Stories
Eighteen Years
We are having a wonderful autumn on the Northern Great Plains. The temperature has dipped below freezing only a couple nights and the days have been balmy with light southerly winds.
The Tragedy of Phiney Flat
The north end of our ranch is part of a many thousand acre, level piece of ground known as Phiney Flat. By the county soil maps I know that the Flat is a fertile place for this part of the world and, in the places where the native, perennial grass still grows, it does extremely well.
One More Afternoon Of Love
There is a tiny adobe cabin nestled in the sand dunes of far eastern New Mexico. No real road leads to it, just two faint tracks among the mesquite, love grass, blue stem, and cholla cactus.
The Third Plate
If you haven’t yet read Dan Barber’s new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, you should. This is not a book review but it needs to be said that Barber is a wonderful writer who can tell an important and complicated story as easily as chatting over dinner with old friends.
Excerpt from Dan's New Book
It is a memoir about the last ten years of our lives and the life of Wild Idea Buffalo Company. It is peopled with folks that many of you know from your connection to Wild Idea. Here are the first few pages from chapter one.
The Meaning of a Name
Many of the fathers in my family have been saddled with the deceptively simple, yet unusual, middle name of Hosler. It was my great grandfather’s last name, and though he blinked out of our scraggly family tree with an awkward Catholic divorce, the name lived on as the middle name of uncles, cousins and nephews.
Nit Wits in the Sagebrush
My passing interest in what is going on at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch is fueled mostly by the fact that, like Old Clive and thousands of other ranchers, the economic health of my ranching operation depends to a large extent on inexpensive federal government land leases.
Celebrating The Earth From The Ground Up
Spring is the easiest time of year to celebrate the earth because burgeoning beauty is everywhere. Our connection to our environment is heightened. For the first time in many months there is color in our gardens and in the trees.
Thinking Like A Mountain
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, just as the sun was lightening the sky, I sat in my pickup truck on an enormous flatland above the Cheyenne River. I had just finished flying my gyrfalcon, Sally, and she was happily having her breakfast on the ground beside the truck where I could keep an eye on her and frighten off predators that might see her and move in for an easy meal.
National Bison Day Keynote
It’s an honor to speak to you here at the National Museum of the Bison. Good to see old friends and colleagues in the audience. It’s like a homecoming: Federal and state biologists, TNC folks, bison producers and supporters that I’ve known for decades.
Basing Decisions On The Unknown
I am imagining a call to the United States Park Service where the phone simply rings and rings: nobody home at one of our countries premier land-managing agencies! How can this be? What could bring us to such a state of affairs?
Conversations with the Vegetable Guy
A dozen years ago, during a semester when I was teaching at Carleton College, I wandered down to the Co-op to see what it was all about. I had never been inside a food co-op and I was curious to know what drove the people who worked there.