Wildlife, Rural Communities, and the Rangeland Livelihoods They Share: Opportunities in a Diverse Economies Approach

Abstract

Because rangeland ecosystems and the wildlife they support are integral to rural economies, understanding economic trends in rangeland regions is a valuable contribution to wildlife management. This chapter reflects on and synthesizes the experiences of a group of academic and practitioner collaborators working to balance the needs of wildlife and rural ranching communities in a priority conservation region, the central Montana portion of the Northern Great Plains. The chapter summarizes both the challenges facing ranching economies and policy and market strategies available to encourage conservation by private landowners. Its main emphasis, however, is to invite readers into a different kind of conversation about wildlife conservation’s role in rangeland economies and livelihoods. The chapter introduces the concept of diverse economies, a way of understanding the economy through social relationships as opposed to merely the exchange of money, with a brief summary of its origins and perspective. It then draws on the theory and practice of diverse economies to map relationships and activities at the intersection of rangeland conservation and community development in central Montana. In emphasizing the diversity of practices that make up “the economy” and the intimate intertwining of the economy with ecologies, diverse economies thinking opens up space to approach the complex ways that the livelihoods of rural residents and rangeland wildlife overlap and the search for adaptive solutions to conservation challenges.

1 Introduction

One of the distinguishing features of rangeland ecosystems is their long-standing integration into pastoral economies. In the contemporary rangelands of North America, wildlife shares the landscape with ranching communities, where native rangeland ecosystems support extensive pastoral livestock grazing—largely, but by no means exclusively, by family-scale operations (ranches) (U.S. Dept of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture 2021). Livestock ranching in turn operates as a cornerstone of many rangeland economies and communities. As Chap. 8 suggests, working lands overlap with critical biodiversity habitat. This common geography makes it imperative to identify synergies between ranching and stewarding wildlife, although the subject of whether and how private rangeland management supports or detracts from wildlife conservation goals is an evolving body of research. That said, where rangeland ecosystems are under threat from exurban and residential development or crop conversion pressures, sustaining thriving family ranch operations is currently considered to be an important strategy for preserving intact rangeland wildlife habitat and opportunities for wildlife (Gage et al. 2016; Olimb and Lendrum 2021).

However, sustaining thriving family ranches is no small task. The challenges facing ranching are numerous and diverse, and how ranchers manage these challenges directly influences opportunities to conserve wildlife on private ranchlands (Brunson and Huntsinger 2008; Roche 2021). The uncertainty of weather and markets, high costs of production–especially land–relative to commodity prices, and greater attention to environmental performance by powerful interests, including consumers and regulators, are all concerns voiced by ranchers about the sustainability of ranching (Haggerty et al. 2018a). Ultimately, these challenges point to questions about the viability of ranching livelihoods under changing market, climate, and political conditions.

The goal of this chapter is not just to emphasize the challenges facing ranching to rangeland ecologists, nor is it to summarize policy and market strategies available to encourage conservation by private landowners (although we do both of these things briefly). Rather, by sharing a case study of a region in Montana that exemplifies many of the opportunities and challenges at the nexus of local economies and wildlife (Epstein et al. 2021b), we hope to invite readers into a different kind of conversation about wildlife conservation’s role in rangeland economies and livelihoods. This chapter is organized around “diverse economies” thinking (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020), a holistic approach to analyzing the economy as part of a broader set of sustainability challenges and social-ecological dynamics. The goal of the diverse economies school is to broaden conventional discussions of economic activity that focus on things with dollar values to include the diversity of social exchanges and relationships that individuals and groups of people engage in to survive and thrive. It does so by providing a new approach to describing and talking about what makes up an economy. Given the scope of the challenges facing both rangeland ecosystems and rangeland economies, this kind of creativity and experimentation are clearly essential.

Fittingly, we bring a diverse set of perspectives to this chapter. Three of the authors are academics, two are full-time ranchers (who, like almost all ranchers, wear a number of other professional hats as well), and one is a conservation professional. This chapter integrates the perspectives of contributing co-authors through our synthetic discussion and analysis of the regional case study and direct dialogue in the form of quotations and reflections. All of the authors are focused on collaborative solutions to the community development and environmental challenges facing rangeland regions, including in central Montana.

In the next section, we briefly introduce the idea of social-ecological systems, an approach that supports the view that wildlife conservation and ranching economies are linked and interconnected. This lens frames Part 2 of this chapter in which we present our case study region, central Montana, as a place rich in ecological and wildlife value and where range-based livelihoods and economies demonstrate considerable stress and resilience. To that end, part 3 reviews challenges to range-based livelihoods through descriptive statistics and a summary of recent research. Part 4 turns to interventions focused on encouraging conservation activity by private landowners, which we situate relative to the scope of economic and ecological challenges identified in our summary of issues in central Montana. Finally, Part 5 explores developments in central MT from the diverse economies perspectives. The chapter concludes with ideas about how wildlife experts can bring diverse economies thinking into the work of wildlife conservation in rangeland communities.

1.1 Rangelands as Social and Ecological Systems

By addressing questions of wildlife management and conservation through the lens of local ranching economies, this chapter will ask readers to think about rangelands in what are likely new and different ways. For example, we expect that readers of this book will be familiar with ideas related to rangeland ecology because of its importance to wildlife ecology, management, and conservation (Chaps. 1–4). Indeed, questions related to what plant communities are present where, the quality and quantity of water sources, or how nutrients cycle through the soil are expected topics in professional training for wildlife management and conservation. However, rangelands also have social dimensions that influence wildlife and wildlife management (Brunson et al. 2016). Humans and human systems greatly influence biotic and abiotic processes, including wildlife dynamics, on rangelands through land use, management, and policy. Simultaneously, rangeland ecosystems are important to humans as a source of cultural and economic value. Thus, it is important for rangeland scientists and managers to understand rangelands as not just ecological systems, but as social and ecological systems (Hruska et al. 2017).

Researchers and managers seeking to adopt a more integrated approach to rangelands and wildlife management are increasingly turning to the concept of social and ecological systems, a way of seeing all the social and ecological dimensions of ecosystems as connected and also interdependent (Colding and Barthel 2019). In fact, much of the science community increasingly views “all humanly used resources as embedded in complex, social-ecological systems (SESs) (Ostrom 2009, p. 419).” Approaching rangelands as an SES allows researchers to ask questions that transcend disciplinary silos by providing a conceptual framework for investigating the various social, political, economic, and ecological aspects of rangelands and rangeland management as part of an integrated system (Hruska et al. 2017; Ojima et al. 2020). For example, how can collaborative processes for rangeland governance improve outcomes for species conservation (Duvall et al. 2017)? How does rancher decision-making influence ecosystem service delivery on rangelands (Roche et al. 2015)? Social-ecological systems analysis has also inspired studies central to the core questions of this chapter, such as how to sustain cattle ranching alongside endangered rangeland species (Charnley et al. 2018).

Interest in understanding SES dynamics across biomes, including rangelands, has grown within the field of environmental management as part of a broader interest in resilience, which addresses how systems or aspects of systems ability of a system (ecological, socio-economical, or social-ecological) or aspects of system to recover from disturbances and return to its pre-disturbed analysis (Folke et al. 2005; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Reid et al. 2014). In the case of this chapter, SES thinking frames our focus on the joint sustainability of rural economies and wildlife populations (Carpenter et al. 2001), or the resilience of different wildlife conservation initiatives to the modern challenges of rural ranching operations. While a comprehensive discussion of rangeland SES dynamics is outside of the scope of this chapter (see Bestelmeyer and Briske (2012), Hruska et al. (2017) for excellent summaries), appreciating the interconnectedness and interdependence of social and ecological dimensions of rangelands is a valuable starting point for our investigation into the economic dimensions of range-based economies and their intersection with wildlife management and conservation.

