Rancher Sid Goodloe lives and works in the southern Rocky Mountains and says he endures a kind of “frontier hangover” that characterizes many cowboys in the American West.  This landscape and the “cowboy lifestyle” possess a rugged mystique and a romantic allure that has been promoted by literature, film and television, and is embedded in the national consciousness.  And yet this mythic lifestyle has come under intense scrutiny in recent decades, as environmentalists have taken straight aim at land erosion, water consumption and public land use.

West of the 100th Meridian: Ranchers and Race to Save the Range will explore the controversy over ranching and rangeland management. This film will examine scientific, political and philosophical considerations concerning environmental stewardship, the culture of ranching families and communities, collaborations between ranchers, ecologists and environmentalists, and the controversial but often successful use of grazing animals to improve land and water biodiversity. Through interviews, archival images and present-day observational footage, this film explores urban consumption ethics, conflicts over public land grazing, the economic viability of family ranches, and the idea of the "Western mystique" currently prompting the conversion of thousands of acres of working ranch into "ranchette subdivisions.”

Sid and Cheryl Goodloe (NM), Jim and Daniella Howell (CO), and Betsy Ross (TX) are ranchers who are willing to step outside of traditional ways of managing the land and animals. They work with environmentalists who have chosen to interact with ranchers in search of a common goal – the reclamation of a degraded environment.  In these collaborations, ranching communities have become environmental communities, and environmentalists have come to recognize in their former philosophical enemies a group of people who value the land and animals.

Currently in post-production, the film will be accompanied by an anthology of articles by land managers, scientists, and social science scholars.