Nicole Rosmarino now heads Colorado’s State Land Board. Is the idea of Buffalo Commons part of the background tension?
by Allen Best
Buffalo Commons has not shown up in any of the stories recounting the pushback to the appointment of Nicole Rosmarino to lead Colorado’s State Land Board, but that is at the heart of the matter.
Rosmarino yesterday was named executive director of the state agency, which manages 2.8 million surface acres across Colorado as well as 4 million mineral-estate acres. Nearly all of the surface land, 98%, is leased for agricultural purposes. School trust assets in fiscal year 2023-24 generated $282 million for the state’s public schools, according to its 2024 annual report.
In May, when all other finalists were eliminated from further consideration, livestock groups raised their voice.
“Nicole Rosmarino has spent a career in organizations that hold radical, anti-ranching beliefs,” Tim Canterbury, president of the Washington D.C-based Public Lands Council, told the Fencepost.
“Putting a radical activist in charge of the State Land Board at a time when Colorado is facing important decisions about the future of our home and our economy is not good governance. It is political activism in its worst form.”
Canterbury is a fifth-generation rancher from the Howard area, between Salida and Cañon City and a former president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association.
The Colorado Cattlemen’s Association had more restrained language but signaled a worry that states land now leased for livestock grazing might be removed.
“State trust lands are successful because of the long-standing, effective partnership with livestock producers,” Erin Spaur, the chief executive, told The Fencepost. “Shifting away from that legacy in pursuit of untested or politicized ideas would be a mistake.”
The announcement by the administration of Gov. Jared Polis offered a different take, citing Rosmarino’s “30 years in natural resource management and natural resource policy.”
Most recently she was the senior policy advisor for wildlife, agriculture and rural economic development to Polis. Before that she was executive director of the Southern Plains Land Trust, an organization she co-founded. Prior to that she had been wildlife program director at WildEarth Guardians.
“She knows well how important the Land Board is to our agricultural communities,” said Polis. “With her breadth and depth of knowledge of the Land Board’s role and mission, she is more than qualified for this position.”
Buffalo Commons was a phrase first used by professors from Rutgers University in an article titled, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” In that December 1987 article published in Planning magazine (to which this writer has contributed many articles in the past), Frank and Deborah Popper examined the history of the Great Plains, including the steady depopulation during much of the 20th century. The best use of the land, they suggested, would be a partial restoration of the land to the 19th century.
“The federal government’s commanding task on the Plains for the next century will be to recreate the nineteenth century, to reestablish what we would call the Buffalo Commons,” they wrote.
The article was met with sometimes furious pushback from many residents of the Great Plains but has also inspired several books and some efforts to recreate large tracts of land where bison can roam. The most success has occurred in the northern Great Plains.
Rosmarino’s work in Colorado would seem to be heavily influenced by the thinking of the Poppers or at least occupied a parallel lane. The Southern Plains Land Trust, or SPLT, which she co-founded in 1998, has assembled 53,000 acres and holds conservation easements on another 7,000 acres. Its declared mission is to protect and restore the American Serengeti.
In a 2018 essay, Rosmarino wrote that America’s Serengeti is an imperfect analogy to the Great Plains. It is useful, however, to communicate importance of the region. The amazing animal abundance there in the 1850s rendered John James Audubon speechless.
“Unlike many other land trusts, we prefer to purchase and hold land ourselves so that we can manage it for biodiversity,” wrote Rosmarino. “Historically, bison and black-tailed prairie dogs were bookends of biodiversity on the shortgrass prairie,” she explained. Black-tailed prairie dogs themselves urgently need safe refuge, given their decline by about 95% from historic population levels. They have long been persecuted by agricultural operators, often in tandem with government agencies, given the perception that prairie dogs compete with cattle for forage.”
Research, she added, has shown that under certain circumstances, the dogs can benefit livestock by reducing shrubs, enhancing nutritional value and succulence of forage, the increasing the ability of soils and plants to absorb precipitation.
“Yet the persecution of prairie dogs continues,” wrote Rosmarino, who was then executive director of SPLT.
The 43,000-acre Heartland Ranch Nature Preserve southwest of Lamar is the group’s largest holding. I visited it in October 2024 and was given a tour by Jay Tuchton, the preserve manager. We saw bison aplenty, of course, and he told us of deer and pronghorn, occasional elk, and even a bear or two. I think he said that four or five people lived in the preserve, too.
In short, it was perhaps an approximation of when the Bent brothers operated a fur-trading post along the Arkansas River a few miles northwest in the 1830s and 1840s.
Contacting sources in that area, I heard of some conflicts. A June 10 story by Marianne Goodland of ColoradoPolitics probed what SPLT had been saying on its social media posts. “Cows be gone! ” said one post for April 2024. “Follow our struggle to keep neighbouring cows out of our preserves.”
The work of preserving expanses of the Great Plains — including portions of eastern Colorado — can best be understood in the context of the controversial, thought-provoking article by the Poppers in 1987. They admit surprise at how much verbal dust they kicked up with their thoughts.
“We never expected any response at all!” said Frank in an interview with Planning magazine in 2018. “This was a total surprise to us.”
They were invited to give 63 presentations between 1988 and 1994. Several books have been printed, one of them nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The Poppers had described the Great Plains as “the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.” In 2018, he said, the couple stood by it. “And climate change will make it worse.”
In a later essay, the Poppers described Buffalo Commons as an alternative to the boom-and-bust cycles. It “suggests ecologically and economically restorative possibilities for large stretches of the Plains. We foresaw a Plains with new land uses that fell somewhere between traditional agriculture and pure wilderness. Environmental protection and ecotourism would supplement existing agricultural and resource-extraction methods. Buffalo and other native animals and grasses would in some places replace cattle, a non-native species. The shift from corn-fed cattle to grass-fed buffalo would diminish the overall environmental pressures on Plains agricultural land.”
Frank, who is now 81, and Deborah, who is 77, told an interviewer for the Billings Gazette in April 2024 that they stand by most of their analysis.
“The one thing we got seriously wrong in 1987 was, we thought the federal government would be a prime mover in the creation of the Buffalo Commons,” Frank said. “That clearly has not happened. There have been a couple of sort of figurehead, symbolic changes in the Department of Interior. But the real action has been from state and local governments, native tribes, nongovernmental organizations, some private landowners like Ted Turner, and all of the smaller buffalo operations growing up across the plains.”
An oddity is that it’s a couple from New Jersey who took interest in the Great Plains. Frank told the Montana newspaper that his first experience was on a trip with college friends to the West Coast in 1963 and 1964.
“I was really struck by the beauty and the strangeness, at least in terms of my previous experience, of the Great Plains,” he said. “It was somber and austere, and yet somehow truly inspiring. And that always stuck with me.”
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The ranch-industrial complex assumes that it is a public good. Reality shows that cattle are an invasive species with a long history of environmental degradation. There are other native species that thrive on grass, too, but were unjustly extirpated. Where is environmental justice?
Responsible herd management is critical for cattle in particular, as their natural tendencies are to wallow and overuse riparian areas in particular. If cattle are going to be managed well, things like the Geo fencing operation the BLM is running in the upper Colorado River district need to be implemented. Otherwise and still, bison grazing is going to be more beneficial for the land and hopefully the state moves in that direction despite the opposition
It’s heartening to see Colorado be one of the states to take the lead in working towards restoring the Buffalo Commons.