Great Plains

Prairie sunsets are still beautiful, but prairie visits nowadays are shrouded with the ghosts of a once richly wild area. This vast area of North America used to teem with varied, abundant wildlife. Tens of millions of bison roamed alongside tens of millions of pronghorn. Perhaps five billion prairie dogs hosted thriving landscapes of life complete with black-footed ferrets, burrowing owls, mountain plovers, kit and swift foxes, ferruginous hawks and healthy populations of the 140 or more species that benefit from prairie dogs and their towns.

WildEarth Guardians seeks to make the Great Plains great again. Our Great Plains campaign seeks to restore this once awesome landscape through policy reform, public outreach, and sustained litigation.

Our work is vital in this region, as the Great Plains suffered the grave misfortune of falling under the plow.  With the loss of deep-rooted prairie grasses and wildflowers (some stretching eight or more feet deep), the prairie soil literally blew away during the Dust Bowl.  With active government participation, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, snakes, rabbits, and native carnivores were targeted for extermination. Native herbivores such as bison, pronghorn, and elk were hunted nearly out of existence.

Many homesteaders went belly-up, and the government rushed in with a program that bought up foreclosed homesteads. Thus were born the National Grasslands, which provide important prairie habitat to remaining native wildlife and plants.  More than four million acres are managed by the U.S. Forest Service as National Grasslands, and most of this acreage (82%) is in the Great Plains.  The Bureau of Land Management also manages important holdings of short- and mixed-grass prairie in this region.

These public lands are the focus of WildEarth Guardians’ last stand for the Great Plains.  We fight against harmful land uses in this neglected area of the country, where oilmen and ranchers act, and are often treated, like kings.  We use litigation and targeted policy reform as part of our hard-nosed approach to give persecuted prairie wildlife, such as the black-tailed prairie dog and coyote, a safe home on the range. But given that the majority of the Great Plains is privately owned, our actions don’t stop at private lands.

Through Prairie Dog Day, outreach in schools and with the public, and other celebrations of native wildlife, we also spread the word that the Great Plains could indeed be great once again, if prairie wildlife, plants, and their habitats, are provided with long-term protections.