2 Central Montana as Wildlife and Ranching Case Study

One of the last remaining relatively intact temperate native grasslands, the northern mixed-grass prairie ecosystem of the Northern Great Plains are a priority conservation for wildlife scientists, managers, and advocates (Scholtz and Twidwell 2022). This chapter uses a sub-region of the Northern Great Plains in central Montana as a case study perspective on the opportunities and challenges that come with wildlife conservation in rural, ranching communities. Our profile includes six rural Montana counties, all of which surround a major public land complex, the Charles M. Russell (CMR) National Wildlife Refuge (Fig. 27.1). We call this six-million-hectare rangeland expanse the CMR region, acknowledging the refuge’s defining presence in regional conservation issues. This portion of the Montana Northern Great Plains features a climate and geomorphology that supports a variety of rangeland vegetation: mixed-grass prairie dominates the glaciated plains in the northern portions of the region and a mix of shrublands and grasslands prevails farther south (Epstein et al. 1996; Rosenberg 1987). As a result, the CMR region is host to a plethora of wildlife including elk (Cervus canadensis), American bison (Bison bison), golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus), and numerous species of songbirds (Lipsey et al. 2015).

Fig. 27.1

Map of CMR region. Sources Montana State Library Clearinghouse, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Note Public lands managed as part of the Charles M. Russell (CMR) National Wildlife Refuge include the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge, which is separately designated but managed by CMR NWR. (Reproduced from Epstein et al. 2021a, b)

The CMR region’s diverse wildlife populations and extensive intact habitats (for some species) have motivated interest in conservation initiatives from a variety of agencies and institutions. Public management involves both federal and state actors. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has managed the CMR National Wildlife Refuge, the second largest refuge in the nation, since 1976. The refuge, along with adjacent federally-managed Missouri River Breaks National Monument, features land use explicitly oriented towards wildlife conservation. Other federal lands in the region include those managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), both of which include wildlife habitat as part of their multiple-use mandates (Wilson 2014). Multiple federal agencies also support private land conservation through cost-share programs and technical assistance such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife program. The state wildlife agency, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, manages several Wildlife Management Areas in the region. In addition to state and federal agencies, stakeholder-led working groups and other citizen initiatives are also active in the region. The CMR Community Working Group is a collaborative entity established in 2011 to help facilitate dialogue among the area’s many public and private conservation stakeholders.

The area’s wildlife values have not gone unnoticed by non-governmental organizations and private actors. A series of ecoregional planning efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s directed attention to the wildlife conservation value and potential of central Montana and the lands surrounding the CMR National Wildlife Refuge (Epstein et al. 2021b). Conservation planners, who referred to the area as “The Big Open” drew inspiration not only from the extent of intact rangeland systems, but also to the limited amount of human influence—declining populations were seen as an opportunity.

A prominent non-profit organization in the area is the American Prairie, formerly American Prairie Reserve (and abbreviated subsequently by its widely-used acronym, APR), that has been purchasing ranch properties with the goal of creating a prairie reserve that extends over 4.1 million acres. Since 2004, the non-profit organization has acquired over 420,000 acres of deeded and leased land (approx. 1700 km²) strategically acquired to extend the wildlife habitat potential of million-plus acres that make up the nearby CMR refuge Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. While several of APR’s properties offer leases to local ranching operations for cattle, the primary land use goal on APR’s holdings is wildlife conservation, including the restoration of American bison to the northern Great Plains (Bullinger 2017; Davenport 2018). In addition, recreational and amenity-oriented ranch buyers have also begun purchasing properties in the CMR region with increasing frequency (Haggerty et al., in review).

A description of conservation actors in the region would not be complete without including two local groups, the Ranchers’ Stewardship Alliance (RSA, established 2003) and the Winnett ACES (Agricultural Community Enhancement and Sustainability, established 2016). Both are grassroots organizations established in the context of economic and social changes in the central Montana region. Their missions focus on sustainable ranching and community development.

In the CMR region, native rangeland, and the wildlife habitat it provides, largely persist because extensive livestock grazing has been the dominant land use for the last century. This land use history and context provides an ideal geography to examine the synergy between ranching economies and wildlife ecologies. The ranching communities we describe in this chapter rely on the CMR refuge and other government-owned multi-use lands for grazing access and serve as a key partner in resource management (e.g., wildland fire management). At the same time, private lands provide a critical extension of the refuge’s protected area. Wildlife populations, as we’ve learned in other chapters in this book, often require a diversity of habitats and resources that can only be realized at the landscape scale. The various landowners in the six counties surrounding the CMR refuge manage acreage that is critical to achieving that scale. Goals and initiatives to secure and improve outcomes for wildlife in the CMR region, thus, inevitably require coordination and cooperation with private landowners, and not just those with an explicit focus on wildlife conservation, but also those that are pursuing range-based livelihoods such as livestock production. In the sections that follow we will explore this important synergy between private landowners and public conservation initiatives, between ranching economies and wildlife ecologies, and the interdependence between rural peoples and wildlife that demands creativity, collaboration, and thinking-at-scale.

3 The Role of Ranching in the Regional Economy

As a first step in characterizing the role that range-based livelihoods, especially those related to production agriculture, play in a regional economy, this section profiles key demographic and economic trends in the CMR region. Over the past fifty years, the economic trends of the CMR region characterizes those of most rangeland regions (Goetz et al. 2018): a slow, but steady decline in population, a shrinking role of agricultural income as a share of personal income in the region, volatile returns to farm and ranch proprietors, reliance on non-labor income and public sector employment, and growing recreational and investment interest in private rangeland. Rather than an exhaustive survey of agricultural economics of the region, the following is a profile of key socioeconomic trends that provide a context for thinking about how ranch owners and employees relate to the overall economy, issues for the sustainability of their industry, and by extension, where wildlife management can present an opportunity and challenge.

3.1 Population Trends

An estimated 25,798 people occupied the 15.2 million-acre region surrounding the CMR in 2020, about 11,000 or 40% of them in towns, including the area’s “larger” towns—Lewistown, MT (~6000), Glasgow (~3000), and Malta, (~2000) and another 2779 spread amongst in the area’s small towns, with populations in the hundreds. An estimated 1300 Native Americans occupy the region, including members of the Assiniboine (Nakoda), Gros Ventre (Aaniiih), and Sioux tribes. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, 8265 people lived on farms and ranches in the six-county area in 2017, about two-thirds of the area’s non-town residents, or one-third of the total population. Considering that less than one percent of the population of Montana is in a farm or ranch household and less than two percent of the national population is, this figure demonstrates the relative significance of farm and ranching lifeways in the CMR region.

Characteristic of many rural rangeland regions in the United States and Canada, the size of the human population in the CMR region has been steadily declining. Over the past half century (1980–2020), the population of the CMR Region declined by 7834 people (23%; Fig. 27.2). By contrast, the state of Montana added nearly 300,000 people in the same period, for a growth rate of just over 33%. As a result, median age in the area is anywhere from 5 to 10 years above that of the state of Montana (39.9; U. S. Census Bureau, n.d.).

Fig. 27.2

Human Population and Cattle Inventory in CMR Region, 1980–2020. Sources Population: U.S Department of Commerce, 2020. U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Census and American Community Survey, reported by Headwaters Economics’ Economic Profile System. Cattle inventory: National Agricultural Statistics Service (2021). Cattle inventory is a national sample conducted every month that provides estimates of the number of breeding animals for beef and milk production as well as the number of heifers being held for breeding herd replacement. Data reported are extrapolated from a sampled subset of producers

3.2 Employment and Personal Income

The Census of Agriculture reports 2600 agricultural operations in the 6-county area, of which 44% are livestock operations and 42% are crop-focused, most specializing in grains and cereal crops. As a share of all agricultural land area in the region (9.9 m acres), crop-focused agriculture is 26%, compared to 66% for pasture and rangeland.¹ The number of domestic livestock in the region has fluctuated according to weather and commodity cycles, with producers reporting an estimated 343,000 domestic cattle in 2020 (Fig. 27.2). The important point yielded from looking at Fig. 27.2 is that human and livestock population trends do not show a simple relationship. Cattle trends tend to reflect the combined effects of weather and markets. Human population reflects the shrinking labor force required in agriculture and the limited opportunities in other economic sectors in the region.

