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Eligibility

This competition is open to all individuals and teams of individuals, for-profit and non-profit organizations, and academic institutions worldwide.

About the Jury and the Selection Process

Winners will be selected in a two-stage process. The first stage entails the submission of an "executive summary" not to exceed five pages. From the pool of such submissions, knowledgeable consultants contracted by FREE will provide an initial screening and will then invite up to 20 for development into a full proposal not to exceed 25 pages. FREE will provide an honorarium of $500.00 to develop these full proposals.

In the second stage, consultants contracted by FREE will recommend 10 full proposals for consideration by the jury. The jury will then review and award them a first place prize of $20,000, a second place prize of $10,000, and a third place prize of $5,000. Simple, concise ideas will be given the same consideration as sweeping, complex entries. We welcome proposals that describe reforms that have already been successfully implemented elsewhere and can be replicated along the Missouri River.

Entries will be reviewed for their:

1. presentation of innovative alternatives to conventional thinking about natural resource policy;
2. inclusion of a plan for fostering implementation;
3. ability to reduce costs and enlist cooperation among private landowners, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); and
4. sensitivity to the concerns and expectations of affected individuals and communities.

The jury is composed of: Mr. Stephen Ambrose, Dean James Huffman, Lewis and Clark School of Law, Portland, Oregon; Mr. Donald Snow, Executive Director, Northern Lights Research and Education Institute, Missoula, Montana; Dick Stewart New York University Law School; a former high level federal official with a natural resource agency; and a representative to be suggested by the conservation group American Rivers.

Proposal Format and Deadlines

All proposals must be submitted electronically to FREE's Program Director, Pete Geddes, e-mail: pgeddes@free-eco.org. All submissions must be compatible with Microsoft Word Office 98. Submissions received after the deadlines will not be considered.

The First Round

The first round proposal is limited to five (5) pages. Although people may submit earlier, the deadline for this round is January 10, 2001. Submissions must adhere to the following format:

• The author(s) title(s), affiliation(s), and full contact information (including e-mail) must be on the top of the first page. Do not include a separate cover sheet.
• Submissions must be double spaced in Times 12 point font.
• The proposal should include these sections in the following order:
  
  1. Overview
  2. Rationale
  3. Identification of Action(s) Needed for Implementation
  4. A 250 word biographical sketches of the principle author(s).

The Second Round

This round is by invitation. Those selected to develop the full 25 page proposal will be notified by February 1, 2001. Upon receipt of the proposal, FREE will provide an honorarium of $500.00. Use the same format as in the first round. Knowledgeable consultants contracted by FREE will forward 10 proposals to the jury for consideration and selection of awards. Deadline for this round is June 1, 2001.

Awards

FREE will pay travel and lodging for finalists (principle author only) to attend a two day seminar August 13-14, 2001 at the Charlie Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. The seminar will include environmental leaders, economists, policy analysts, and members of the media who will discuss the various proposals and their implementation. Upon completion of the seminar the prizes will be awarded. Finalists must be able to attend this seminar. An optional canoe trip down the White Cliffs Corridor may follow for those interested in further discussing means of disseminating the alternative.

Background Information

The least spoiled stretch of the Missouri River is the Wild and Scenic corridor near Fort Benton, Montana. Here the river begins to roll through a 130-mile-long patch of wrinkled land known as the Missouri River Breaks. The upper reaches, dubbed the White Cliffs, were Lewis and Clark's favorite portion of the river. Their journals run rhapsodic through this stretch, where Lewis remarked that the bluffs of "remarkable white sandstone [worn into] a thousand grotesque figures. . . exhibit a most romantic appearance." To many modern eyes, the scenery along the Wild and Scenic Missouri is world-class, the kind of landscape Americans love to protect in national parks.

Recently there came just such a proposal for the Missouri, to upgrading the federal status from Wild and Scenic, a relatively weak federal protection, to the fuller protection offered by national park or monument designation. It's a time-honored, familiar move in the West, where federal lands comprise half the land-base: areas that seem to achieve special status as "scenic resources" are inevitably nominated for national park designation. As many would attest, "That's what national parks are for."

But in the case of the Missouri - and perhaps in other cases, as well - national park or monument "protection" may provide little protection at all. Visitation to the Wild and Scenic Missouri is skyrocketing, a tribute both to the river's rare beauty and to the massive new interest in the Lewis and Clark trail. In 1976, long before Stephen Ambrose wrote his best-selling book Undaunted Courage, only 2,200 visitors a year camped along the Missouri, each one logging about four days on the river. That translates to around 8,800 "visitor days," the key number for land managers trying to gauge the impacts of recreation. In 1998, the number of visitor days had swelled to 50,000. It is clear that as we approach the years 2003-5, the bicentennial years of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the number will dramatically increase.

Unfortunately, in the midst of this skyrocketing interest, the Missouri is hardly "wild" and all, and is becoming increasingly less scenic. One of the finest and most important features of the river - a feature not lost on Lewis and Clark - were the massive cottonwood groves that lined the banks. Certain stretches of the river were virtual forests of cottonwoods and related species. These trees gave shelter to the thousands of elk, deer, big horn sheep, and bison that grazed the bottom lands. They also provide fuel for the thousands of steam-powered paddle-wheel boats that pushed up the Missouri from St. Louis to Fort Benton during the glory days of Indian trading (1820 to 1885).

Today the cottonwood groves are largely gone, victims of logging, poor livestock grazing practices, and (perhaps most important) the elimination of natural floods. Large dams above the Wild and Scenic stretch have ended the seasonal flooding of the river - flooding to which the river's plant and animal life was well-adapted. Without floods, cottonwoods suffer. The soils they grow in lack sufficient moisture to germinate and grow new plants; seed dispersal is reduced; the offspring of the great trees become highly vulnerable to livestock grazing. The wildlife that depended on healthy forests of cottonwoods will continue to suffer as well. It will take concerted, well-coordinated effort to restore the cottonwoods of the Missouri, but without them, the Missouri cannot claim the mantle of "wild."

The proposal for park or monument status is predicated on the facile assumption that such designation is both politically and economically expedient. In the case of the Missouri River, this is highly problematic. Unlike the Grand Staircase-Escalante, where the huge majority of acres were already in the federal domain, the Wild and Scenic Missouri is a hodgepodge of private, state, and federal ownership. If the President were to designate the Wild and Scenic corridor a national monument, the designation would only apply to the federal lands. Yet the majority of acres along the upper stretch of the corridor (from Coal Banks Landing to the Judith River) are private. Consolidating ownership to compose a fully federal land corridor along the river would be costly, time-consuming, and controversial.

The Missouri River corridor from Fort Benton to the Montana-North Dakota border is an agricultural region, home to some of the world's largest wheat farms. Ranchers and farmers historically have used the river bottom lands for grazing and for pumping stations for irrigating the bench lands above. In order to consolidate ownership, it would take tens of millions of dollars for the federal government to buy out existing landowners - assuming they would agree to sell. Given the anti-federal political climate of Montana and the West, the likelihood that Congress could amass such funds (probably over the objections of Montana's Congressional representatives) is slim.

If the "protection" afforded by national park or monument designation is both unfeasible and unpalatable, how may we protect and restore this marvelous river corridor? Our task - and yours if you will join us in this effort - is to find feasible, locally acceptable alternatives to protect the valued resources along the Wild and Scenic Missouri.

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