Badlands Conservation Alliance’s 2024 annual meeting was held in Bismarck at the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library on Saturday, November 16th. The event celebrated BCA’s 25th anniversary and featured speaker Michael Barthelemy, Director of Native American Studies at Nueta-Hidatsa-Sahnish College.
Ben Rawlence, a British writer and journalist, has researched and compiled a fascinating look at the seven major trees in six ecosystems of the northernmost forest, the treeline forest.
This National Trails Day, join Badlands Conservation Alliance as we participate in trail repair and maintenance operations in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Follow gf.nd.gov/legislation for news about outdoor legislation in North Dakota.
Badlands Conservation Alliance’s 2024 annual meeting was held in Bismarck at the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library on Saturday, November 16th. The event celebrated BCA’s 25th anniversary and featured speaker Michael Barthelemy, Director of Native American Studies at Nueta-Hidatsa-Sahnish College.
Ben Rawlence, a British writer and journalist, has researched and compiled a fascinating look at the seven major trees in six ecosystems of the northernmost forest, the treeline forest.
Your voice matters and this is the time to stand and have it heard! You as BCA members are more critical than ever. BCA will continue to monitor the various threats from oil and gas development, air quality issues around Theodore Roosevelt National Park, water extraction from the Little Missouri Scenic River, and the potential of rare earth mineral mining.
You can learn more about the Maah Daah Hey National Monument campaign at the coalition’s official website, ProtectMDH.com. Please show your support by signing the petition calling on the president to designate the national monument.
Badlands Conservation Alliance is dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the Badlands and rolling prairie ecosystem comprising western North Dakota’s public lands, both state and federal. We provide an independent voice for conservation-minded North Dakotans and others who appreciate this unique Great Plains landscape.
In 2024, BCA’s projects and collaborations included the Maah Daah Hey National Monument campaign, a legal intervention to defend the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, advocating for Suitable for Wilderness areas during the public comment period for the Dakota Prairie Grasslands Travel Management Plan, and submitting comments to the Bureau of Land Management regarding oil and gas leases.
By closing superfluous roads and limiting unnecessary road construction, and prioritizing non-motorized recreation, we send a strong message that the Badlands and Little Missouri National Grasslands are open, accessible and enjoyable for future generations. BCA supports a Travel Management Plan that better strikes a balance between public access and the conservation of North Dakota’s unique western ND landscape.
Badlands Conservation Alliance joins legal intervention to defend federal public lands conservation rule from ND, MT, ID lawsuit. Community, Tribal and environmental groups today filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit from the states of North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s new public lands rule, which creates a framework for the agency to manage 245 million acres for conservation. The coalition aims to defend the Bureau’s authority to adopt the long-awaited conservation rule from the states’ lawsuit.
BCA teams up with Laughing Sun and Atypical to create limited beer releases that raise awareness about conservation in western North Dakota. A portion of sales will be donated to support BCA’s mission.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“We oppose the use of eminent domain for this or any other project in the Badlands,” said BCA board president Christine Hogan, a retired Bismarck attorney. “Eminent domain is not the spirit of the North Dakota Badlands. Such tactics inevitably create bitterness in the ranch community. If Billings County wants a bridge, they should work to obtain the consent of the ranch owners whose private property would be impacted by the project.”
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.