Montana News
Looking at the Caterpillar
At the very beginning of this series, I spent some time with a rancher named Mark Rose. He showed me some pictures of his livestock killed by predators. "I have a folder over here of pictures of a line attack, of a bear kill, of a wolf kill." I'd met up with him to talk about bears because Grizzly's congregate on the land he manages. But Mark let me know what he thought about that early in the interview. "Listen to your questions to me already in the first ten minutes. Bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear." "There was no balance there, guys." This really caught me off guard. I'd come here to talk about Grizzly's and my plan was pretty much in disarray. I kind of danced around even saying the word bear for the next little bit. I told him I wanted to understand his frustrations better, and this is what he said. "Yeah, I'll tell you a story about my neighbor. And I get really emotional about this stuff, kids, these guys." "They mean a lot to me." This was when Mark was managing a different ranch, not all that far away from those rolling green hills of the Gallatin Mountains where we met. A wildlife group had come to town to talk with his neighbor about wolves. So Mark asked to tag along. He and his neighbor went down to meet this big group of people. Mark's neighbor gave them a tour, and as it wore on. He stood up and they asked him lots of questions about the perspectives of the rancher, and just like your questions, it always came back to the wolves, always. And he kept trying to redirect the conversation into something else, like about cattle or about deer or about the grass that he, you know, that's so important and the streams. And the question is, "What about about the wolf?" "I have about the wolf, about the wolf, about the wolf." And all this time it was right next to the highway. All this time I could see him looking over his shoulder at something on the highway. I'm like, "What the heck is he looking at, right?" And this goes on for like 15-20 minutes. Honestly, the question is about the wolf, and he kept looking over at the highway and cars are zooming by, and I'm like, "What the heck is he looking across the highway at something?" He finally got fed up with it. He's like, "Good grief, he just got frustrated." And he walked up to the highway. Bed down. This hardened rancher in the heart of grizzly country pulled out a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. Bed down picked up one of those little black and orange caterpillars. You know what I'm talking about, those little fuzzy guys, I don't know their names. But they're kind of a cool little thing, you know, you like them as a little kid. Any product? I brought that little caterpillar back down to the group and said, "Now, all the time you were asking me about that one animal, that one focus that you have, and the concern you showed for that one animal." He said, "All the while, that little caterpillar was coming across the highway, dodging traffic. That little caterpillar was sprinting as hard as he could across that highway with his life and his hands, right?" And he said, "Not one of you was concerned about that caterpillar. Not one of you." He said, "You have to have a much broader view. Think much bigger in your view." He said, "It's awful dangerous to get so focused on one thing in nature that you throw away everything else." You know that? That really made an impact on me. The Endangered Species Act works to conserve one species at a time, be they wolves or grizzly bears. The law isolates the wolf from the caterpillar, the grass, the soil, and the cows, and in doing so, it ignores the wolf's connection to a broader ecosystem. But that's not how the real world works. Each protected species is part of a complex web of relationships with other plants and animals, even nutrients and microorganisms in the soil. Why is that stuck with you so much to this day, do you think? Because it's so accurate. It's so useful in broader terms, in your broader life. It's easy to get sucked into a rabbit hole in so many things in your life and be so focused on one particular thing that dominates your life. And that's just not how life is. It's a kaleidoscope of experiences and things around you. From Montana Public Radio in the Montana Media Lab, this is The Wide Open. I'm Nick Mont. Just over 50 years ago, lawmakers passed something into being that would shape our country's future. By trying to preserve the diversity of life on Earth, the framers of the Endangered Species Act thought we could temper some of the worst environmental wreckage we'd wrought. This whole season, battles over grizzlies, wolves, fish, and owls set the course for the ESA to go from nearly completely bipartisan back in the 1970s to one of the most controversial pieces of legislation on the books today. Despite that controversy, just about everybody agrees that extinction is something we should prevent, but we can't see eye to eye on how to make things work better. Mark's critique of the single species approach is one of many. So this time, on our final episode of our first season, why is everybody fighting about the ESA? And how do we go forward in an era of mass extinction? Stay with us. Today, we're losing species at a rate 100 to 1000 times greater than what would occur naturally. And one thing that's really striking to me is just how much people support the idea of stopping this epidemic of extinction. The polling data is really clear. Roughly four out of five Americans support the Endangered Species Act. But despite this public cheerleading, the law remains about as politically divisive as it gets, and this has left me with one big question. If we're not fighting about extinction, what are we fighting about? This is Pat Parentow. Pat is an emeritus professor at Vermont Law School. He's been involved with some of the highest profile and most important ESA cases out there, from the northern spotted owl to endangered whooping and northern sandhill cranes. In 1974, just after the ESA got passed, Pat was working for the National Wildlife Federation. He'd grown up hunting and fishing on the plains of Nebraska. He'd been part of the first Earth Day back in 1970. But as he immersed himself in environmental law, he became what he calls somewhat facetiously a wild-eyed environmentalist. One of Pat's early tasks with the NWF was reading all the court cases that came down about wildlife and ecosystems. There was no internet. There was no electronic anything. To read environmental cases, I had to squirrel myself away in the Library of Congress in a little room reading books. You can imagine. I'm just sitting there with stacks and stacks of books going through the index looking for environmental cases. That's the way it used to be done. It's almost like studying by candlelight. This is where he first encountered the language of the law. As we've talked about, the Endangered Species Act has a mandate. It had teeth. Unlike other environmental laws, it said, "Thou shalt not." The goal was to stop extinction. Though, Pat said there was this huge blind spot. Science hadn't yet come to terms with the forces driving species of plants, animals, birds, fish, and insects to their demise. We were naive about the ESA. None of us early advocates had any concept of how many species were in trouble. Back in those early days, he said, "There was a sense of can-do that was way, way out of proportion to reality." That's what happens, isn't it? When you set goals without information, without facts, without evidence, you're bound to be wrong, wildly wrong. So, the ESA is another example of a systemic problem much, much worse than anybody imagined. Pat watched as the political opposition mounted owls, grizzlies, and wolves, and early on, snail-darters, that three-inch fish that challenged the multi-million dollar, teleco-dam, and Tennessee. Part of the answer to the question of what people are fighting about when they fight about the Endangered Species Act came early in the very first legal battles about the ESA. This is Justice Lewis Powell's dissenting opinion when the Supreme Court put a stop to the multi-million dollar, teleco-dam's construction, and that's nailed our case in the 1970s. The close decision casts a long shadow over the continued operation of even the most important projects, projects serving vital needs of society as well as national defense. If continued operation endangers a survival, or the critical habitat, of a newly discovered species of water spatter or cockroach, operation of the project could be brought to a halt. Some people say, "Well, the ESA stops things. No, it doesn't. Show me what it stopped. I'm trying to think of where the ESA has stopped anything. Didn't even stop teleco-dam." This probably strikes you as a pretty wild claim, but think about it. Throughout this season you've heard about how species took on bigger and bigger projects. The teleco-dam in the end got built since it got the OK from Congress. The polar bear challenged oil and gas drilling on federal land all over the country, but the feds found a loophole to maintain business as usual. And Pat's more or less right about this. One Defenders of Wildlife study reviewed over 88,000 consultations over federal projects in a seven-year period. In all those projects, nothing was stopped or even altered all that much because of the acts. My point here isn't that the ESA never stops projects. It certainly does sometimes. But more than straight up stopping, it creates delays and forces agencies to go back to the drawing board, spending more time and more money figuring out how to do right by the natural world. If it isn't really that the ESA is stopping things, then is the problem that it's increasing the cost of doing business? And, of course, the answer is yes. I mean, that's true of every single environmental law we have. Pat says our environmental laws intervene on behalf of nature where markets alone don't. The price of our homes and our cars and everything we use and consume in our daily lives, those prices don't include their ecological tolls. And then there's an even bigger issue. Back when the ESA was passed, the fixes for extinction were somewhat simple. Want more raptors like bald eagles and peregrine falcons on the landscape? Well, just stop poisoning them. Want more alligators? Stop making purses