Below is a November 8, 2024, New York Times essay by Arthur Middleton, wildlife professor and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Wyoming Migration Initiative lead and longtime friend of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Each summer, as I drive along the river valleys between Yellowstone National Park and Cody, Wyo., I see new cabins jutting from ridge tops, subdivisions in former hayfields and fences separating them all.
Though population and housing density have been rising in this region for decades, some of the recent growth may be thanks in part to a cultural juggernaut: the television show “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner as a charismatic Montana rancher who battles developers.
The show, which returns to Paramount on Sunday for the second half of its fifth season, made owning a piece of this landscape glamorous around the same time the pandemic and remote work drove more people to do so. Home values in Bozeman, Mont.; Jackson, Wyo.; and Cody have shot up since 2018. One study published after the fourth season found that close to two-thirds of tourists reported that their visit to Montana was at least partly inspired by the show. While there is no data explicitly linking the television show to development, it only takes a small number of new homes in each valley near Yellowstone to change its future.
I see mounting development as a grave threat because of how it is carving up an ecosystem that must stay relatively intact to function. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and several nearby national forests protect a broad high-elevation plateau. Every summer, this lush island at the heart of the ecosystem creates a feeding bonanza for tens of thousands of hoofed mammals — including elk, pronghorn, bison, bighorn sheep and moose — allowing them to fatten up and nurse their young. In the fall, as the snow piles up, they migrate down to valleys and plains in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho to shelter for the winter.
These migrations support Yellowstone’s famed predators and scavengers, such as wolves, grizzly bears and eagles, and world-class wildlife-watching and hunting opportunities that draw millions of people to the area. I have come to see the migratory hoofed mammals of Yellowstone, like the wildebeest, zebra and gazelle of East Africa’s Serengeti, as its true keystone species.
Native Americans have carried this knowledge for millenniums, but it took modern GPS tracking to fully illuminate the migrations. The maps show dozens of corridors reaching like veins and arteries for more than 100 miles across the landscape.
The maps also make clear that the parks and forests do not fully protect this ecosystem. About 30 percent, or seven million acres, is privately held in ranches, farms and other parcels. Because historically, settlers claimed lands with the best soil, water and grass, the habitat they provide can be far more ecologically important than a huge swath of a national park. If current trends continue, much of this private land could be sliced up and fenced off in the coming years.
Plenty of the new construction is in towns, helping to improve housing affordability, but some is well outside population centers and displaces wildlife. Migratory herds can tolerate some disturbance but begin to avoid areas where more than 1 percent to 3 percent of the land has been developed. Homes with garbage and bird feeders can attract grizzly bears, causing conflicts and bear deaths.
Development has also brought more fences, roads and traffic, the latter compounded by spiking park visitation. The total extent of the fencing is not known, but my research group conservatively estimated 16,000 miles in elk ranges alone. Fences cause mortality and stress for migratory wildlife, and studies show that high road traffic can stop deer and pronghorn from crossing altogether.
These pressures require an all-hands-on-deck campaign to protect habitat on private lands and ensure that wildlife can roam freely. Any such effort will need the support of communities, states and hundreds of landowners — so it must be locally rooted and highly collaborative. It also has to be flexible, offering financial incentives to help keep working ranches intact while appealing to the better angels of the high-net-worth individuals who have been moving in.
The primary tools available to protect private lands in the ecosystem are county zoning regulations and conservation easements. Many counties have imposed limits on rural housing density, but expanding such zoning restrictions may be unrealistic in this largely politically conservative region. County officials, particularly in agricultural communities, have legitimate concerns that limits on subdivisions can hurt families that are land rich but cash poor.
That leaves the conservation easement, a deal in which a landowner agrees to permanently limit development in exchange for a payment or reduced tax burden. Easements are popular in places as liberal as Wyoming’s Teton County and as conservative as nearby Sublette County. Yet the demand for easements from ranchers and farmers has exceeded the funding available for land trusts to strike these deals.
Residents are also working to make the land more permeable for wildlife. Community groups have removed or modified hundreds of miles of fence, much of it within mule deer and pronghorn corridors. In nearby areas, state transportation departments have begun building wildlife overpasses and underpasses that help thousands of migrating animals cross roads safely.
In Wyoming, which has the largest share of the ecosystem, the governor has boosted wildlife corridor conservation, as have tribal leaders at the Wind River Indian Reservation. The federal government, under both Trump and Biden administrations, has pursued policies to better conserve Western wildlife corridors — including, most recently, tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support landowner-led efforts in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
Yet development is outpacing these good, bipartisan efforts. Much of what we love about Yellowstone could be jeopardized without concerted action in the next five years. Increased public funding is needed, as are new philanthropic commitments in the spirit of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s donation of land to greatly expand Grand Teton National Park. The region’s newer, high-net-worth landowners can honor this iconic American landscape by aiding local initiatives and committing to new protections on their own lands. Visitors to the region could also pitch in: The next time the Park Service increases entrance fees, it could direct some of the funds to landscape conservation, so future generations can experience the same wonders.
What we are up against now is time, and the desire of so many people to have a piece of “Yellowstone” America. The question is whether Americans’ obsession with the fictional Yellowstone will contribute to the destruction of the real one or help fuel bold action and investment to save it.
(Photo credit: Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation)