Free Market Environmentalists are building America's largest wildlife reserve [with video embeds]

Building America's Serengeti for less than the price of a football stadium

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Introduction

Back in 2016, I wrote the Steemit article, Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable, which explored the idea of using market mechanisms to protect wildlife. In the article, I proposed the idea of a game that was inspired by things like Airbnb, Project Noah, and Pokémon Go where property owners, tourists, and app developers could all collaborate in a game where they get blockchain rewards for matching photographs of endangered wildlife.

In this concept, property owners of hotels and similar properties would post a photo of an animal that was seen on their property, and a tourist would be rewarded for taking a matching photograph of the same animal.

I was reminded of this post today, when I read the article ‘Free-Market Environmentalism’ Is Working in Montana. This article discusses the American Prairie Reserve, which is in the process of creating a so-called American Serengetti - the largest nature reserve in the contiguous United States.

In particular, the reason I was reminded of my 2016 post was the "Cameras for Conservation" concept from this excerpt:

Some of these benefits are felt most directly by American Prairie’s Wild Sky program participants, which financially incentivizes wildlife-friendly management practices on neighboring ranches. Interested neighbors can sign up for “Cameras for Conservation,” where American Prairie will pay to install game cameras on the rancher’s property and then pay them for each picture of an animal that that camera generates. If your game camera gets a picture of an elk or deer, that’s $50 in your pocket. A mountain lion? That’s $250. And if you document the presence of a grizzly bear or wolf, that will be $500 per animal, all while you are still running cattle on the property.

So I was curious to learn more about this project. I found some more about this project in the YouTube video, Imagine America's Serengeti: Building the Largest Wildlife Reserve in the Continental United States from the Aspen Institute. Here is the video:

In the remainder of this article, I'll describe some of the things I learned about the project.

Project size and location

The first thing to note is that there are only four locations in the world where a project of this scale is possible, one is the chosen area in the American Northern Great Plains; a second is in the South American Patagonian Steppe; the others are the Kazakh Steppe and Mongolian Steppe, in Eastern Europe and Asia.

The second thing to note is that the land that's being conserved will be about 3 ¹/₂ million acres, roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. If an area that size were to be carved out of England, it would cover the area between London and Dover. Of that amount, about 500 thousand acres will be privately owned land that links together about 2 ¹/₂ to 3 million acres of public land, mostly owned by the federal bureau of land management.

The location is convenient for three reasons:

• The land is 95% untilled
• People have been moving out of the area for more than a hundred years
• The initiative only needs to buy a limited number of properties in order to "glue together" already existing wildlife oriented lands
• Because of the grassland's unique attributes, it has a carrying capacity that exceeds all of the other North American wildlife preservation sites.
• The area has a unique wildlife history that spans ten thousand or more years

That history includes animals like: elk, grizzly bears, wolves, bison, bighorn sheep, cougars, pronghorn sheep, and deer.

Cost and funding

The project is being funded by donations from private philanthropists, and it costs about $450 million (in 2013 dollars, I presume). While this seems like a large amount of money, it's roughly half the cost of a football stadium or ³/₄ of the cost of a hospital wing. The team intentionally chose land that is inexpensive because there aren't many people who would be interested in buying it.

To put it succinctly, here is the goal that was stated by the speaker in the above YouTube video:

Our idea is to create - right there - the biggest reserve that's ever been created in the United States, doing it with private philanthropy for the public, and secure it for hundreds of years into the future.

The project is purchasing the land from willing buyers by waiting for sellers to call, and at the time of the above video (2013), they had a long queue of sellers in the pipeline. Most of the acquired land was previously used for cattle ranching.

Working with stakeholders

In order to be "good neighbors" with native Americans and nearby ranchers, the project has worked closely with nearby property owners. They also needed to elicit support from the academic and philanthropy communities. In order to have a common language that would be useful for aligning their goals, they devised the ten point, Freese Scale for Grassland Biodiversity.

The ten points are each scored with a value from 1 to 7 and describe attributes that are impactful to conservation efforts are:

• Soil & vegetation management
• Herbivory
• Fire
• Hydrology
• Variability
• Herbivores
• Ungulates
• Predators
• Fragmentation
• Unit size

When choosing the location, all collaborators from disparate organizations had to agree on the values that were assigned to particular locations. This helped them with land selection, and it also helps them with incrementally improving the grassland biodiversity year after year after year.

The team is legally prohibited from helping top-level predators like wolves and grizzly bears to find the preserve, but by managing the Freese Scale, they believe that those animals will eventually arrive and set up roots. Already in 2013, the speaker in the above video said that wolves and grizzlies were getting closer and closer every year.

A final stakeholder, of course, is the general public. In order to make this resource available to the public, the team is looking at best practices from other wildlife reserves around the world and adapting them for the Grassland reserve. So far, this has included establishing a camp site and romantic indoor accommodations.

Conclusion

It's only possible to provide cursory coverage, so I definitely recommend reading 'Free-Market Environmentalism' Is Working in Montana and watching the YouTube video.

Here's another, more recent video (2021) that I haven't had time to watch yet. If you watch it please feel free to provide some of the more recent information in the replies below or in your own post.

Thank you for your attention!

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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