out of them. But as the number of species on the list exploded, today, the total number of species designated threatened or endangered as well over 2,000, the root cause of their demise became clear, and that is pretty hard to address. And it turns out that 80% of the species that are now on the list are there because of habitat loss. More people in more places and more business and industry to make them stuff, all that growth and development, some of the very same things we use to measure how well we're doing as a society, fragmented habitat in the little pieces and came with a massive ecological toll. Those are systemic problems. They are global problems. They go right down to the very core of our economic system. Tempering the damage requires challenging the ideologies that define this country. That growth is good and more is better. These are not fixes we'll impose on ourselves, so to pat, this requires the strong hand of the government. So then you get to the heart of the matter, which is what should government do. Pat says there's a smorgasbord of options out there, and lawmakers have proposed just about everything on the menu. There's more regulation, less regulation, financial assistance, technical assistance, permitting processes, making species getting on the endangered list easier, or harder, and same goes with getting off it. And there's money. For years, some organizations and lawmakers have said the ESA is starving. It's underfunded and there's not enough money to learn about and save all the species that are in dire straits. But despite seemingly endless bills proposed to strengthen or weaken the ESA, for more than the last 30 years it's just kind of been stuck in place. Like the species it's meant to save, the law has more or less been on life support. Nobody can agree on any meaningful changes. The problem is we don't have a system that's capable of responding to problems, challenges that emerge once a law is enacted. The idea that you can pass something in 1973 and then just leave it alone forever is kind of naive, isn't it? What we're actually talking about when we talk about the Endangered Species Act is the role of government. The law forces us to balance the environment, the economy, and our own livelihoods. But these questions are nearly impossible to separate from politics, at least up in DC. And today, among lawmakers, the ESA, like other environmental laws, is more polarized than ever. Just to give you an example, here's the set of statistics I can't get out of my head. The ESA is credited with saving 99% of the species it protects from extinction. That's Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan. She's saying that almost every single species that's gotten ESA protections because it was on the downward spiral to extinction continues to exist. Therefore, the law is a smashing success. Then, the other side. Here's Harriet Hageman, a Republican representative from Wyoming. Since the Endangered Species Act was first passed in 1973, only about 3% of species have been delisted. This argument is that by this metric, the ESA is a dismal failure. Think of the act like an emergency room, a place where you go if you need help, but you want to leave as soon as you're better. The problem is, most critters are just staying there. In the ER, here's Don Baier, a Democrat from Virginia. What's your perspective on what we have often called the most successful piece of legislation in American history? Is it 99% successful or is it dramatically disappointing because only 3% have been delisted? Two radically different facts about the state of the ESA, both technically true, but telling very different stories. Here's Pat. If we can't find a way to get to a common set of facts, it's going to be hard to negotiate. It's going to be hard to discuss solutions. We're stuck politically with a law that's really outmoded. I would be the first to admit it needs work. And we can't seem to get into a civil conversation about exactly how that should be done. We should be arguing about means and methods and creativity and innovation and all of that should be open and welcome. We just don't have a forum for that right now. We'll be back. The wide open is supported by High Country News, a nonprofit reader supported publication that has been covering the land and communities of the West for more than 50 years. Information on how to receive a wide open listener subscription at hcn.org/subscribe with the code wide open 2024. Before the break, we heard an argument for improving the Endangered Species Act from Pat Parental. Pat represents one clear side of the Endangered Species debate. Extinction is a problem and the solution is clear, strong government. But other ways to make the Endangered Species Act work better are unfolding on the ground under the confines of the law as it exists now. Karen Bud Fallon is a property rights lawyer from Wyoming. She's a DC person. She's worked in both the Reagan and Trump administrations. But she's also a fifth generation ranch person. And it's there on her family's ranch that she started thinking about endangered species. My dad always said to my two sisters and I, if I'm going to survive in the livestock business, I need a lawyer, a vet, and a banker. And the daughter said, "Okay, Daddy." And that's what he got out of the deal. And so I went to law school. Karen's a polarizing figure in the ESA world. She represented Clive and Bundy back in a 1989 case about the desert tortoise. When the feds put the tortoise on the Endangered list, it started a long chain of events that led to a week's long armed standoff with the federal government back in 2014. A confrontation in Nevada this morning threatens to become a modern day range war. At issue was cattle grazing on federal land. Karen's a big time critic of the ESA. In congressional testimony, she said, quote, "rather than saving species and conserving their habitats, the ESA is used as a sword to tear down the American economy." And in a 2016 talk, she said this, "Right now, I would repeal the ESA in a heartbeat. But they tell me that Congress will never do that in a bazillion years. Heck, we can't even get them to offer a bill to amend a little teeny piece of it." Speaking with her, I was a little surprised. She was a lot more measured about the law than I expected. In her time in Washington, she told me she felt a disconnect with the experience of the people she represents. "The idea that people in a city are going to be able to tell people in a rural community how to live and how to think and how to work is just, it just doesn't work." This, in a sense, comes back to the caterpillar. To Karen, directives from up high are too general. They ignore the specifics of what individual operations mean for individual ecosystems on the ground. It all left her with a bad taste in her mouth for how to address conservation and extinction from Capitol Hill. "Watching this over the years, I don't think people got near as wound up in ideological issues." She said back in her days serving under President Reagan, both sides would have hard conversations with one another. They'd sit down and they'd work it out. But this time around, when she was working in the Department of the Interior under Trump, "There was none of that. People just didn't like you because of who you worked for, even though like I didn't do anything political. My job was to do legal work, and I actually found that really sad." With the federal government gridlocked, it can be easier to see how the ESA is evolving on the ground. Some of the most interesting adaptations I've found are on private land. Like we've discussed, endangered species don't just confine themselves to living on federal land, so private landowners are crucial to the effort to conserving species. As a lawyer, Karen sues the federal government on behalf of ranchers and also intervenes for the government when they get sued by groups like the Center for Biological Diversity. When I started my practice, I was really more focused on federal land's issues, BLM and Forest Service engrazing and all that stuff. But I talked to lots of ranchers that didn't have BLM and Forest Service problem, and I tease them and I'd say, "Don't lose my business card, because someday an endangered species is going to come to you on your private land and you're going to need me." More than two-thirds of species on the endangered and threatened list depend on private land to survive. Everything from grizzlies and wolves to migratory birds to amphibians and insects. One of the main complaints of Karen and other folks on the property right side of ESA debates is that mandates and regulations create perverse incentives for landowners. If there's, say, a rare bird that could get listed, a rancher might cut down all the trees that could support it before it shows up on their property, so their operation isn't subject to more regulation down the line, or they might take even more drastic measures. This is from a Fox News story about a decade ago. So this has led to a new response called "shoot, shovel, and shut up." In other words, landowners should see an endangered species on their land, sometimes shoot the thing and then bury it and then shut up about it. Part of this is fear-mongering, to be sure, but lots of ranchers and farmers really do dread an endangered species showing up on their land. And there are cases of animals like grizzlies killed and buried on private land, only found because of their tracking callers. I've even talked with some folks for this show who still had SSS bumper stickers for "shoot, shovel, and shut up." Karen's point is that penalties don't work as well as rewards. Financial incentives to help ranchers maintain good habitat for endangered species, along with their own livestock, could help address this side of the endangered species problem. If you want to keep these lands opened and used, you have to give people an economic way to survive. Because if they can't farm or they can't ranch, their only choice is to sell it to subdivisions. Open space, even if it's grazed by cattle or sheep, preserves habitat for everything from elk to grizzly bears. Driveways, McMansions, and sprawl, for the most part, do not. Despite the standstill in the legislature, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gotten a little creative on the ground. There are a handful of