News — Badlands Conservation Alliance

Getting Your Arms Around 381 Years of History

We’ve lived in northeastern Montana and western North Dakota for most of the last 42 years, and we’ve visited the Badlands hundreds of times. Whenever we return we learn something new about the seemingly forbidding area. We’ve also witnessed the mushrooming of the oil and gas industry in the region along with hundreds of spills. We joined Badlands Conservation Alliance as a way to have a more impactful voice on the treatment of this land. With BCA’s guidance we’ve written letters to the North Dakota Industrial Commission commenting on the oil and gas development.

Guest ContributorSeptember 27, 2023Hiking Report, Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Hiking to New Horizons

BCA needs new, younger members. How do we reach out to them? This is my daily question as I strategize our work. We all need to stretch ourselves to grow BCA. We need donor development and funds to thoroughly compete and achieve our goals.

Badlands Conservation Alliance names Shannon Straight Executive Director

Shannon, a Minot native, has a lifetime love of the badlands and is motivated to forward the Badlands Conservation Alliance’s mission: A Voice for Wild North Dakota Places! He is an advocate for collaboration and is grounded in the belief that new members and donors to BCA will play a vital role in shaping North Dakota’s future that better balances resource development with conservation.

StaffMay 8, 2023Press Release, Shannon Straight, Executive Director

White Paper Announcement

The Badlands Conservation Alliance has begun to put together a White Paper on its concerns about the North Dakota outback, particularly the Badlands. We believe that the people of North Dakota (and beyond) are eager to know just what is at stake in the Little Missouri River Valley in the third decade of the twenty-first century. They want to know what sorts of development threaten one of the most storied and important places in America.

Wild BadlandsClay JenkinsonApril 19, 2023#50 Spring 2023

An Evening with Jay Grantier

Jay Grantier has been vital to the BCA mission since its very first meeting, in part because he has authentic roots in the North Dakota badlands. His father was a cowboy in the "way back" time when cattle were first making their way to the badlands from Texas.

Wild BadlandsClay JenkinsonApril 12, 2023#50 Spring 2023

Book Review: Billionaire Wilderness

Farrell spent five years researching and interviewing to write this book. The book is a sociological study of a community where the rich chase beautiful, tax-friendly places and as the author says, “game the system. In most counties in the United States, the population estimates from the census are similar to the number of people claiming residency for tax purposes. Not in Teton County. It has the largest discrepancy between the number of people who actually live there and the number of people who claim to for tax purposes.”

Wild BadlandsBill KnudsonApril 12, 2023#50 Spring 2023

2022 Annual Meeting Potluck That Leads to Hope

I suppose I will claim that the Badlands belong to no one and to everyone: national status should be a shared sense of belonging for yucca, sheep, juniper, rattlesnakes, wolves, coyotes, Cottonwoods, scoria and gumbo, buffalo, wild horses, tourists, golfers, hikers, Cottonwoods, the watercourses, Cottonwoods, historical faith in our country and its hopes, Cottonwoods.

Wild BadlandsRick WatsonApril 12, 2023#50 Spring 2023

Badlands Mammals II: North Dakota Bighorns

In 2021, I wrote a bit about one of the Badlands’ smaller charismatic denizens, the Ord’s Kangaroo Rat. This time it’s a much larger one, our Bighorn Sheep, its near extinction and recovery. The bighorn had its origin in the Old World during the last ice age. It is in the cattle family, the Bovidae, along with bison, mountain goats and a plethora of other Old World and domesticated species. They crossed to North America via the Bering Straits Land Bridge at the end of the Pleistocene, the oldest North American fossils having been dated at around 110,000 years.

Wild BadlandsGuest ContributorApril 7, 2023#50 Spring 2023

The Designed Landscape of the North Dakota Badlands

Recommended reading: The Designed Landscape of the North Dakota Badlands: Weldon and Marjorie Gratton, Faithful Stewards and Genuine Collaborators, by Steve C. Marten. North Dakota History, v. 80, no. 2, Summer 2015.

Wild BadlandsStaffApril 7, 2023#50 Spring 2023