According to statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Commerce, just under one in five jobs (17%) in the region is in agriculture. Of those, two out of three are farm self-proprietorships (self-employed, non-corporate farm and ranch operators). Income in agriculture is notably variable (Fig. 27.3, top), but agricultural wages have provided about 12% of total labor earnings in the region in recent decades, having declined from close to 40% in the 1970s. Fifteen percent of all jobs in the region in 2019 were in some form of public employment, including federal, military, state, and local governments, with the sector contributing 24% of total labor earnings in the region.

Fig. 27.3

Farm Income and Receipts and Non-Labor Income in CMR Region, 1970–2019. Labor Earnings: Net earnings by place of residence, which is earnings by place of work (the sum of wage and salary disbursements, supplements to wages and salaries, and proprietors’ income) less contributions for government social insurance, plus an adjustment to convert earnings by place of work to a place of residence basis. Non-Labor Income: dividends, interest, rent, and transfer payments (includes government retirement and disability insurance benefits, medical payments such as mainly Medicare and Medicaid, income maintenance benefits, unemployment insurance benefits, etc.). Non-labor income is reported by place of residence. Sources Farm Income and Receipts, 1970–2019: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2020. Regional Economic Accounts. As reported by Headwaters Economics Economic Profile System, Accessed 9-06-2021. Non-Labor Income: Source. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2020. Regional Economic Accounts. As reported by Headwaters Economics Economic Profile System, Accessed 9-06-2021

A significant historical change in the region, paralleling rural economies around the nation, is the growth in the importance of non-labor income (Fig. 27.3, bottom). Non-labor income includes private and public sources: it counts rent earned from property, dividends on investments, as well as transfer payments such as public health benefits, social security, unemployment, and veterans benefits. In 1970, non-labor income represented 26% of personal income. Fifteen years later, in the midst of the farm crisis, non-labor income was nearly 60% of personal income. Since then, and in 2019, non-labor income has comprised about half of all personal income in the CMR region, with over half of non-labor income earned as dividends, interest or rent and the remainder dominated by age-related and hardship payments. In other words, in 2019, one in four dollars accruing to residents of the region came from rent, one in five came from a public benefit such as social security, medicare and medicaid, and unemployment payments. This is in contrast to the one in sixteen dollars earned from farming or ranching in 2019.

Figure 27.4 also charts trends in farm earnings and cash receipts from farm products (middle chart). A couple of things are clear from these charts. First, agricultural income is notably volatile, reflecting the dynamics of national and global commodity markets. Second, farm and agricultural income has not grown either as a share of personal income or in absolute volume over the past five decades. This is in contrast to the growth in labor earnings in the state of Montana, which doubled during the same time period.

Fig. 27.4

Source Diverse Economies Iceberg by Community Economies Collective is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

The Diverse Economies Iceberg. A generic version of the diverse economy is shown at the left, with the specific iterations of a diverse economy in a ranching landscape shown on the right.

From the windshield as one passes through the area, ranching looks and feels like the dominant economy in the CMR Region. But measured by standard economic metrics such as income and jobs, ranching is arguably a minority share of economic activity in the area. Farming and ranching depend on, rather than support, local livelihoods. One reading of these economic indicators is that ranching is a highly marginal activity unlikely to support the CMR region. Our research suggests this is somewhat true in the sense that (1) working ranches are continually getting bigger while they support the same or a smaller number of ranching families (see below) and (2) ranches are increasingly owned by people who operate them as recreational investments, do not live on them, and do not depend on them for their livelihood. It is a more accurate description of the region to note that ranching is interdependent with other sources of income: rental and interest or government payments, and income earned in other sectors, most likely the public sector. In order to understand the ranching economy as a local economy, then, it is essential to recognize that it is interdependent with other livelihoods, industries and sectors–neither superior nor necessarily subservient to, but rather intimately embedded with them.

3.3 Ranch Land Markets

As a final note on the local economy of ranching, it is essential to note the fast-growing interest of recreational buyers and investors in ranch property across North America, a trend that is also at play in the CMR region. Once circumscribed to high amenity areas near ski resorts and national parks and the occasional large property in extensive ranching areas (for example, media mogul Ted Turner has acquired over 1.8 million acres of property across regions in the Southwest, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountains; (Turner Enterprises Inc., 2021), ranch acquisition by the ultra-wealthy has expanded geographically in the past two decades. These ultra-wealthy buyers and other recreational interests are an economic force in the CMR region, meaning that those ranch properties which go on the open market are typically marketed for their diverse recreational, wildlife, and scenic values. For those seeking to own and operate ranches who lack substantial investment capital (i.e., local area producers), high land prices present a major sustainability issue: family-owned operations struggle with estate issues and emerging ranchers cannot afford to pay for land based on returns from ranching (Haggerty et al. 2018a).

Recent research conducted in Montana documents that key features of the amenity ranchland market (Epstein et al. 2021a; Haggerty et al. 2018b) are: increased concentration of farm and ranchland, access to high levels of capital to invest in ranch management on the part of ranch buyers, and wide variation in the key priorities of new buyers with respect to ranch management objectives (Epstein et al. 2021a). Implications for wildlife managers are an important area for future research, but initial work demonstrates that wealthy buyers are part of an increasingly complicated social landscape of wildlife conservation. While their ranches can and often do act as refuges for certain species, the owners themselves do not necessarily have a strong interest in participating in programs for landowner cooperation established with full-time ranchers in mind (Haggerty and Travis 2006). Furthermore, privacy, aesthetics, and recreational opportunities are more likely to play a role in land use decisions––for example, related to public hunting access or lease opportunities that challenge existing norms and relationships between ranch owners and members of the local ranching and resource management community (Epstein et al. 2019, 2021a; Haggerty et al. 2018b).

From the perspective of ranchers who steward a large amount of wildlife habitat in the CMR Region and the wildlife managers who work with them, the demographic, economic, and land market trends discussed here suggest a difficult and uncertain future. Building on our research and experience in central Montana and elsewhere in the northern Great Plains, we have emphasized the difficult times facing new and emerging ranchers and the opportunity and challenge that presents for wildlife conservation (Haggerty et al. 2018a). In terms of working with the owners of large ranch and farm properties, wildlife managers can anticipate a broader range of interests, experience and priorities on the part of landowners. Professional ranch managers are playing a greater role as proxies for landowners in negotiations with neighbors and agencies and emphasizes the complications for the wildlife management profession (Epstein and Haggerty 2022).

In rangeland areas undergoing demographic and land ownership changes, the nature of who is connected to whom through economic relationships, broadly defined, and the nature of those connections continues to evolve, emphasizing the embeddedness and interconnectedness of ranching economies, ranching livelihoods and wildlife habitats. From this perspective, it seems likely that work “in town”—for public agencies and possibly for new kinds of private sector employers—will remain integral to many ranch household economies. Wealthy absentee owners create a demand for certain kinds of services, but whether local businesses will provide those services is an open question. While demographic and land ownership patterns are shifting substantially, the transboundary and interconnected nature of ecological issues persists. Residents and wildlife managers in regions like central Montana will find themselves increasingly attending to the need to identify new kinds of mutually-beneficial economic relationships, raising the question of what role wildlife conservation might play in building a robust and resilient diverse economy.