tools they're using now under the ESA that do exactly what Karen is craving. Here are two of them. First, habitat conservation plans. These allow take of an endangered species in one place, in exchange for conservation somewhere else. So, a development threatens turtles just west of the city. One of these plans can allow that to happen, in exchange for preserving more turtle habitat on, say, the east side of that same city. And the agency's also pioneered something that today is called a conservation benefit agreement. The idea here is that landowners enter into contracts with the feds over conservation measures that could benefit species. Usually, this is about species that are under consideration for listing, things like monarch butterflies. People react much better to say this is a voluntary program. Here's your suite of things you can do when you negotiate out a deal, and then you're not burdened by the ESA if the species gets listed. This means that when that monarch, or whatever species it is, makes the endangered list, you don't have to worry about getting caught up in the teeth of the ESA. You've already shown the government you're doing your due diligence to conserve a species, so you're more or less good to keep on doing what you're doing. I think it's a brilliant way to do it, and I'm doing lots of those, and I'm fully supportive of those. These are ways the governments worked within the bounds of the law as written, even if underfunded, to help address conservation problems in the modern world. But it's still just a start. Pat Parentow, the lawyer and ESA advocate, is on board for incentivizing ranchers to preserve species, but that shouldn't come at the cost of making the ESA even stronger. An incentives alone, he says, are not going to cut it. If you really believe that voluntary action will save these species, then I don't. My 50 years of experience tells me that's not going to happen. Pat and Karen might be on totally opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to how to make the ESA work better for people and for ecosystems. But they do agree on one thing. We need to do something to make the law better, and our political system just can't handle it. There has to be another way to win more hearts and minds to save species. That's after the break. The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritlin Fund, the Santa Bar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and listeners like you. Ways to contribute and make this kind of journalism possible at mtpr.org. We've heard from two sides who think something needs to be done to help us work better to save endangered species and ecosystems. And now, I want to introduce you to someone who's doing exactly that. Spending time with ranchers to help people work and thrive without hurting plants and animals. I am the American Indian tribal liaison for the NRCS. This is Latrice Tazi, and this is kind of acronym city, but that means she works for the natural resource conservation service of the US Department of Agriculture. So she works for the feds, but she's a member of the Blackfeet tribe, and she also comes from a ranching family. Latrice sees the deep cultural and ecological importance of endangered species like grizzlies and wolves, along with how they relate to everything on the landscape, from the caterpillars to the soil. But growing up, working cattle, she also understands the pressures those creatures can put on making a living. So, Latrice operates in this liminal space, somewhere between Pat Parentow and Karen Budfalan. I see my position as a bridge between the government agency and tribal producers. Latrice isn't litigating the ESA or focusing on policy solutions, but she is working on endangered species issues. Basically, where she lives on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front is grizzly and wolf central. Many of the ranchers she works with have major problems with predators, and Latrice gets both sides of that. The way she thinks about it is, they're here, they're part of the ecosystem, so how can we adapt? Bigger picture, Latrice is at the micro level of the ESA battles. She's on the ground, talking with people, looking at them in the eye. While we're in political gridlock with court cases flying around on both sides, this is the level where I see real movement and hope in all things endangered species. We met Latrice at her house on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, the high peaks of Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the traditional territory of the Blackfeet Nation in the distance. This is where I was raised, where I did my preschool on the back of a horse. My dad showed me the teepee rings up on the hills over there. The buffalo jumped further down by the creek. So, you know, this place made me who I am. So, this is my comfort zone, so after I'm done working with producers, this is where I come back to, this is like my oasis. Like, I'll go for my walk, so hug a watch. The water flow and the creek, I'll listen to the birds. It's just, it's like my way to re-energize. Latrice greeted us with her armada of dogs. From a teeny little wiener dog, the meanest of the bunch, to a