Sean Gerrity

Big Money, Big Park, Big Questions

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American Prairie Reserve’s Patchwork Of Properties
American Prairie Reserve’s purchased and leased land is shown in green with white borders adjacent to Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument and Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Together, these parcels complete a network of land larger than Yellowstone National Park, the second-largest national park in the Lower 48 states. Source: American Prairie Reserve, Montana State Library, U.S. Geological Survey 1 Arc-Second SRTM, Natural Earth, Montana Department of Transportation, U.S. Census Bureau, National Park Service
Credit: Daniel Wood/NPR

Hats off to Sean Gerrity, as well as to the farmers and ranchers who have kept the native prairie grasses intact in recent generation, and to the native communities who stewarded these lands long before all this became a story. Our thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for sharing the story:

Big Money Is Building A New Kind Of National Park In The Great Plains

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Bison walk on American Prairie Reserve land. The organization is slowly purchasing ranches from willing sellers, phasing out the cows and replacing them with wild bison. Claire Harbage/NPR

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

A privately funded, nonprofit organization is creating a 3.2 million-acre wildlife sanctuary — American Prairie Reserve — in northeastern Montana, an area long known as cattle country.

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Sean Gerrity founded the American Prairie Reserve more than 18 years ago after he moved back home to Montana from Silicon Valley, where he ran a firm that consulted for companies such as AT&T and Apple.
Claire Harbage/NPR

But the reserve is facing fierce opposition from many locals because to build it, the organization is slowly purchasing ranches from willing sellers, phasing out the cows and replacing them with wild bison. Those private properties are then stitched together with vast tracts of neighboring public lands to create one giant, rewilded prairie. The organization has purchased close to 30 properties so far, but it needs at least 50 more.

“I see them coming in with big money, buying up ranches and walking over the top of the people who are already here,” says ranch owner Conni French. “For them to be successful in their goals, we can’t be here, and that’s not OK with us.”

She isn’t alone. Driving around, you see signs everywhere that say, “Save The Cowboy, Stop The American Prairie Reserve.”

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A “Save the Cowboy” sign is posted along a fence. The “Little Rockies” on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation are seen in the distance. Claire Harbage/NPR

But the project’s efforts have garnered a lot of positive attention from those living outside northeastern Montana because, once it’s complete, it will be the largest wildlife sanctuary in the Lower 48 states — about 5,000 square miles, nearly the size of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Continue reading →

Home On The Range

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Prairie Project

The great plains play an important role in both the history and prehistory of North America on many levels–in terms of wildlife, ecosystems and human occupation–and the American bison were an integral part of all three. The American Prairie Reserve is an ambitious project to reintroduce herds of the species into 3.5 million acres of public and private land patched together to create a protected area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.

Sean Gerrity is passionate about the project, so much so that he is able to leverage his successful Silicon Valley business acumen into creative 21st-century solutions to the world’s conservation challenges with ideas that include the 73 bison calves awaiting their release into the wild the next day.

If all goes well, this bull calf will spend the rest of his life roaming grasslands that once teemed with millions of his forebears. He will encounter herds of elk, deer, and pronghorn. He will sniff the wind nervously for the scent of cougar and bear and wolf. Prairie dogs will dive for cover at the tremor of his hooves while hawks soar hungrily overhead in the endless sky. He will run for miles, for days, with no fence to hinder him.

If all goes well, this bull calf—or perhaps this calf’s children or his children’s children—will belong to a herd 10,000-bison strong, the largest conservation herd in all the world and the cornerstone inhabitants of the American Prairie Reserve, which has set its sights on becoming the largest wildlife reserve in the continental United States. Continue reading →