4 Ranching and Wildlife in a Diverse Economies Framework

Although future land ownership trends in the CMR region are hard to predict, the area’s rangelands are likely to feature working livestock ranches for many years to come. A premise of this chapter is that (1) among many other factors well-described in this book, rangeland wildlife conservation in the Northern Great Plains also depends on the vitality, resilience, and adaptability of working ranches and (2) such vitality and resilience will depend on the elevation of interdependence and mutualism as key features of the economy—practices that have deep roots in many rural economies, but which are rarely discussed in the context of private land conservation. Economic creativity is all the more important given the increasing heterogeneity in the interests, lifestyles, and capacities of ranch owners.

To that end, we introduce the concept of diverse economies as an alternative approach to thinking about the relationship between livestock ranching and wildlife conservation. First, we define diverse economies. Next, we demonstrate an approach for capturing a diverse economy through two participatory data collection efforts—a community mapping exercise and a “diverse economies inventory.” Both efforts were done as service-learning projects to help communities learn about and identify the important relationships and more-than-market based exchanges in their own local community economies. Next, we profile two local initiatives that reflect the core values of diverse economies perspectives by supporting opportunities for local communities to collaborate, build trust, and value interdependence. Lastly, we share a series of perspectives from locals in central MT on the meaning of these collaborative efforts and how they view a more holistic approach to addressing ranching economies.

4.1 The Diverse Economies Framework

Diverse economies refers to a subdiscipline of economic geography and, more broadly, a mindset about sustainability. Along with broader critiques of the failure of the current economic system to achieve basic sustainability goals (cf., “Doughnut Economics²”; (Raworth 2017), the diverse economies approach seeks to “promote ethical and solidaristic modes of interdependence and help mitigate some of the key challenges of our time (such as environmental destruction and increasing inequality)” (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020, p. 2). A central practice in diverse economies thinking is to broaden what we see and describe as part of the economy. Diverse economies scholars believe that by seeing the economy as broader than just what we get paid to do and sell, we can begin to imagine ways to make the economy better serve sustainability for people and nature—ways that we can’t imagine under the very narrow ways we tend to think about what the economy is.

To help academics and practitioners break out of a narrow view of the economy, the diverse economies community has developed a core practice: inventorying economic diversity. This means simply making legible all of the many ways that humans procure and exchange goods and services, broadly defined. The diverse economy is more than just the flow of money, it’s also a diverse set of relationships, practices, and activities that link different ranch properties across the landscape. The diverse economies iceberg is a central metaphor used to emphasize that the economy is so much more than things that can be monetized, or counted, and the conventional venues of monetary exchange—selling labor for wages, selling products in formal markets, and providing finance in a mode built to benefit the lender through interest. The iceberg (Fig. 27.4) shows how big the economy is when conceptualized holistically. An example often used to teach the diverse economies idea is to ask whether work done in maintaining and managing a home is an economic act—of course this is labor that ensures a family can survive. But if it is unpaid, it doesn’t count as part of the economy. When such “informal” work is counted in a measurement like GDP, the figure instantly multiplies significantly (Coe et al. 2019; Mazzucato 2019).

Indeed it is often heard in rural communities that family operations and the relationships between them are the backbone of a community. While the diverse economies of ranch communities are often well known amongst its residents, it can be hard to see and measure by those of us who are more familiar with thinking about the economy as limited only to those things bought and sold with currency. Below we share two ways that communities can identify and track aspects of their diverse economy. We conducted both exercises with residents and community members in one county in the CMR region. We turn first to the diverse economies inventory and then participatory ownership mapping.

4.1.1 Diverse Economies Inventory

On top of, or above the waterline of the diverse economies iceberg are the aspects of the economy related to the capitalist economy. These include wage labor and the production of commodities for market exchange as part of a capitalist firm/enterprise. In ranching communities, these activities include earning income from a livestock auction, hiring a seasonal employee, or purchasing equipment or feed. However, there are many ways that a ranch-based enterprise might engage with its community. Ranching families might spend the weekend at a neighbor’s operation to help brand or move cows. A rancher might lend out her tractor for another to borrow. A landowner might give permission to a local hunter to use their property. While these activities can be essential to the functioning of ranching enterprises and their respective communities, they are largely outside of what we typically think of as the economy.

Conducting a diverse economies inventory is one way to encourage a community dialogue about and awareness of interdependence in the local economy. We conducted one such inventory with seven ranching households in one CMR region county in 2017. Our goal was to understand ways that ranches and other local enterprises exchange goods and services in addition to monetized transactions. The categories of our inventory followed a diverse economies approach. We asked participants about their ranching enterprise, the ways in which their ranching operation and property interacted with the local community; about labor, who they employed or worked for including paid and unpaid labor; and, ranching transactions, who they exchanged goods with and how. These categories included aspects of economy-as-iceberg that were both above and below the water line. We also asked participants about which aspects of the economy they thought created the greatest good for families, which aspects created the most good for their community, and which activities they would do more of if they had more time. The iceberg on the right in Fig. 27.4 shows the types of labor, enterprises, and transactions that were commonly described by participants, with Table 27.1 providing elaboration from the answers to survey questions.

Table 27.1 Perspectives on the diverse economy

Table 27.2 Examples of conservation programs on private lands

Several things standout from this activity. First, our participants describe an economic life that is more diverse than just wage labor and capitalist production. They report sharing and exchanging labor with neighbors and other community members. As one participant noted: “Most of us can’t survive without reciprocal trading. You can’t find people to do the work.” Taking care of family members and volunteering on local school boards, conservation districts, and with important community institutions was another set of activities recognized as critical to the survival of rural communities. Others emphasized the role of place, and the value of supporting local businesses. As one participated noted. “Shopping locally is very important. Local/traditional owners appreciate that if they want local businesses to survive we have to support them.”

Beyond bringing an opportunity to name aspects of the diverse ranching economy, the inventory process was also an opportunity for our participants to reflect on the value of activities pursued for the sake of community. Multiple participants noted the importance of participating in civic life, especially in remote, rural places. “You look around the table here and there’s past commissioners, because there’s so few of us you feel obligated to take your turn. We feel a stronger sense of connection to our local government and our local school because most of us have been involved.”

A final take away from our inventory was affirmation among our participants that private land use plays an important role in both community functioning and wildlife management. For example, all seven of our participants reported providing hunting and fishing access for local recreationists. Because the state game agencies in the U.S. rely on public hunters and hunting to manage wildlife populations, opportunities to access private lands are an essential component of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (Organ et al. 2012). The central role that private lands and landowners play in wildlife management have made them a focus of wildlife management initiatives, and in particular, those aiming to increase opportunities for the public to gain access to private lands. While landowners in the region have the opportunity to participate in fee-for-access programs through the state wildlife agency, participants described the opportunity to welcome visitors and recreationists onto their property as a community obligation: “understanding for the generations that grew up here a sign of being a good neighbor or a friend.” These sentiments underscore the more-than-financial dimensions of hunting access and demonstrate the value of thinking more holistically about the economy in the context of wildlife management.

4.1.2 Participatory Ownership Mapping

Because private land use can strongly influence outcomes for wildlife conservation, ranching operations are a key component of landscape-scale conservation initiatives designed to conserve landscape species (e.g., Chap. 10). Moreover, who owns private lands and how they manage them also matters to the functioning of rural communities beyond just the profitability of individual ranching operations, with further implications for wildlife. Property ownership is an especially compelling, and also tricky, topic from a diverse economies perspective. On the one hand, a diverse economies perspective is likely to focus more on alternatives to formal private property, or ways that people share access and use rights to land and resources, such as commons. On the other hand, and as we show here, making property boundaries visible and the subject of discussion can encourage dialogue and reflection among community members to think broadly about interdependence and connections among properties and neighbors.

In 2018, we worked with a group of local stakeholders from one county in the CMR region to create a dataset describing the ownership and operation of local ranch properties. The goal was to collect information for development of a program to support young ranchers with access to grazing land. We were also interested in understanding the ways that ranch ownership intersected with community dynamics. Together with local partners we agreed on a process that would allow us to count the number of ranch operations in the county and assign attributes to each ranch focused on local employment, land use and social and economic connections in the community. The process involved a careful consolidation and analysis of the publicly-available county cadastral record (see Haggerty et al. 2022). The next step was to work with local experts to characterize the attributes of ranch ownership. Specifically, we collected the group’s expert insights about the residence of the ranch owner (local or absentee); their level of activity in the community; the estimated number of families supported by each operation; the dependence of a property on leasing other land; and whether the property was projected to stay in agricultural production in the future. Participants answered based on their own knowledge and group discussion. In early January, 2018, we shared and discussed our draft results with members of the community group. Their feedback was incorporated into our final report.

Taken together, the data generated through this exercise paint a picture of a rangeland region in transition. The vast majority (95%) of private property in the county is held in large units (> 640 acres) and is actively used for farming and ranching. One-quarter of the large farm and ranch private property in the county is owned by absentee owners with 97% of this property remaining in some form of agricultural production. Among 22 absentee owners, seven were known to the local group. About 64% of large farm and ranch owners are considered highly active in the local community. The high level of community engagement among ranchers is a critical asset in the community and one that might be leveraged toward a path to working with other landowners in the future. Locals were uncertain about the future of approximately 1/3rd of the acreage they reviewed.

From a diverse economies perspective, the participatory mapping exercise revealed the importance of looking at property collectively. Building an accurate ownership map is not a small task and discussing private property demands a high level of trust among participants. However, an inventory is critical to taking stock of current ownership demographics and identifying threats and opportunities to working lands. From the perspective of wildlife managers, an inquiry like this can help build a comprehensive picture of current and future local land ownership, one that might be effectively overlaid with spatial data on conservation priorities. In addition, the exercise can generate an appreciation of interdependence, a theme that is relevant both to community development and supporting cooperative wildlife management efforts. One participant in the mapping interviews observed that the exercise gave him a new perspective and appreciation for how interconnected ranch properties are—and by extension, the local economy.

When it comes to conserving working lands and enrolling private landowners in wildlife conservation, there are in fact many public programs underway. The following section provides readers a general survey of landowner-focused conservation initiatives in the United States, as this is a critical set of tools available to wildlife managers, with an additional goal of encouraging consideration of how private land conservation initiatives may or may not help to engender diverse economies.

5 Private Land Conservation Initiatives: A Diverse Economies Perspective

A website targeting end users of private land conservation programs (e.g., landowners), the Montana Conservation Menu was established in response to a proliferation of landowner- and producer-focused conservation programs in Montana. While a great many programs exist, they are not always fully enrolled, and it can be a full-time job for a property manager or owner to assemble the programs into something that is a meaningful economic opportunity for their operation. The Montana Conservation Menu website (https://mtconservationmenu.org/), organized by the Soil and Water Conservation Districts of Montana, aims to overcome these hurdles. Landowners can research cost-share programs to enhance pollinator habitat, learn about reimbursements for hosting particular wildlife species, or enroll in specialized conservation markets. The hope is that by aggregating opportunities strategically, the Conservation Menu approach will enhance the value of public programs to landowners and by extension, boost their conservation impact.

The Montana Conservation Menu is a testament to both the increasingly broad landscape of opportunities afforded to rural landowners and the central role that property-specific programs play in the predominant approach for wildlife conservation on private lands. While understanding their scope and structure is important for wildlife managers, so too is an appreciation of their limitations. In this section, we provide a general overview of landowner-focused conservation programs and some of their inherent challenges for achieving wildlife conservation and rural economy goals at scale. In short, while valuable to individual properties, monetizing or subsidizing wildlife stewardship–the thrust of the majority of landowner-focused conservation programs described here–falls short of the demands of building lasting diverse economies, given the many challenges that lie ahead for rangeland communities (human and non-human).

5.1 Conservation Programs and Implementation

5.1.1 Agencies and Actors

A large network of federal, state, and local natural resource agencies and private non-profit organizations offer a wide range of programs to support landowners with stewardship and conservation on their land. The NRCS within the USDA is the primary federal agency tasked with working with landowners on conservation projects and has offices and agents serving all 50 states and US territories. The USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife is another federal agency program, although operating with substantially smaller staff and budget, that works with landowners to implement projects that benefit priority wildlife species in their regions.

At the state level, each state has a wildlife agency (e.g., Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, Wyoming Game and Fish Department) that holds management authority over wildlife (excluding those under federal oversight; i.e. migratory birds). Many wildlife agencies provide technical assistance, cost-sharing, or other programs to assist landowners with management that benefits wildlife species or to provide public access for hunting and fishing on private lands. Some state departments of agriculture also offer programs to support soil and water conservation and address water use and pollution concerns (respectively). Each state also has a university cooperative extension program with a primary objective of translating research into on-the-ground practices. Extension agents are often based in communities around the state and may offer education programs or meet with landowners directly to advise on agricultural or natural resource management issues.

Conservation districts, often called soil and water conservation districts, are one of the primary local entities working on conservation issues on private lands (Roemer et al., in prep). Conservation districts are locally governed, typically at the county level by elected board members, and help facilitate the implementation of conservation programs with local insight and relationships. Some conservation districts are funded through tax levies as well as state and federal funding sources. The budgets and program offerings vary significantly from one conservation district to another even within the same state.

Private entities are also important actors working on private land conservation. Several non-profit conservation organizations are active nationally with local and regional emphases. For instance, Pheasants Forever has a large private lands biologist team that partners with NRCS and conservation district offices to implement Farm Bill Programs and other efforts on private lands. Other national groups like The Nature Conservancy and Trout Unlimited have priority focus areas where they often partner with ranchers and other landowners to implement projects like conservation easements, riparian restoration, or upgrading irrigation infrastructure to facilitate fish passage. Land trusts are non-profit organizations with a primary mission of conserving land for multiple conservation values. Some land trusts operate throughout a state while others have a more local or regional service area within a state. These groups are governed by a board of directors largely consisting of local community leaders and residents and therefore can be responsive to local needs. Private for-profit consulting groups also have a niche working with private landowners on a range of resource management issues from optimizing grazing plans to developing stream restoration projects to enhance recreational fisheries.

5.1.2 Programs

This network of agencies and organizations collectively implement an alphabet soup of conservation programs (Bennett et al. 2018). We characterize these programs along a spectrum from “public” to “market-based”. Towards the public end of the spectrum are technical assistance, cost-shares, direct payments or rentals, and conservation easements. In technical assistance programs, agency or organization staff with specific expertise advise landowners on technical aspects of land management, which may take the form of a conservation or management plan. Cost-share programs provide financial support to implement specific conservation practices or to install conservation-oriented infrastructure. For example, an agency may pay for 50% of the cost to install a new “wildlife friendly” fence that allows for migratory ungulates to more easily pass beneath it while the landowner pays the remaining 50%. Other programs, like many of the Farm Bill programs, provide a direct payment to landowners for adopting specific conservation practices. The Conservation Reserve Program, as an example, pays an annual rental payment for each acre of farmland that is taken out of crop production and revegetated with grasses for contract periods of 10 or 15 years.