giant, slobbering sweetie pie named Cassius. They're her pets, and they also keep her safe from things like grizzlies, which are everywhere out here. The dogs are all wrestling each other and coming in for pets and jumping in a nearby stream as we talk. You can't make this up like dogs, horses, cows everywhere, like everywhere. Latrice gets the property right side of the argument, Karen Bud Fallon is so adamantly for. The way she was raised showed her the importance of the things we rely on, but take for granted. In the ESA world, there's the meat from livestock, raw material from mining, timber from logging. Latrice brought things back to something really simple and basic. Water. I didn't have running water until I was six, and we finally got a house with running water, and so I kind of lived, like, you know, old school. So I would say, hey, where we'd had to carry water from the creek. And so at a young age, I remember carrying water from the creek. So I appreciate just being able to turn on my faucet because I remember like, "Karen, those buckets following my brother be like, "Brother, wait up for me. Like, wait up for me." And so just having those type of experiences growing up, I think it just made me humble and understand that we do depend on our resources to survive. And if we don't have those resources and those resources aren't maintained, not only as land hurting, but we're hurting as people as well. Like Karen, Latrice said people don't respond well to being told what to do. To her, conservation starts with something remarkably simple, listening. When I go to a producer's place, I hear them out like I let them complain about everything that bothered them, their kid doing this and that, just so I can get to the heart of the operation because I realize they have lives too, just like all of us. And so if you hear the hard stuff and they're like, "Oh, she really cares." You know, that had nothing to do with the ranch, but she listened to me and now I'm going to talk about the ranch and she still is attentive and cares. Like, then it just shows them like that compassion that I have and that relationship. Fundamentally, Latrice's work is building relationships with other people. To me, this sounds so different than the partisan headbud in Karen and Pat talked about in DC. Latrice has hard conversations with people. Some ranchers have been doing things a certain way for decades. Their minds are hard to change, but hearing them out, taking calls at all hours of the day, she encourages them to think differently. For me, relationships are important. And if we don't have relationships, if I don't have a strong relationship with the land, if I don't have a strong relationship with the animals, if I don't have a strong relationship with people, then it reduces the effectiveness of my word. The way Latrice thinks about relationships is a little different than the way you might think about them. She's building trust with ranchers, but she's also encouraging them to interrogate these relationships they already have, but they may never really think about. In particular, what's their relationship with land, with all the stuff they rely on, from the caterpillar to the cows to the grizzly bears? That's what I really hope to bring back, is that relationship-based thinking. Because I'm like, we can throw every terminology out. We can throw regenerative grazing. We can throw regenerative agriculture, you know, all these fancy terms. But if we're not managing it in a way that we value the system, that we would in any relationship with each other, with our animals, with the land, then we are just, there's no justice. There's no balance. It's just take, take, take. And so, for me, when I talk about relationships and I do that with my producers, to me, that's what it's about, is just showing, like, we are responsible whether we have land or not. We are responsible for taking care of our resource. And I think, you know, all of our people have had this disconnect. Not just indigenous people, but people from every background have had that disconnect from nature. I want to focus in on one aspect of her life at home, amid all these dogs and cows and horses. Not all that long ago, she got some pet bison. Bison, or buffalo, she calls them both interchangeably, can weigh nearly a ton. The hulking brown horned ungulate once numbered 30 to 60 million across the country. And by the beginning of the 20th century, they were on the verge of extinction, though they've still never been formally protected by the ESA. So, pet bison, this might seem weird. But latrice had a real fascination with soil and with ecosystems. And bison, our ecosystem engineers. And her tribe, like many indigenous groups across the country, was bound up with bison for millennia, for culture and for sustenance. To her, bison are part of reclaiming black feed identity. So, long story short, latrice got some bison, kept them in a little pen by her house. And as they grew up, they started escaping, getting out with their dad's cattle. The first time I lost them, I was so scared they got out, and I was going up and down. And I seen these beef calves hopping, like how my buffalo calves in like, "Why are those beef calves hopping like buffalo?" And sure enough, I go around that Cooley and my buffalo right there and I'm like, "Oh, it's a transfer of knowledge. Are you teaching the cows? You know the calves?" And my kids were looking at me eye rolls and I'm just like, "Whatever, guys." And I'm like, "I get it." On one of those bison jail breaks, she sent her kids up into the hills to help chase them back home. It sounded like this brief moment of panic, but also one of beauty. I was like, "Holy heck, I wonder when the last time buffalo were actually chased out here on foot?" And they were probably the same age. About the same age as my kids, chasing the buffalo to be harvested. And I was like, "And now, so my kids just chasing cows down the hill, like, they're chasing buffalo and like low-key, like me and my dad's ratched truck, like, full-on ugly cry, like, "But, like, because I'm just so emotional, like, just seeing them chase the buffalo, you know, and knowing that they were chasing them home." And I was just like, I was just like that really, really proud mama moment. Eventually, the trees thought those bison deserved to be wilder out on the land. I was like, "Dad, when my buffalo get out, they kind of head with other cow herds. Can I just kind of kick them out with our cows?" Today, the bison aren't fully wild, but they're also not in a little pen anymore. They're roaming relatively freely with her family's cattle out on their land. Unlike cows, bison evolved with this landscape. Their impact on the land was defined by movement, shaping the soil and plants and wildlife with their hooves. The wallows provide habitat for birds. The way they trample the earth can create a mosaic of diverse ecosystems. So, hearing about those cattle hopping like bison, I wondered what her cows were learning from their new companions out on the land. If, in the silent and instinctive way of wildlife, those buffalo were teaching the cattle a new way of existing on the landscape that has been lost for a century. To me, her bison, going out with those cattle, it sounded like the perfect metaphor for the relationship's latrice was building at her job. I mean, it sounds like exactly what you're doing, right? Like, you're the buffalo going out with those cows. Yeah, you know what it's funny, because I'm always like, when I got my end to name it, my grandmother gave it to me. She's like, "You know, your end to name is going to be buffalo storm." And then when she gave it to me, I was all upset. I'm like, "I don't even do anything with buffalo. Like, why would you name me after a buffalo?" What Latrice is saying is that when her grandma gave her what she calls her Indian name, she couldn't relate to it. Buffalo's stone woman. But she learned the story of that name. There was a time when buffalo, the tribe's main food source had gone away. In recent times, this was tied up with colonization. Buffalo were killed to near extinction. In part, it was a deliberate effort by the US government to eliminate tribal people. So in this story, this woman goes out, her people going hungry, and she hears this chirping sound. Latrice actually told me the story over the phone after our interview. And when she got closer to where the chirping noise was coming from, she seen it was coming from that stone. And so that stone told her if she sings with it and it gave her songs that the buffalo would return. So the woman brought the stone and the songs it taught her back to her people. And so she did. She sang the songs and they sang and then they were able to hunt successfully again. Buffalo stone woman taught Latrice's ancestors how to recover the species and the knowledge around it that had been lost. She was able to bring them back. Today, like Buffalo stone woman, Latrice is singing her song to ranchers, helping them find their own relationship with land and restore knowledge about relating not just to single species or to livestock operations, but to entire ecosystems. And in a more literal sense, Latrice brought bison back to her family, to her land. So when she thinks about that name, her grandma gave her today. I'm like, oh, she's seen something that I didn't see. You know what I mean? I'm like, I had to grow into my name. So, you know, those things are really beautiful. I remember when my dad would talk about buffalo out here in Badger, look at the buffalo jumps in the teepee rings. It was almost past tense. They were here. These were the buffalo jumps. And now I'm like, now we get to talk about them in the present day. Like, oh, yeah, the buffalo are just over there with the cows. The polarization around endangered species issues isn't going to change from the top down. Politicians are going to keep on being politicians. At this smaller level, situated in landscapes home to endangered species, this is where I see hope for the future of how we save ecosystems. The law can do a lot. But working together and building relationships, we can do a lot more. I should add, Latrice isn't alone. Collaborative groups, community organizations, and other folks all over the country are hard at work doing exactly what Latrice is doing. Building relationships and finding shared visions