I stopped for the night in Billings, Montana, at an RV campground on the Yellowstone River. There was a breeze off the river, and with the camper vent opened, I could stay cool while I caught up on email and planned my next stops. Through the window of the camper, I could see a ridge rising straight from the river to a rocky peak above.
I’d heard that RV campgrounds were great places to meet other travelers, families and retired people who pulled up folding chairs around a campfire to swap stories and crisp marshmallows. Not true here. The giant RVs lined up along the pavement dwarfed my pickup truck camper. The park offered both WiFi and cable television, and the RVs were self-contained, with their own bathrooms and showers. On the pebbly banks of the Yellowstone River, I had the rushing water and the sunrise to myself.
I had stopped in Billings to meet the ranchers who have been fighting coal in Montana since the 1970s. I met Steve Charter, chairman of the Northern Plains Resource Council, at the organization’s headquarters, and he invited me to walk out on his land to the north and to park my truck there for the night.
Steve Charter is chairman of the Northern Plains Resource Council and owns a ranch north of Billings, Montana.
Charter wore a cowboy hat, a green cotton shirt, jeans held up by a belt with a silver buckle, and scruffy boots. His neatly trimmed beard showed some white amid the black.
He was just a teenager when his parents gathered with neighbors to found a landowners association to fight coal, he told me. “In the early 1970s, these land men from big eastern coal companies started showing up at our doors. They were pretty heavy-handed: ‘We’re coming in, and we’ll offer you a reasonable price, and you’ll sell to us.’ And then they would say, ‘Your neighbors have all made deals.’ ”
The Charter family, who lived in the remote Bull Mountains about 50 miles north of Billings, called their neighbors and learned that, in fact, they hadn’t cut deals with the coal company. They met and formed the Bull Mountain Landowners Association.
“The coal companies didn’t like that,” Charter recalled with a chuckle. “Coming from Appalachia, they were used to strong-arming people and getting their way.”
Like many stories of the West, the railroad has a role here. The federal government had granted railroad companies vast tracts of land in exchange for building the rail lines and serving the farmers, ranchers, and rural towns. But, according to Charter, the rail companies prefer large trains that carry single commodities, like coal. They dropped passenger services to small towns and shipments of cattle, farm products, and other local goods. Their preference for coal, together with their ownership of alternating square-mile blocks of land, made them a formidable foe.
“We weren’t in a strong position to fight,” Charter said. “If we lost the [grazing] leases, we’d just end up with a checkerboard of unusable land, so the coal companies had a good argument about why we should cave in and sell out to them.”
But they didn’t sell out.
“We loved the land and didn’t want it torn up,” Charter explained. “Also, my dad was an ornery rancher and didn’t like being threatened and pushed around.”
They soon learned that other groups of landowners were also forming associations, including the ranchers at Otter Creek. So the groups from around the state met up in the Charters’ living room and formed the Northern Plains Resource Council.
This wasn’t long after the first Earth Day, in April 1970, and environmental consciousness was spreading. Young people just out of college heard about these ranchers who were battling coal, and they began to show up and volunteer. Those young people, and Steve Charter, who was just out of high school, became the first volunteer staff.
At first, the ranchers were leery of the newcomers, Charter told me. Many of the young people had long hair, which didn’t go over well in conservative eastern Montana. “There were a lot of haircuts,” Charter recollected.
But somehow it worked out. “As people worked together and got to know each other, that’s when the magic happened.”
At Montana’s 1972 legislative session, a coalition of ranchers, hippies, and environmentalists pushed through some of the country’s most progressive environmental regulations, including laws requiring coal companies to restore the land after they mined it. They reached out to Appalachian anti-coal groups and the people there who had been “exploited and messed with for years,” as Charter put it. In conjunction with the Appalachian groups, the council lobbied for a national mine reclamation act,1 which, after years of work, was adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on August 3, 1977.
Although they had help from some of the big green groups, Charter said the local groups from Appalachia and Montana led the work, and that, he believed, made the difference. “We’re Ground Zero,” Charter told me. “We know the issues because we live them. That gives us credibility.”
Today, Charter is painfully aware that the issue of coal affects far more than the people who live adjacent to mines and train tracks. “Every ton of coal they mine can be translated into carbon dioxide. So we’re all Ground Zero,” Charter stated. “It’s a nineteenth-century fuel, and this is the twenty-first century. All of the time and effort trying to prop up the coal industry would be better spent trying to figure out an alternative economy that’s going to work in the long run.”
The conversation then took a tack I wasn’t expecting. It turned out that Charter had some interesting ideas about how to jump-start that economy. We were walking on the rocky, dry ground of his ranch, where a small rise allowed an expansive view of grasslands, prickly cactus, more outcroppings, and, off in the distance, the highway back to Billings.
Charter explained that since 1984 he had been practicing “holistic resource management,” a technique for herding cattle that mimics the behavior of wild ungulates, like buffalo, when predators are nearby. In this case, ranchers use fencing to keep the cattle together, so their hooves grind up the grassland and they defecate and urinate on the ground, spread seeds, and then get moved off it. Although there is some controversy over when and where this method works, research indicates that land managed this way is healthier than when cattle are dispersed over a large area and plant life doesn’t fully recover between grazings.2 The U.S. Department of Agriculture is among those institutions endorsing the technique. The system works best when the person managing the land understands it well and can observe the health of the land year by year to learn what amount of grazing and recovery time is optimal.
Charter only recently began to see an additional dimension to restorative grazing—its connection to climate change. Overgrazing, tilling, and other modern farming practices have depleted the carbon in the soil, allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. But restoring the soil contributes to the soil’s ecological diversity and health and to the productivity of the grasslands. And it also helps the soil absorb massive amounts of carbon. Mycorrhizal fungi accomplishes some of this magic. It extends fine filaments far into the ground, releasing enzymes, dissolving rocks, and bringing nutrients up to the surface.
Microbes become part of complex food chains and carbon chains, Charter explained, and eventually form the humus that extends deep into the soil. That humus is basically made up of carbon. So ranchers could manage their land to dramatically increase the soil’s absorption of carbon, making rangeland a giant sponge for excess carbon dioxide. This type of soil also holds rainwater more effectively, preventing runoff and flooding downstream and reducing the need for irrigation. The soil’s capacity to hold water will become a critical issue as the climate continues to change and rainfall becomes more erratic, threatening vast areas with desertification.
“It’s really exciting. There’s a whole movement of people who are figuring out how to build soil in ways nobody had thought about. And people are getting amazing results,” Charter said. Restorative grazing could allow ranchers to increase the productivity of rangeland “without having to give all the money to Monsanto” for fertilizers. “You’re getting your prosperity from the soil, and you’re building it over time,” he said.
This form of ranching could add up to an agrarian renaissance of sorts, if Charter is correct, because it would require more workers. And this could help reverse the depopulation of rural America.
“They almost brag that we’re down to half a percent of the population making their living from agriculture,” he said. “There is no relationship to the land anymore. There’s just someone driving a huge tractor, putting on all these chemicals.” And when few people are needed to work the land, the small towns shrink.
“So this could totally turn that around. It’s going to require a lot of knowledge, a lot of hands-on working with the land, because intensively managing livestock takes knowledge and it takes labor. But that’s a good thing. This is the kind of job that people like doing once they know how to do it. As ranchers, we hope to bring people back to where human knowledge and hands will do this, and not petrochemicals and running tractors.”
I looked around at the dry land, covered in grasses and cactus, the hills, and the dusk that was beginning to settle. In the distance, headlights moved up and down the highway to Billings. As an outsider, I had assumed this land was how it always would be. But I could see that if it gets a bit drier, it could become desert. My later research showed that nearly 30 million acres are lost to desertification each year,3 a rate that is 30 times or more the historic rate of land loss.
But Charter envisions a day when the soil is returned to health, with complex ecosystems of microbes and fungi in symbiotic relationships that stabilize the soil, build its structure, and absorb and hold rainwater. The soil would also steadily soak up carbon from the atmosphere, storing it safely in the humus, reversing climate change.
And young people once again would work the land; there would be jobs for people with the patience and work ethic to deeply know the land. And the economy and communities of rural America would recover.
That night, I slept well in my camper parked outside Charter’s barn, my rest interrupted only by the yelps and whines of coyotes in the distance and a glimpse of the star-filled sky.
In the morning, I stopped in to say good-bye. Inside his passively heated solar house, partially dug into the bank to keep it insulated from Montana’s frigid winters, Charter and his partner were making breakfast. While she made a veggie smoothie, he was working up some bacon, eggs, and coffee before taking off to check on his cattle.