American Scientist

RETURN OF THE BISON: A Story of Survival, Restoration, and a Wilder World. Roger L. Di Silvestro. 256 pp. Mountaineers Books, 2023. $21.95.

In his recent book, Return of the Bison: A Story of Survival, Restoration, and a Wilder World, Roger Di Silvestro describes how bison are being repopulated through conservation on federal public lands at national parks and national wildlife refuges, focusing on Yellowstone National Park throughout the book. He implements a narrative that tracks singular people in history that contributed to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park as a wildlife refuge for bison. In particular, he describes the events that precipitated the era of “Big Conservation” at the turn of the 20th century with executive orders by President Theodore Roosevelt and the various Congressional Acts that protected wildlife.

Conservation of species is dependent on collaborative efforts across management sectors and is vulnerable—even susceptible—to narratives that leave out a lot of details. For example, early 20th-century conservation of bison was largely driven by the efforts of nonpublic entities, such as private individuals, Indigenous stewards, and nongovernmental organizations—think of George Bird Grinnell and Charles Goodnight for individuals, Samuel Walking Coyote and Frederick Dupuis for Indigenous stewards, and the Boone and Crockett Club and the American Bison Society for NGOs. For bison conservation, working across public, private, NGO, and Indigenous sectors is critical to restore bison throughout their former historic range, including into much of the Great Plains (of which the majority of the land is privately owned).

Di Silvestro states in the introduction that this book begins where others end: documenting the 140-year history of efforts to restore bison in North America. In particular, he expresses his hope that these history lessons will help other species around the world. In my experience, the restoration of bison has been a multipronged, multisector success story. As a bison researcher at South Dakota State University and Extension bison specialist, I work to integrate insights of diverse bison management practices from across sectors of public, private, tribal, and nonprofit NGOs to advance conservation of the species across its environmental distribution in this rapidly changing world.

This book describes the history of the people who created what is now known as the National Park Service, but the National Park Service is only one segment of one sector contributing to the restoration of happy, healthy bison on the landscape. The National Park Service emphasizes the conservation of ecosystem services that regulate catastrophic natural events such as flooding, and other services that support species biodiversity and maintain ecosystem functioning. Di Silvestro describes these undercurrents by connecting conservation action with the backgrounds of conservationists throughout early 20th century American history.

At its heart, this book focuses on the role that U.S. federal agencies such as the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs play for bison restoration today. However, it is important to recognize that there are many more segments and sectors within the multisector Bison Management System, all contributing to the restoration of our national mammal. The Bison Management System is comprised of the public agency sector, including segments of federal, state/provincial, and municipal governments; the Tribal sector, including segments of Tribal council governments, Tribal-affiliated economic development corporations and intertribal organizations; the nonprofit nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector, including segments of accredited zoological parks, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and so on; and the private sector, including conventional bison ranches, Indigenous bison producers, and enterprise conglomerates. Neglecting this acknowledgement effectively perpetuates narratives that seek to separate and undermine the efforts that each sector contributes to bison restoration.

Di Silvestro aptly describes how the various federal conservation agencies deploy “Big Conservation” through command-and-control strategies such as the Antiquities Act to designate a geographic area as a natural/historic landmark, national monument, national wildlife refuge, or national park. While I agree the era of “Big Conservation” with federal agencies is incomplete, its role pales in comparison to the daily roles that state agencies, private conservationists, nonprofit NGOs, and tribal herds play to increase social acceptance and tolerance of bison on working lands in the agricultural heartland of America. This book falls short in bridging that gap of returning bison to the landscape—namely, the social acceptance disparity.

Returning bison to the North American landscape in the 21st century requires high levels of local social acceptance of the presence of bison. Restoring bison on the margins of their former range, or conservation at the edge, is beneficial because it exposes bison to harsh environmental-evolutionary pressures to acquire new epigenetic traits to climatic extremes. These range margins are often characterized by lower forage productivity, smaller herd populations, reduced genetic flow between populations, and are often publicly owned. Conversely, the core of bison range in the Great Plains is characterized by higher forage productivity, larger herd populations, and high genetic flow, and more than 80 percent are privately or tribally owned. To illustrate this distinction, across the approximately 230,000 bison in the United States, 80.4 percent are privately owned, 8.4 percent are Tribally owned, 2.4 percent are NGO owned, and 8.0 percent are publicly owned. Growing the total bison population in the United States, therefore, should focus on higher productivity lands in the Great Plains through such NGOs as the Nature Conservancy, Tribal lands such as the Rosebud Sicangu Sioux Tribe with their Wolakota Buffalo Range, and private lands.

Fully restoring bison populations into their former historic range requires disease treatment and prevention interventions because of their proximity to other species carrying diseases that affect bison. Higher population densities of any animals are prone to disease outbreaks, especially wildlife populations that interact with domestic livestock species regularly. Nonpublic sectors of the Bison Management System that readily implement disease treatment and prevention interventions, therefore, are better equipped to manage bison populations within the Great Plains while adhering to provisions of the Animal Welfare Act, similar to beef cattle management. The false dilemma fallacy surrounding bison management manifests as a product of continued ignorance of the laws and policies guiding each sector of the bison management system.

Ultimately, Return of the Bison records an incomplete snapshot of bison conservation, just as Ansel Adams’ famous black-and-white photo of El Capitan incompletely represents all of Yosemite’s natural beauty. Bison conservation is incomplete, dynamic, and full of hypocrisy, but it is also unique, progressive, and integrates a much wider and diverse citizenship than shown in the book. Moving forward, discussions of the national mammal, the bison, should be undertaken without prejudice of fallacies of wild versus captive bison. Doing so implements a zero-sum mentality, or to put it another way, someone wins and someone loses. I encourage readers to seek diverse narratives about bison and their conservation. In reality, all four sectors of the Bison Management System work together on a daily basis to restore bison to the landscape. It is the intersector collaboration that will ultimately repopulate bison in the 21st century to achieve one million bison on the landscape — through highly engaging, integrated, evidence-based, collaborative, wise-use conservation.