same region?

The biosphere reserve idea may be the centerpiece of a coherent

and universalizable conservation philosophy, but not the whole of such

a philosophy. The wilderness idea is half of an either-or dichotomy:

either devote an area to human inhabitation and destructive economic

development, orpreserve it in its pristine condition as wilderness. The

classic wilderness advocates, such as Roderick Nash, in other words,

envisioned no alternative to industrial civilization offset by wilderness

preservation. As long as it stayed on its side of the fence, industrial civi-

lization went unchallenged.

The core-buffer-corridor concept of the Wildlands Project is

cast in the new biosphere reserve paradigm. But the authors of the

1992 "Wildlands Project Mission Statement" still, in my opinion,

concede too much to industrial civilization as we know it when

they write, "Intensive human activity associated with civilization-

agriculture, industrial production, urban centers--could continue

A Critique ifand anAlternative to the Wilderness Idea 179

outside the buffers." Complementing the biodiversity reserve idea in

a sound nature conservation philosophy are the ideas of appropriate

technology and sustainable livelihood-if by "sustainable livelihood" is meant human economic activity that does not compromise ecologi-

cal health and integrity. Solar alternatives to hydroelectric and fossil-

fuel energy should be aggressively explored. Alternatives to industrial

agriculture should be encouraged by means of policy changes. Urban

sprawl should be controlled by better planning and stricter zoning.

Timber reserves should be harvested ecologically as well as sustainably,

as now ostensibly mandated by the new Forest Service policy on na- tional forests. And so on. Thus some biological conservation might be

integrated with economic activities in areas not designated as biodiver-

sity reserves (cum buffers and corridors),just as some economic activi-

ties might be integrated with biological conservation in those that are.

I was impressed with how the GreaterYellowstone Ecosystem seemed

to be a looming presence in the collective consciousness of Bozeman.

Almost all the symposium speakers mentioned it. Some dwelled on it.

A few spoke of nothing else. It being my spring break and all, I had set

aside a few days afterward to go trekking. The park pulled me like a

magnet. I rented a car and drove up the Paradise Valley to the north

gate. Then I poked around the valley of the Yellowstone River and

those of the Lamar and Gardiner, rwo of its tributaries, on foot.

Tired of a long, bitter Wisconsin winter and with my cross-

country skis back home in my shack, I never got anywhere near the

backcountry. Climbing up on McMinn Bench near Mount Everts, I

could see the park headquarters village in the vicinity of Mammoth

Hot Springs, the town of Gardiner off to the north, U.S. 89 running

south to Norris Geyser Basin, and U.S. 212, which is kept open all

winter as far east as Cooke City, Montana. But the difference berween

inside and outside the park boundaries was like the difference be-

rween night and day. Inside, the headquarters village, the roads, the

180 J Baird Callicott

campgrounds, all had hard edges. And there were no fences. Outside,

the gate town had a long filament of gas stations, motels, fly shops, and whatnot strung out along the highway. New-looking houses were

scattered here and there on the nearby bluffs.Though I was usually

walking through a mixture of mud and elk manure, the park seemed

clean. Beyond, the landscape seemed marred and cluttered.

Both outside and inside the park I saw elk, mule and white-

tailed deer, and pronghorn. Inside the park I saw plenty of bison. At

close range the evidence of elk overpopulation was ubiquitous: aspen

. were absent, an elk-eye-Ievel browse line was on the Douglas-firs and

whitebark pines, game trails traversed the slopes every fifty feet or so

of elevation, the riverbanks were denuded and eroding, and every-

where I stepped, I stepped in elk scat.

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (comprisingYellowstone

and Grand Teton National Parks, the Bridger-Teton, Targhee, Gallatin,

Custer, Caribou, and Beaverhead National Forests, three national wild-

life refuges, and BLM, state, and private lands) is the biggest relatively

intact ecosystem in the Lower 48. The park is a listed UNESCO

Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site. What the Yellowstone

Biosphere Reserve lacks is a thoughtful buffer zone policy and well-

articulated corridors connecting it with the Bitteroot, Bob Marshall,

Glacier, and Cascade core habitats. I have no personal experience with

potential corridors, but the Paradise Valley is an ideal candidate for a

buffer zone on the north boundary of Yellowstone National Park.

Under the new mandate for ecosystem management, the Forest

Service should manage its "multiple use" forests as buffer zones to the

adjoining parks and to its designated wilderness areas in the Greater

Yellowstone Ecosystem. Up to now, the Forest Service has extensively

roaded its lands and permitted clear-cut logging, especially in the

Targhee and Gallatin National Forests, "treatments" not consistent

with biosphere reserve buffer zone management. Stock grazing is

permitted on nearly half the public lands in the ecosystem, including

A Critique ofand anAlternative to the Wilderness Idea 181

(incredibly) designated wilderness areas in the national forests and parts

of Grand Teton National Park. But what hope can we entertain that

the absolutely essential winter ungulate habitat represented by a multi-

tude of private properties in the Paradise Valley will be managed as a

buffer zone?

Let's look at what's going on in the valley now.With my first

quart of cold beer in three days on the seat between my legs, my left

hand on the wheel, and the right taking notes as I drove from Gardiner

to Livingston, this is what I saw:

Immediately beyond the park boundaries a good deal of open

land in the side hills between the Yellowstone River valley and the

mountains has been bought for winter range by the Rocky Mountain

Elk Foundation. But virtually within sight of the park gate and only a

stone's throw from the river, some enterprising entrepreneur has dug a gravel pit. As I drove by, a bulldozer was pushing loose rock around in

a cloud of dust.

The next notable manmark on the landscape is the former alpine

estate, Royal Teton Ranch, of the late Malcohn Forbes, who must not

have known that his view opened on the Gallatins, not the Tetons. As

his last rite to Mammon, Forbes got top dollar for his prime Montana

property from a California survivalist cult, the Church Universal and

Triumphant. Right on the riverbank the hard core cultists live in a

tacky shantytown (and the rest in places like Livingston and Bozeman).

Back in the sidehills of the Gallatin Range they have erected bomb

shelters whose fuel storage tanks were found leaking diesel oil. As I

drove by at eventide, cult cattle were watering in the Yellowstone and

trampling its banks. It so happens that the old Forbes place has geo-

thermal "resources;' and I saw steam rising near the little setdement.

The "church" plans to' develop these resources, putting the park's

geysers at the risk of being extinguished.

Then, on the side of the road away from the river, I passed an "elk

farm," a rundown house and some ramshackle outbuildings beside a

182 J Baird Callicott

small, grassless paddock enclosed by a high fence. I was told that game

wardens had fmally caught the wily proprietor luring hungry wild elk

into his compound by night. Later he would sell them as pen-raised animals.

A litde relief from this world of wounds came when I drove into

Yankee Jim Canyon, most of which is part of the Gallatin National

Forest, where the mountains on either side of the valley narrow and

the river flows fast through a shallow gorge.

Down north of the Yankee Jim respite, the valley widens, framed

on the east by the Absoroka and on the west by the Gallatin ranges.

Once more the property is mosdy private. Ranches. Cattle. I wasn't

around long enough to know whether or not the ranchers in the

ParadiseValley were conscientious land stewards, like Mr. Hibbard.

But what I could see through the windshield at sixty miles per hour

was the meaning of "trammeled"-to be caught or held in, or as if in, a net; to be enmeshed; to be prevented or impeded; to be confined,

according to my dictionary. The valley was trammeled, enmeshed, and impeded by a network offences.

Interspersed with the ranches, closer to a wide spot on the road

called Emigrant and on into Livingston, are riparian smallholds with

mansions sitting on them, belonging to gentry from elsewhere who

found their litde piece of paradise on the Yellowstone River. Two miles

east of Emigrant on a big bend of the river is Chico, a hot springs re-

sort. I didn't go there, since I had just had an au naturel soak in the park.

To accommodate itinerant pilgrims to the valley, someone was

rearranging the river bluff with a bulldozer and building an RV "camp-

ground" farther down the road. The hookups were all installed.When I passed by, the driveways were just going in.

As I got closer to Livingston, the gentrification of the riparian

zone became more intense. The mountains pinch in again and stop at

the north end of ParadiseValley, near a place called Allen Spur. I rolled

on into town--gradually. The highway is lined with modest houses

A Critique ofandanAlternative to the Wilderness Idea 183

along the river, lumberyards, gas stations, 7-Eleven stores, motels, fast-

food joints, trashy empty lots-the usual mishmash of totally planless

strip development, Anyplace, U.S.A.

And what could the valley become? A Buffalo Commons. Or,

more precisely, an Ungulate Commons.

Most cults-the Branch Davidians were an especially spectacu-

lar example-eventually self-destruct. The Church Universal and

Triumphant, one hopes, will be no exception to the rule. Then the

federal government can do what it tried before to do, purchase the

old Forbes place and devote it to wildlife.

The government thought it couldn't afford Forbes's asking price,

and so probably would shrink from the thought of buying the whole

ParadiseValley, much of which may not be for sale. So what can be

done? Convince the ranchers to tear down their fences, the most

ubiquitously trammeling presence on the land; get rid of their cattle;

and invite in the elk, bison, antelope, and deer. Coyotes will keep the

ground squirrels in check; black-footed ferrets will limit the prairie

dog population; gray wolves and mountain lions will take out old, sick,

and less fit large herbivores, leaving the cream of the free-ranging crop

for the erstwhile cattle ranchers to skim. The gentry should love to

look out their picture windows and see free wild animals, rather than

their neighbors' fenced cattle. And the tourists might pay even more

money to park a Winnebago in the midst of "free nature"-as Arne

Naess dubs this fair mix of people and wildlife--instead of in just an-

other roadside attraction.

But how to avoid the tragedy of the commons? Through co-

operation. The ParadiseValley is well defined and self-contained. A

ranchers' co-op could hire its own wildlife ecologists and, in consul-

tation with the Fish and Wildlife, Forest, and Park Services, set their

own sustainable harvest quotas.

After my talk at the wilderness symposium, Chase Hibbard was asked what he thought of my remarks about switching from cattle

184 j. &ird C.llirott

ranching to market-hunting native ungulates. He was opposed to it.

Categorically.Why? I asked him, if market analyses suggest that such a

scheme would be more economically attractive than cattle ranching.

You know, business is business.Are cattle a religion in Montana, or

what?Yes,he answered, they are. (This symposium was full of sur-

prises.) And he went on to lay down the usual line of bullshit (pun in-

tended) about how cattle are a part of what makes the West the West

(in the Hollywood-mediated American mind), and how his family

has been running cattle here a long time. A long time! I wanted to say,

but didn't-a blip on the trajectory of the true history and future of

the West, which belongs to the bison and to those whose livelihood

once did and may soon again center on this shaggy symbol of North

America's high, semiarid country and on the other native grazers and

browsers.

Thinking over this exchange of opinions, I came to the conclu-

sion that cattle were not the real cult object of the western ranchers'

religion. Private property is.The ParadiseValley is not home to, in ad-

dition to the Church Universal and Triumphant, neo-Baal cultists. No,

John Locke is the theologian of cattlepersons. As I envision a Paradise

Valley Ungulate Commons-a key part of the Greater Yellowstone

Biosphere Reserve Buffer Zone--private "real" property would re-

main in private hands. Privately owned "animal units" are what would

go, along with fences, one purpose of which is to mark real estate

boundaries and segregate one rancher's privately owned herd from

another's.

Would this be so un-American? Not if we think more expan-

sively, in historical terms. That's more or less the way the Indians-

bona fide Americans ifanyone is-did it. Each group had a territory to

which they claimed and enforced the property rights. But the animals

were their own bosses.And if, to get a hearing, we must confine our-

selves to the short-term scale of Euro-American history, pelagic fisher-

persons, traditionally, own their boats and tackle, but the fish go where

A Critique ofand atiAlternative to theWilderness Idea 185

they will, owned by no one. So the precedent and paradigm for an economically exploited native Ungulate Commons should perhaps

be marine fisheries rather than terrestrial ranches. With this difference:

A network of North American Ungulate Commons would be far less

liable to overexploitation, because the stocks are composed oflarge,

visible specimens that are fairly easy to count and they fall under na-

tionaljurisdictions (those of the United States, Canada, and Mexico,

now, for better or worse, coordinated by NAFTA). The biosphere reserve conservation concept includes another, less

often discussed zone, the transition zone. Here too, the key is appropri-

ate technologies and sustainable economies. Starting at Livingston and

going east, montane Montana gives way to high plains Montana. The

Great Plains region is already moving in the direction of a Buffalo

Commons. The fences are still up, but several big ranches-most fa-

mously; the one belonging to Ted Turner-are switching from cattle

to buffalo.While buffalo are certainly less tractable and more difficult

to contain, they need less care than cattle, and so are becoming an in-

creasingly attractive alternative for imaginative and well-landed high

plains entrepreneurs. And many Indian groups are expressing a keen

interest in restoring buffalo herds to reservation land, with the added

incentive of the bison's place in their histories, cultures, and religions.

186 J. Baird Callicott