Conservation easements are another tool that restricts uses of property to conserve values like wildlife habitat or scenic views. Conservation easements are voluntary agreements between a landowner that grants the easement and an agency or organization, often called a land trust, that agrees to accept and hold the easement. The specific terms of each easement are negotiated by the landowner and the organization accepting the easement but typically include restrictions limiting subdivision, development, or preventing conversion of rangelands to crops (i.e., “sodbusting”). After granting an easement, the landowner still continues to own the property and usually can continue existing agricultural activities. Landowners can donate easements, which may qualify for federal and state tax incentives. In some instances where a property is a high conservation priority, landowners have the option to sell a conservation easement and receive a cash payment for all or a portion of the appraised fair market value of the easement (see chapter one in Guillion et al. (2020) for more detail on how easements are appraised). In these instances, agencies or land trusts need to raise grant funds to purchase the easement through programs like the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program administered by NRCS, although a number of states have their own easement funding programs and some private foundations also provide funding towards the purchase of easements.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a number of market-based opportunities exist. In these types of programs, the landowner typically acts as a “seller” and enters into an agreement with a “buyer” to provide an environmental good or service or a land-use practice that likely results in that environmental good or service. Many of these programs exist within a regulatory framework where buyers need to “offset” an environmental impact by purchasing a “credit” developed by the seller. In the United States, wetland banking is the most established market-based program. When entities like a construction company or a state department of transportation are unable to avoid impacting a wetland, they are required by the US Clean Water Act to mitigate that impact which can be done by purchasing credits established by a seller by creating new wetlands or restoring existing wetlands at a different location. A number of regulation-initiated ecosystem markets exist. These include markets that support flora and fauna protected under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) as well as pollution credit markets such as California’s cap-and-trade program. Under California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, enhanced forest stewardship practices can generate credits to be bought and sold.

There are also voluntary markets that operate outside of a regulatory setting. Voluntary carbon markets now allow landowners to develop carbon credits in rangeland systems through “avoided conversion” of grasslands projects. In these projects, landowners agree not to plow or develop rangelands at risk of conversion in order to maintain carbon stocks within the soil. Corporate buyers tend to be the major purchasers of these types of carbon offsets and are motivated by sustainability pledges and climate commitments. Corporate buyers also drive demand in other market-based conservation efforts as these corporations aim to create more sustainable supply chains and mitigate reputational risks (Toombs et al. 2011). While there are a number of voluntary market-based conservation programs, many of these efforts are currently in pilot phases and participation is limited to landowners in specific locations. There is potential for these markets to expand in scope and scale in the future and they may become more influential in how private lands are managed.

5.1.3 Landowner Motivations

Research demonstrates that landowners have diverse motivations for participating in conservation programs. Many landowners have strong stewardship values and a connection to their land and their management practices are a reflection of those values (Lien et al. 2017). Conservation programs can assist landowners in exercising their values where it might be otherwise cost prohibitive, such as through cost-share programs. Other landowners may be more economically motivated and conservation may help their bottom line by helping cover the costs of replacing aging infrastructure with more conservation-informed designs. Vegetation treatments like mechanical or chemical removal of woody vegetation may enhance habitat for species like sage-grouse (Centrocercus spp.) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) while also increasing grass cover that provides forage for livestock (Chaps. 5, 10). Selling a conservation easement is also a strategy used by landowners to extract some of the real estate value of their properties and allow them to reinvest in their agricultural business, pay down debt, or save for retirement. These diverse motivations also reflect the range of landowners in western landscapes where amenity ownership is increasing alongside more traditional livestock operations (Gosnell and Travis 2005).

5.2 Challenges and Opportunities in the Existing Conservation Approach

There are a number of challenges associated with the existing portfolio of conservation programs as well as opportunities to build on the current foundation. A major benefit of programs on the public end of the spectrum is that there are programs that most landowners can participate in regardless of what part of the country their property is located. Landowners can contact their local FSA/NRCS office, conservation district, state wildlife agency, or other network actors and begin exploring options currently available for their property. Conversely, many market-based opportunities are geographically limited or limited to specific resources that do not occur on every property (e.g., habitat for an endangered species). The ability to participate in a rangeland avoided conversion carbon market, for example, is limited to properties with soils determined to be at risk of conversion to crops and typically requires enrollment of a substantial amount of acreage to overcome transaction costs and be financially viable (Brammer and Bennett 2022).

Some public conservation programs have been criticized for not being strategic and instead implemented in an ad hoc project-by-project fashion. Some scholars have criticized investments in conservation easements as inefficient and failing to target lands most at risk of development (Merenlender et al. 2009; Rashford et al. 2019). Some efforts now attempt to address this “random acts of conservation” concern such as NRCS’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), which focuses funding on specific resource issues in specific geographies. The Sage Grouse Initiative, led by NRCS but with numerous state and private partners, uses a science-based strategy to strategically focus limited budgets on areas and the types of projects that will have the greatest benefit to sage grouse (Naugle et al. 2020). These approaches help bridge the project-by-project nature of working with individual landowners with a landscape focus that is needed for impact at a broader scale.

Public conservation programs typically benefit from relatively secure funding and tend to be more institutionalized. NRCS programs, for example, are funded by the conservation title of the Farm Bill, which drives hundreds of millions of dollars annually towards private lands conservation. State wildlife agencies benefit from the Pittman-Robertson Act, which returns a portion of taxes levied on guns and ammunition to states for the purpose of managing and restoring wildlife. While states enjoy a great degree of flexibility in how these funds are spent, many wildlife agencies dedicate a portion to conservation programs on private lands. In general, market-based programs do not share this same level of institutionalization and many can be described as “institutionally brittle.” Regulatory driven approaches like species banking often require demand for credits created through the listing of a species under the ESA, but court decisions, lawsuits, and political pressures can create dynamic uncertainties over a species’ listing status. The USFWS listed the lesser prairie chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) as threatened in 2014, but a federal court vacated the listing decision in 2015 (Chap. 9). These regulatory dynamics have tempered market-based approaches for the species as actors evaluate the situation and weigh costs and benefits of generating and buying credits. Similar regulatory uncertainty plagues market-based approaches for water quality and other ecosystem service markets.

An additional challenge for market-based programs is creating confidence in what is traded within the market. Most market-based programs focus on resources considered public goods that are not directly tradable. Instead, some programs use proxies like land-use practices that are likely to result in the generation of that public good to determine the number of credits created by those actions and available to be traded. Standardized units, like a metric ton of carbon, also need to be established as the “currency” that is traded within a program. Yet standardized units need to be estimated using complex models and protocols to determine, for example, how many credits can be generated from agreeing not to convert an area of grasslands to cropland. These complexities can undermine confidence in market-based programs when the models and protocols do not reliably estimate the ecosystem good, which is common with resources and ecosystems that are highly heterogeneous. In these instances, buyers may question what they get in return, which can result in the collapse of the market, as happened with the Chicago Climate Exchange. This early effort to create a voluntary market for carbon collapsed following, in part, concerns raised about the integrity of credits traded in the market. These technical aspects of creating artificial markets for public goods present significant obstacles to the viability and longevity of market-based approaches.

5.2.1 Do Existing Programs Embrace Interdependence and Connectivity?

In addition to their respective challenges, the range of landowner conservation programs above shares one additional limitation relevant for this chapter’s focus on the intersection of rangeland economies and wildlife ecologies. Whether subsidized or reimbursed by the public or traded and exchanged within a marketplace, the existing conservation toolkit for supporting wildlife conservation on private ranchlands operates at the level of individual properties and landowners. This emphasis reflects the legal framework of private property in the US—as the property rights of landowners give them the power and responsibility to dictate how land use and management supports stewardship on their respective properties—but also a deeply entrenched assumption about our modern economy and its focus on the individual. While the conservation contributions of single ranch properties can be very meaningful, especially if landowners own and control very large and ecologically significant holdings (Haggerty et al. 2022; Epstein et al. 2021a), wildlife and conservation scientists in this textbook and elsewhere stress the need for conservation practices and habitat restoration at the landscape scale (Brunson and Huntsinger 2008).

The need for large landscape approaches raises important questions about the existing landowner conservation toolkit related to whether individual landowner incentive programs can support the types of continuity of stewardship and connectivity required to mitigate biodiversity loss and support thriving wildlife populations. Because rangeland economies are deeply entangled with wildlife ecologies, answering this question, we argue, requires a re-thinking of our orientation towards the economy, and more specifically, ranchland economies. In the next section, we apply the diverse economies framework to community-based conservation efforts in central Montana.

