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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.