Let’s conserve an endangered species: The heritage rancher

Here are my core Badlands principles, which I believe are shared by the overwhelming majority of the people of North Dakota. One - the Badlands are North Dakota's greatest scenic asset, the crown jewel of our 70,762-square-mile rectangle of prairie and Great Plains landscape. Two -the Badlands are our most important tourist destination and marketing resource, the main reason that the least visited state in the union gets visited. What makes the Badlands so attractive to everyone is some combination of the stark, broken landscape through which that whimsical improbable river flows and the palpable sense - felt by all visitors - that somehow the district has escaped the kinds of development that have compromised the heritage, the openness, the loneliness, and the spiritual possibilities of other remarkable landscapes of the American West. Three - the highest and best use of the North Dakota Badlands is traditional cattle ranching, which, of all human enterprises, pays the most respect to the fact that the Badlands are really grasslands.Traditional ranching represents the lightest human footprint on the Badlands. Ranching erects a minimal, unintrusive, and aesthetically pleasing infrastructure on the landscape. It supports the most attractive (and quintessentially American) human culture: the laconic cowboy in chaps, bold belt buckle and hat, riding the ridge alone against an endless horizon, saddle leather creaking, rifle ready. It is impossible to be a good rancher without developing an intimate, loving and subtle understanding of the rhythms of land and grass and season...read more