6 Community Collaborations: Diverse Economies on Central Montana Rangelands

The diverse economies material we have presented emphasizes the importance of understanding ranches as interdependent not only with one another, but also with other livelihoods and economic sectors. So where do wildlife fit in this equation? How do local community members view the synergy between ranching economies and wildlife conservation? How well aligned are existing programs targeting wildlife stewardship on private lands with the need to work at scale and to foster diverse and interdependent economies?

6.1 Seeing Diverse Economies Practices in Central Montana

Taking care of little islands in this landscape is great--you look and say, ‘oh, yeah, that person over there is really cool. He's doing that, but [it’s not enough] … now, the freaking best grass in the world, and if everything's cratering around me, it’s useless because I need all these neighbors around me. I need all of these other people, I need a community.—Bill Milton

In this section, we share the ideas, insights, and wisdom of three contributing authors³ who are community leaders in central Montana dedicated to finding linkages between sustainability of local rangeland economies and wildlife populations. Together they have decades of personal and professional experience at the nexus of ranching and wildlife. We first offer a portrait of each person and the organizations they help to lead and follow with three key lessons for thinking about rangeland wildlife and local communities based on their experiences. The three community conservation institutions they represent explicitly link conservation—including wildlife, but also water, soil and native plants—with economic opportunities that emphasize the interdependence of ranching operations at local, community, and regional scales: (1) a successful grassbank; (2) a small-town community development organization; and (3) a regional conservation collaborative. The work of these three groups occurs alongside and within the broader network of wildlife conservation stakeholders, actors, and agencies described, yet at the same time, demonstrate key features of the diverse economy approach and thus provide important insights for wildlife managers on the social-ecological-economic dynamics of rural ranching contexts.

6.1.1 The Matador Ranch Grassbank: Diverse Economies at the Neighborhood Scale

As one of the world’s largest private-land conservation entities, The Nature Conservancy is often associated with conservation easements. TNC is also a leader in the implementation of grassbanks—a term that describes a program which incentivizes ranchers to adopt conservation practices on their property in exchange for grazing access on another property. Qualifying conservation practices may include weed control, removal of fencing, restoring habitat for key species, and granting a conservation easement on their property. Grassbanks benefit ranchers by giving their own lands an opportunity to rest and improve forage quality while their cattle graze elsewhere” (University of Wyoming 2021).

In central Montana, TNC’s pioneering grassbank program evolved in 2002 following severe drought, when ranchers were faced with selling off their herds if they couldn’t find sufficient forage. After acquiring the 60,000-acre Matador Ranch south of Malta, Montana, TNC established a grassbank in cooperation with local ranchers inspired by successful examples elsewhere. Local ranchers pay discounted fees to graze their cattle on the Matador in exchange for wildlife-friendly practices on their own operations. At a minimum, cooperating ranchers must agree to control noxious weeds and not break any new ground. After that, the lease price drops for additional conservation measures such as protecting prairie dog towns, securing sage-grouse leks, or modifying fences to make them safer for wildlife.

Grassbanks are celebrated as a conservation tool that leverages access to grazing to achieve conservation across multiple properties (White and Conley 2007). This is important. But often overlooked is the idea that a successfully-managed grassbank demands cooperation and integration among a collection of otherwise discrete ranching enterprises—as many as ten or twelve families participate in the Matador Ranch grassbank. While the Matador Ranch has a formal management team to make day-to-day decisions and run the property, participating ranch operators meet on an annual basis to negotiate and prioritize collective practices on the ranch. This kind of required cooperation and coordination emphasizes the necessity of interdependence, first and foremost among livestock producers. In this way, a grassbank represents a diverse economies model operating at a neighborhood/landscape scale—structured to some degree around conventional financial transactions, but also highly dependent on cooperative, non-monetary transactions. The grassbank also connects livestock producers, NGOs, and the broader local economy. As founding member, rancher Dale Veseth has said about TNC’s investment: “This has made a huge difference in this community… When you help feed families and cows, they’ll remember.” (The Nature Conservancy, n.d.).

6.1.2 The Winnett ACES: Diverse Economies at the Scale of a Town and Its Hinterland

Winnett, Montana is the main population center in remote Petroleum County, Montana. The Winnett ACES (Agricultural and Community Enhancement and Sustainability) is a local non-profit organization formed in 2016 to strengthen its community so that future generations will live, work, and raise their families there. Initially the group was focused on the challenges of acquiring land for grazing and ranching, particularly for young families just getting their start. The group continues to work to develop a grassbank to this end. They also serve as a hub for local conservation activity by administering grants, many of which align rangeland management and wildlife stewardship objectives.

However, the other projects ACES has pursued are another window into the integral nature of conservation and community development. They focus on enhancing Winnett’s public services and core infrastructure. The ACES’s first program was Winnett Beef in the School, which serves locally-raised beef to the local K-12 school system. Led by a local producer, area ranchers donated enough beef initially to fill four years’ worth of need at the Winnett Schools. Additional volunteers did the brand inspections, hauled the beef to the slaughter facility, and donated freezer space (Sturm 2017). Winnett ACES has also encouraged the building of a community center and is leading an effort to revitalize public and historic buildings to provide housing, office space, and business opportunities. All of these projects acknowledge the importance of the social and physical environment for building community and attracting residents (Western 2021). As founding member Laura Nowlin puts it: “Communities the size of Winnett are really reliant on the agriculture industry and the ranchers. But that is one of the things that ACES has talked a lot about too is that we are just as reliant on the community …”—Laura Nowlin (Beevers 2020). At its core, the Winnett ACES is about interdependent thriving.

Central features of a diverse economies approach to local development, relocalizing food systems, and revitalizing community infrastructure are strategies that support the long-term vitality of rural places, including those where local producers and private landowners are key actors in managing rangelands and conserving wildlife. Thus, the efforts of Winnett ACES sustain interdependent thriving between members of rural communities and between communities and the ecosystems and wildlife they steward. In doing so, the diverse economies approach of the Winnett ACES also illustrates how social in social-ecological systems is a vital part of rangeland wildlife conservation and management.

6.1.3 The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge Community Working Group: Diverse Economies at the Regional Scale

The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge Community Working Group (CMR CWG) was formed to enhance and preserve the ecological, economic, and social well-being of the 6 counties (Fergus, Garfield, McCone, Petroleum, Phillips, and Valley) surrounding the Refuge. Participants in the group include agency representatives, landowners, grazing permittees, county commissioners, conservation districts, interest groups, and engaged citizens. The group has been meeting bi-monthly since July 2010, with the meeting location rotating through the 6 counties.

The CMR CWG collaborated to develop a three-part goal for the region, which focuses on quality of life, production and landscape characteristics (see box). The vision is an excellent example of the degree to which interdependence is recognized as a fundamental characteristic of successful wildlife conservation, including diverse economic interdependence.

Title: Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge Community Working Group’s 3-part Landscape Vision

Describe the quality of life you would like to see be predominant in the region in 5–10 years

“We want this region to maintain a diversified economy within which a prosperous agriculture industry is sustained and local communities are prosperous with stable populations. We desire an atmosphere where agencies, local government, NGOs, and citizens work together to create positive outcomes for the community and citizens: focusing on common ground, mutual respect, and community-based decision making, where people are committed to the working group and access to public land is ensured for both the public and producers.”

What kind of production will be needed to sustain this quality of life?

“A diversity of unique goods and services to support economic and social values will need to be produced from a working landscape that maintains its scenic value, healthy soils, and ecological integrity. We must also identify and implement best management practices that integrate local ecological knowledge, succession planning in all entities, local working groups to address challenges, incentives to practice conservation, steady tax base to support infrastructure, and responsible, well-educated citizens.”

What does the landscape need to look like to obtain your production?

“We desire a landscape that provides habitat for diverse and healthy wildlife populations, where further conversion of native prairie is discouraged, and where the needs of natural resource dependent industries are balanced with conservation. In short, healthy agriculture lands cooperatively managed for the benefit of the resource, wildlife, industry, and community.”

The CMR CWG’s contribution to a diverse economy may seem less obvious than the grassbank or ACES model. The group has largely functioned as a convening venue for sharing information and building trust and familiarity among diverse conservation stakeholders. However, when regional resource management challenges arise, the substantial economic and community development value of relationships developed in the context of regularly meeting to exchange perspectives becomes clear. For example, when a very large wildfire raced through central Montana in the summer of 2017, the National Wildlife Refuge and local conservation districts coordinated a quick and creative response to the loss of forage on local ranches. Both parties credited the establishment and maintenance of communication channels over the course of years of participating in the CMR CWG as a major factor in their ability to act quickly and effectively, together (Charles M. Russell Community Working Group 2018).

6.1.4 Three Lessons from Central Montana

Lesson 1. Everything is connected: Wildlife stewardship must also be community stewardship

First and foremost, our community leaders in the CMR region reiterate the key themes of this chapter, namely that most residents of ranching communities see no separation between rangeland economies and rangeland ecologies. As Bill Milton puts it: “everything is connected, it's all interdependent, you know, you can’t separate any of these ideas from each other.” Laura Nowlin, rancher, watershed collaborative coordinator, and community development volunteer offers a landowner’s perspective on wildlife in this statement:

Wildlife is part of our identity, both as individual landowners and as a community. We are not disconnected from wildlife, like most (more urban) people are...it’s just a part of who we are and what we do...I feel like it’s important for managers of any sort to recognize that what we’re doing has to encompass everything. And not just wildlife and not just soil and not just economics, because it all has to work together to make everything work.

When you’re thinking about wildlife managers, that’s their sole job and their sole responsibility. I think the key piece that ranchers play is that we're concerned about all of it because it all affects our business and our land and our communities. So our approach is yes, we want to conserve wildlife, but, for the people who have the capacity to take care of the wildlife they have to have housing, they have to have healthcare, they have to have schools. Fundamental pieces of our community infrastructure have to work, and can’t be separated from having the landscape work for wildlife and all these other issues that the rest of the world thinks is so important. What we seek to understand are: which are the programs and approaches to wildlife conservation that benefit us individually as ranchers and benefit the whole community?

Sharing his perspective from three decades working with The Nature Conservancy on the rangelands of the Northern Great Plains, Brian Martin emphasizes the more than monetary economic rewards of conservation practices in terms of enhanced operational resilience:

Communities benefit from wildlife conservation because it ultimately produces a more diverse experience. Diversity builds resilience for both human and natural communities. There are direct financial benefits that can be derived from wildlife, but the returns are more likely associated with healthier and functional systems that better withstand drought and other climate change driven extremes. In ranch systems, diversity of vegetation likely creates more variable forage for livestock and can help maintain a higher nutritional plane throughout the year.

Recognizing that wildlife and people are interconnected, however, is just the first step. Our local experts also acknowledge a need to think beyond the scale of the individual property. This is important not only for wildlife, but also ranching communities. This leads to lessons 2 and 3.

Lesson 2. Creative solutions spread through relationships, which hinge on trust

The local experts profiled here believe that when place-based institutions like grassbanks, ACES, and the CMR CWG constitute the core of landscape-scale conservation, opportunities to link economic and wildlife stewardship increase. As the conservation menu mentioned in Sect. 27.5 makes clear, there is no shortage of private and public incentive and payment programs available to private rangeland owners. Whether or not these programs reach their maximum potential for wildlife conservation of course depends, among other things, on how wide their uptake is. While there are many factors determining participation in landowner conservation programs, trust is one of the most important (Sketch et al. 2019).

Here, groups like ACES serve as a critical venue for trust and the types of relationships necessary for working beyond individual property lines. Milton observes “land-based, community-based organizations … have the legitimacy and the license to put things in the play… without those groups there's no functional leverage to make serious change happen.” In contrast, a lack of trust can stymie even the best and most ambitious of conservation plans (Covey and Merrill 2006). Describing a pathway to grow trust from the “inside” out across the rural landscape, Nowlin offers a metaphor of a tree with many branches growing in many directions, but all reliant on a strong trunk:

If we all work first from our side of the tree to reach those closest to us and then branch out as we go, then eventually, we should reach everyone. So, ACES will work with our rancher neighbors who are not yet comfortable having conversations and finding common ground with most environmental groups. … We can help ensure that the “trunk” is on solid footing with a high level of trust among the existing partners first and then, when we're all comfortable, we begin to extend to the outliers.

Being locally-based and intertwined with daily lives and projects of local communities are essential when it comes to building trust.

Lesson 3. Wildlife and ranching need scale, scale requires relationships: Enter diverse economies

While rangeland ecologists take the importance of working at scale as practically a given, scaling conservation programs directed to individual landowners up (and out) into a cohesive landscape effect remains a challenge. The emphasis on allowing ideas to diffuse through relationships built on trust is one key platform. A diverse economies strategy of networked economic cooperation helps provide a further solution to this challenge.

Drawing on his experience both as a facilitator of numerous conservation collaboratives and as a founding member of one of the nation’s largest beef-marketing cooperatives, Bill Milton articulates this vision of coming together to work at scale through a locally-led vision of economic cooperation:

Family ranching’s role in our economy continues to shrink, yet the resources we steward remain significant and play an outsized role in policy discussions regarding protecting native places and combating climate change. How can ranchers take advantage of this moment in time? I often ask myself, how can family ranchers leverage their resource assets, their wisdom, and their expanding community of partners to better secure a viable livelihood for their fellow family ranchers? I propose the answer to that question is to build a place-based, rancher-owned company to market our collective stewardship of grasslands. Rather than focusing primarily on rewarding benefits to individual ranchers for conservation practices, why not market those practices and benefits at scale within large local regional landscapes?

I think the whole economic model taking care of large landscapes is that local people have to get creative and brave enough to ask to actually create the economic engine to do that. And that’s going to involve expanding beyond what we've already done with some really great partners.

7 Summary: A Diverse Economies Perspective on Rangeland Wildlife Ecology

For wildlife professionals, understanding ranching communities and range-based livelihoods is important for two reasons. First, because land enrolled in livestock production and other private ranching land uses affects the form and function of wildlife habitat, understanding the constraints and opportunities facing ranchers from the broader economy is key to designing effective conservation and management strategies. At the same time, wildlife professionals will become part of rangeland communities by virtue of living and working in them. A keen understanding of rural places and their economies is a valuable component of the job and are reasons students of wildlife management might be wise to invest in understanding range-based human communities with the same kind of dedication the profession brings to plants and animals.

This chapter invited readers into the world of “diverse economies” thinking (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020), a holistic approach to analyzing the economy as part of a broader set of sustainability challenges and social-ecological dynamics. In rangeland regions, a diverse economies perspective involves appreciating interdependence. This chapter specifically highlighted the interdependence of ranching and agriculture with other formal economic sectors, as well as the many connections among rangeland residents forged through informal economic activities. The chapter offered a survey of public and private programs that attempt to encourage rangeland owners and managers to adopt conservation practices, including wildlife-friendly management choices, and notes that payments, regulations and incentives are not enough to build thriving economies. The local conservation vignettes offered in the chapter’s final section encourage readers to think broadly about how economic interdependence—among neighbors, among public and private wildlife management actors, and even between rangeland residents and a broader public—can be leveraged to accomplish landscape-scale objectives of thriving human and wildlife populations.