More than 30 million bison once roamed North America. Only about 50,000 now live in wild herds, leading ecologists to say the buffalo is “functionally extinct.” Will the nation’s mammal and a symbol of the West endure?   This story originally appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. By Christine Peterson   Ervin Carlson was in his 20s when he saw a bison. The creatures were being brought back to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northern Montana, a place they’d lived for ...

This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   Every once in a while, I read a book that has the power to transport me somewhere else. Writing that is so vivid and emotionally compelling that I feel as though I am there. More than once, while reading Tory Taylor’s books, I have found myself deep in the backcountry, overlooking a meadow of horses or hot on the trail of an elk, only to be startled back to reality—warm in my bed, my black lab ...