The cheatgrass on the Snake River Plain in early June 2039 is the color of wheat at harvest—golden, dry, continuous. Stand on the basalt rim above the valley and you can see for miles: not a single shrub breaks the horizontal. Just grass, dried to tinder, waiting for lightning.
This is what 180,000 acres of former sagebrush steppe looks like after the cheatgrass-fire cycle compressed fire return intervals to three years. Each burn eliminated more of the shrub component that might have recovered. By 2039, transformation has already happened. What kind of ecosystem emerges from it depends on whether you direct that emergence or accept it passively.
You're here to direct it.
Your strategy centers on targeted grazing as the primary management tool. Livestock moved through the landscape in carefully timed rotations reduce fuel loads before fire season, preventing the most severe burns that eliminate all native perennials and degrade soil carbon stocks. The grazing isn't heavy or continuous—that accelerates degradation. Instead, moderate intensity timed to cheatgrass phenology removes fine fuels while allowing native perennial grasses to persist in the understory.
Walk the grazed sections in June and you'll see the difference. Where cattle moved through in April, the cheatgrass is cropped short—six inches instead of eighteen, not enough fuel to carry a crown fire. Between the cheatgrass, you can still find bluebunch wheatgrass, Sandberg bluegrass, native perennials that survived the transformation. In ungrazed sections, the cheatgrass stands thick and tall, a continuous fuel bed that will burn hot when it ignites.
Restoration costs $1-2 per established plant at landscape scale—tens of millions for uncertain outcomes. Directing transformation costs less and produces more reliable results.
The economics are straightforward. Restoration costs $1-2 per established sagebrush plant, and at landscape scale that means tens of millions of dollars for uncertain outcomes. Restoration success rates vary dramatically with local conditions—high at cool, moist sites, abysmal at warm, dry sites like the Snake River Plain. Even intensive intervention mostly fails here because establishing sagebrush seedlings encounter moisture stress earlier in the growing season than in native vegetation.
Directing transformation costs less and produces more reliable outcomes. The grazing management generates modest revenue from livestock operations while reducing fire risk. Native perennial grasses that survive in the transformed system provide better forage value than cheatgrass monocultures and maintain some soil carbon storage, though less than intact sagebrush. The system won't support sage-grouse or pygmy rabbits, but it can support other wildlife adapted to grassland conditions.
This isn't what was there before. Carbon storage has declined as deep-rooted evergreen perennials were replaced by shallow-rooted annuals. Biodiversity has contracted as sagebrush-obligate species lost habitat. The landscape looks different—more grass, less shrub, different seasonal color patterns. Stand on that basalt rim in October and you won't see the silver-green of sagebrush, the way it catches light, the particular beauty of shrub against stone. That's gone.
But it's not ecological collapse. A novel ecosystem providing different functions: moderate grazing capacity, reduced fire severity, maintained soil stability, habitat for grassland-adapted species. The ranchers moving cattle through these rotations aren't destroying what remains—they're managing what's possible.
The tradeoffs are real. Lost: the shrub-steppe ecosystem that covered these landscapes for millennia, the species that depended on it, the aesthetic and ecological values of intact sagebrush. Achievable with available resources and current ecological conditions: preventing complete conversion to cheatgrass monoculture, preserving native perennial grasses, managing fire to avoid the most severe impacts, maintaining soil carbon to the extent possible.
The management approach focuses on maintaining what ecological values remain. The system won't return to historical conditions, but it can stabilize at a new state that provides ecosystem services and supports some biodiversity. Spending millions on restoration attempts that will likely fail doesn't serve conservation goals. Directing transformation toward the most functional novel ecosystem possible does.
By June 2039, the directed transformation is showing results. Fire severity has decreased in grazed areas compared to ungrazed controls. Native perennial grass cover has stabilized rather than continuing to decline. Soil carbon measurements suggest the system is approaching a new equilibrium—lower than intact sagebrush but higher than cheatgrass monoculture. The economic returns from grazing operations cover management costs.
Some landscapes—higher elevation, moister sites, places where fire hasn't yet collapsed the shrub component—might still be candidates for intensive restoration. Those landscapes deserve the attempt. But for the millions of acres where transformation has already occurred or is inevitable, direction offers a path toward functional ecosystems rather than continued degradation.
The work involves accepting loss while building something viable from what remains. It requires letting go of restoration goals that aren't achievable while maintaining commitment to ecological function and biodiversity at whatever level the transformed system can support. Managing for the future that's actually coming rather than the past that's already gone.
Stand on the basalt rim in early June 2039 and watch the grazing rotations create a mosaic across the valley floor—some areas closely cropped, others with standing vegetation, fuel breaks that will help firefighters if ignition occurs. Not sagebrush steppe. The silver-green is gone, replaced by gold and brown. But not collapse. What comes next, managed as well as current understanding allows.
Direction assumes that transformation is inevitable for large portions of the sagebrush biome, that limited resources should be allocated where they can produce reliable outcomes rather than uncertain restoration attempts. Novel ecosystems can provide value even when they don't resemble historical conditions. Managing for achievable functions beats failing to restore historical ones.
Accepting transformation in some places frees resources for resistance in others—the landscapes where intensive restoration might actually work deserve concentrated effort rather than spreading resources thinly across millions of acres where success is unlikely. Direction isn't giving up on sagebrush conservation. It's recognizing that conservation requires strategic choices about where to invest limited capacity.
The work continues: adjusting grazing timing, monitoring native grass persistence, managing fuel loads, tracking soil carbon. The system stabilizes at a new equilibrium, different from what was there before but functional within current constraints. The transformation is managed rather than resisted, shaped rather than accepted passively.
What comes next is a landscape that works differently, supports different species, provides different services. Not the landscape that was there in 2020 or 1920. But a landscape that can persist under 2039 conditions, that can support some biodiversity and ecosystem function, that can be managed sustainably with available resources.
Directing transformation produces better outcomes than either fighting it unsuccessfully or accepting it passively. Novel ecosystems managed for achievable functions serve conservation goals better than failed restoration attempts. Strategic allocation of limited resources—resistance where it can work, direction where it can't—advances ecological and economic objectives more effectively than uniform approaches applied everywhere.
The landscapes are transforming regardless. Whether that transformation will be managed or chaotic, directed toward functional outcomes or left to develop autonomously—that's the choice. Direction chooses management, accepts transformation, and works to build the best possible future from current conditions rather than fighting for a past that's no longer achievable.