A plan to assemble as much as 3.5 million acres of private and public land鈥攁bout a million acres larger than Yellowstone National Park鈥攆or a free-roaming bison reservation has some Montana locals fuming, 谤别辫辞谤迟蝉.听
The organization behind the land-grab, has attracted $60 million from wealthy Wall Street and Silicon Valley financiers. The promise to investors: A chance to get on the ground floor of a potential national park. After assembling the land, the nonprofit hopes to populate it with up to 10,000 genetically pure bison. The group will then allow the public full use of the park.
鈥淭hink of it like an empty aquarium,鈥 Sean Gerrity, 54, president of and the driving force behind the Prairie Reserve and a former Silicon Valley management consultant told Bloomberg News. 鈥淲hat we sell is the possibility, and we sell ourselves as the people capable of bringing that vision to fruition.鈥
But locals are upset at the suggestion that they and their forebears have done little to protect and restore the environment. 鈥淭his landscape was broken in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,鈥 Linda Poole, a local to the area, told Bloomberg News. 鈥淩anchers and the Soil Conservation Service worked and brought this prairie back. It鈥檚 not pristine; it鈥檚 restored. It doesn鈥檛 need to be saved from ranchers; it was already saved by ranchers.鈥