on the micro level. Change at this level. Relationship by relationship, both to one another and to the land. It's a lot slower than change mandated by law. I'm not worried about change being right now. I think in society we're so used to change. We want it now. We want it now. Now, now, now. I'm just like, I understand it's going to take generations. And I always tell people, I am the benefactor of my grandmother's decisions. My dad is the benefactor of his grandfather. My kids are going to be the benefactor of my dad's decisions. And my grandkids are going to be the benefactor of my decisions. And I always tell people that because when we're looking at land, we always want to put it in a healthier state than how we inherited it. And so as humans, I'm like, we are always able to adapt. So let's find ways to adapt that benefit everything in the best way. Especially when it comes to mother nature because, you know, this is our mother. She sustains us. And we got to take care of our mothers too. I left Latrice's place looking out to the distant mountains. A storm brewing on the horizon. Her family's cattle were little dots in the yellow hills. I wondered if a couple of those dots were her bison. I started this series driving down the highway near my house, passing battling billboards. Some said grizzly conservation had worked and we should get them off the endangered and threatened species list. Others said, well, the opposite. No de-listing, no trophy hunting. I still make that drive all the time. And the signs have changed. That pro-de-listing one is still there. But the four signs saying grizzlies need protection are down. Tester, you fights for Montanans. As the election approaches, they've been replaced by four signs advertising John Tester, Montana's Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Throughout this series, we've seen how the Endangered Species Act became ever more partisan. So I find this kind of perfect and hilarious. In the months to come, the government is likely to make a decision on whether or not to de-list grizzly bears. There are tons of details on what this means and why we should or shouldn't do it. But big picture, whatever happens, I suspect we'll have another heated, partisan battle in the halls of state and national government and the groups we've heard from throughout this season. As I've reflected on what this could mean in my own community, I keep coming back to my conversations with both Latrice and Rancher Mark Rose. I was struck by how similar some of their sentiment was, despite their differences. Hundreds of miles apart geographically and culturally worlds away. They both took the long view, across species and across generations, from the caterpillar to the grizzly bear to the human. A lot of the times in the early conservation, they tried to take people out of conservation and out of land. And it says like, "Oh, if we take people out, that system will be natural and it'll be healthy." We've had our problems, you know, we've created a lot of problems, but that's really problematic to me. That's just not how nature has evolved, right? But the way I view relationship is people are a part of that. We are a part of nature, too. We shouldn't be excluded or even thought about being excluded from it. We're a vital part of it. If we're part of the natural world, the challenge ahead is a big one. How do we act to leave the place we all call home? Wherever that is, better than we found it. This episode was reported and written by me, Nick Mott. It was produced by Mary Auld with editorial support from Jewel Banville, Lee Banville, and Corn Cates Carney. Our story editor is Lacey Roberts. Jesse Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Isaac Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodriguez, featuring Jordan Bush on Petal Steel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodriguez. Jake Birch mixed this episode with help from Alice Soder. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham, and fact-checking is by Victoria Traxler. Special thanks to Leah Swartz for putting up with me while I made this show and for teaching me so much about the world of conservation. Also, to the trees Totsie, Mark Rose, Pat Perrantow, and Karen Budfowlan, along with all the other folks I've spoken with that didn't make it into this season. And also to Amy Martin for the bison and audio education over the years. And stay tuned, because even though this season is over, we have some more great content coming to you in the relatively near future. I'm Nick Mott. Thanks so much for listening to The Wide Open. This project was produced in collaboration with the Montana Media Lab at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The lab is a center for audio storytelling and journalism education that elevates perspectives from underserved communities in the West. Learn more at montanamedialab.com. The Wide Open is also a production of Montana Public Radio. MTPR enriches the mind and spirit, inspires a lifetime of learning and connects communities through access to exceptional programming. More information at mtpr.org. The Wide Open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana.