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Natural Resources

Negotiating Salvation: Conflict in Conservation Danielle Schmidt-Larios*, Danielle Schmidt-Larios,

The Kickapoo Valley Reserve – a conservation reserve located in the heart of the Wisconsin Driftless Region – allows ATVs, but not rock climbers. 1,000 miles away in northeastern Montana, the American Prairie (Reserve) confronts new BLM rules that say bison cannot be grazed on public lands like livestock can. Who – or what – then, are these reserves for? And, just as critically, who is excluded from them? The development and ongoing management of conservation reserves is rife with tensions about who gets to decide what happens to land, what gets “saved,” and what doesn’t. In this chapter, I explore the socioecological conflicts that emerge in large-scale land conservation projects. In my findings drawn from a mixture of qualitative methods, I propose that the decisions made for public lands drive conflict between, in these two cases, local agricultural producers and newcomers associated with the conservation reserves. Moreover, conflict does not end once the boundaries of the reserves are formed: ongoing and new tensions arise as actors decide, reserved for whom?