| Effective cross-boundary conservation requires understanding how key players—landowners, environmentalists, and land managers—think about property and how they negotiate boundaries. This study examines how ideas about property, boundaries, and cross-boundary conservation operate in a particular location, the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana. National interest in the Rocky Mountain Front invests this area with a highly politicized symbolism, and the struggle for the future of this landscape is both discursive (involving contests over meaning and image) and material (involving contests over land, resources, and livelihood). I utilized in-depth qualitative interviews, a survey, and participant observation to understand these discursive and material struggles.; Results revealed competing discourses emphasizing either wildness or agriculture, with implications for the future of ranching, wildlife conservation, and public lands. Rural restructuring, in particular changes in landownership and land use, were altering established boundary practices because newcomers and ranchers had different views of boundaries and how to manage them. Tensions between private rights and public goods permeated most cross-boundary issues, including hunting access and subdivision. Ranchers often located the public interest at a local level, defining public goods in terms of social obligations to landscape and community. Ranchers were also strong supporters of private property rights, and viewed conservation and livelihood as inseparable.; I also examined the ways different people actually work across boundaries, and the respective roles of ranchers, newcomers, and public land managers in these efforts. Innovative work on weeds and grassbanks indicated that private property may provide opportunities for innovation rather than barriers to conservation. Effective cross-boundary conservation needs to link conservation and livelihood through incentives and working landscape programs. |
