Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Bison-Loving Billionaires Rile Ranchers With Land Grab in American West
Linda Poole can’t restrain herself when it comes to the
most-polarizing topic in Montana: the reintroduction of purebred bison.
As Poole sees it, the bison aren’t a cause. They’re cuddly fundraising
mascots helping the American Prairie Reserve to raise money to advance
its mission of land accumulation under the auspices of species
preservation. “If you can ignite people’s imaginations with free-roaming bison,” she says, “you get the bison to make your money.” The
bison in question are grazing about 20 miles (30 kilometers) away on
ranch land owned by the nonprofit Prairie Reserve, which has attracted
some $60 million from well-known Wall Street and Silicon Valley
financiers, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Summer 2013 issue. Its
plan is to buy out Poole’s neighbors and assemble as much as 3.5
million acres (1.4 million hectares) of contiguous private and public
land -- about a million acres more than Yellowstone National Park to the
south -- in a bid to build an American Serengeti, where the deer and
the antelope can again play free. The organization’s donor roll
reads like a who’s who of the ultrarich: billionaire candy heirs Forrest
Mars Jr. and his brother, John (combined net worth: $44 billion,
according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index); German retail baron
Erivan Haub ($4.9 billion); the foundation of Swiss medical device mogul
Hansjoerg Wyss ($12.4 billion); and Susan Packard Orr, daughter of the
co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and chairwoman of the David
& Lucile Packard Foundation, which has assets of $5.6 billion. After
cobbling the properties together, the group plans to populate the
sparsely settled scrubland with up to 10,000 genetically pure bison,
descendants of the original animals that last thundered across the
American frontier of the 1800s (as opposed to today’s tamer descendants,
which have been crossbred with cattle)...more
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment