The American Prairie: Born Again

Malta Montana, the largest town for 70 miles in any direction, is home to 1,900 people. It sits upon glaciated plains that were once buried in hundreds of feet of scouring ice, plains with soils too shallow and fragile for farming in the face of drought and extreme temperatures. Far to the southeast rise the Larb Hills, a dark-blue upwelling in a quiet sea of duns and silvers. Beyond them the land drops away into the breaks of the Missouri River. To the southwest the Little Rockies stand like a jumble of black stones against the sky. It is a world that seems made for the raptor's vision, and raptors are everywhere, harriers and prairie falcons, ferruginous hawks and golden eagles, red-tails and kestrels. Unfolding below them is an austere land, made more so by a century's worth of livestock grazing, and the myriad absences it produces and requires.

Biologists will tell you that there are plenty of wild animals and natural processes that do not mesh well with cattle ranching -- grizzly bears, wolves, prairie dog towns. If you need the land primarily for cattle, then the dog towns have to be reduced. And if you reduce the dog towns, you reduce the swift fox, the ferruginous hawk, the mountain plover, the prairie rattlesnake, the badger, the complex web of plants and animals that evolved with them. You reduce the black-footed ferret to extinction. You have made the most common trade in our world today, an ecosystem in exchange for what you hope will be profitable land use.

Since 1990, one in ten people has left Malta and surrounding Phillips County for someplace else. Their exodus is the result of a failed 130-year-long experiment in grazing cattle in eastern Montana. A square mile of this land can support no more than six or eight cows, and that, evidently, isn't enough.

The species-rich grassland that once dominated central North America is almost all gone. In the United States, less than 1.5 percent of native prairie landscapes have any sort of long-term protection. The rest have been used, like grasslands all over the world, as croplands, spaces for cities and suburbs and villages, and, overwhelmingly, as grazing lands for livestock. The native species that have lost the most habitat in North America are those adapted to the grassland ecosystem. The bison was the largest mammal in what was the largest ecosystem on the continent; the prairie dog was the most populous. Both have almost vanished. Native grasslands that once displayed a diversity as complex as 190 species of grasses and forbs per square meter now have an average of twelve.

Outside Malta, however, Sean Gerrity sees something beyond the desolate expanse of hard-grazed prairie country. Not a different place, but a different time, a future that mimics an almost forgotten past, when the silence of a prairie dedicated to cattle has become once again a landscape raucous with the cries of birds, when the north wind pours not across barren ground but through a wild tangle of native grasses and wildflowers. There was a time when these plains were far from silent. Wolves howled and buffalo thundered and bull elk crashed in autumn battle, the great noisy wheel of life and death revolving on an American prairie that no human being living today has witnessed.

Gerrity, a lean man in his late forties, walks like someone accustomed to covering a lot of ground, which he has done, literally and metaphorically, in the past twenty years. He grew up in the Montana prairie city of Great Falls, in a family devoted to wild country. He returned to the state a few years ago to apply the management skills he learned as a Silicon Valley business consultant to a very different kind of work: saving an ecosystem.

Gerrity's opportunity first raised its head in Phillips County in the late 1990s. It was born of the slow-motion collision of market forces, weather, history, declining human population, and a vanishing commodity -- shortgrass prairie with many of its original species still present. Collisions like that, the kind that tear holes in the fabric of what is taken for granted, are the bread and butter of Gerrity's business, so in 2002 he took the reins of the fledgling American Prairie Foundation (APF), a conservation group based in Bozeman. The group's plan -- called simply the Prairie Project -- is to create one of the largest and most innovative conservation projects on Earth, a grassland reserve replete with as many native species as can be sustained. With luck and money, it eventually could be half again as big as Yellowstone National Park. Perhaps most notably, the funders and thinkers behind the Prairie Project intend to implement their vision with private, rather than government, money, and do so now, while the window to a different future is still open.