Prairie Paradise

One of the implicit goals of ecosystem based management is to help foster communication and cooperation between natural resource stakeholders.  Part of its recent popularity is that it offers a potential way to diminish acrimonious and unproductive conflicts between stakeholders over how best to manage and use natural resources.  While the ecosystem based approach provides one potentially useful tool, the devil is always in the details.  Each management issue has its own unique historical, social,  political, and economic contingencies that can still make finding consensus difficult.  I think this story from the New York Times describes a good example of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/vision-of-prairie-paradise-troubles-some-montana-ranchers.html?smid=pl-share

It describes a privately organized and  funded effort to create a prairie reserve in Montana, and the backlash and concern this has created among some local residents.  On the face of things the goals and actions of both sides seem very compatible with each other, and yet there is still an ample amount of distrust and resentment on both sides.  The article implies this has more to do with the social backgrounds of the people involved than anything else.