Environmental debates are often loudest far from the landscapes they are about.
Producers can dismiss environmental concerns they should take seriously. Environmental organizations can design solutions without understanding how land is actually used. Researchers may have data without local context. Rural and tribal communities can hold generations of knowledge while still having surprisingly little influence over the stories and policies built around their land.
Steppelands works in those gaps.
We are an environmental organization interested in agriculture, land use, wildlife, and the people connected to them. We care about healthy grasslands, water, biodiversity, climate resilience, animal welfare, and cultural continuity. We also believe those goals are harder to reach when the people most directly affected are spoken about rather than listened to.
Our work begins in the American West and extends to Kazakhstan, connecting landscapes where livestock, horses, seasonal movement, and land-based traditions remain part of living culture.
Steppelands is not built around defending one industry or attacking one movement. We take positions, but we also care about tradeoffs, context, and who gets left out of the argument.
Healthy herds require healthy land. Management has to account for forage, wildlife, animal welfare, tribal sovereignty, cultural differences, and the ecological limits of individual landscapes. On tribal lands especially, horse management cannot be reduced to a national advocacy slogan.
“Cattle are bad for the environment” is not a useful production system. Neither is “ranching is always regenerative.” Grazing, feedlots, crop production, and finishing systems each solve some problems while creating others. We are interested in what actually happens on the ground.
Rain on rangeland, irrigation water diverted from a river, groundwater pumped for crops, and water consumed in processing have different ecological consequences. We care about where water comes from, what would happen without the use, and what the watershed can sustain.
People who live in cities should have a say in the future of public lands, wildlife, and food systems. People who live and work on those landscapes should not be treated simply as stakeholders to be managed. Better policy requires both.
Environmental movements have achieved extraordinary things. They can also become disconnected from ecology, economics, or the communities affected by their campaigns. Supporting environmental goals should not require pretending those failures do not exist.
A horse may be wildlife, livestock, food, family, heritage, labor, or a political symbol depending on where you stand. The American West, tribal nations, and Kazakhstan all carry distinct traditions of living with animals and open landscapes.
Current projects, public campaigns, and the programs we are building next.
A growing repository of research, data, policy explainers, source material, and public education on wild horses in the American West. It brings together ecology, history, federal and tribal policy, management, culture, and perspectives that are often missing from the national debate.
A research and information repository on U.S. beef production and its environmental tradeoffs. It follows cattle through the production system and brings together explainers, research, data, and source material on grazing, feedlots, methane, land, water, corn, wildlife, and policy.
Eat Horse makes the case for restoring a legal, regulated domestic horse-processing system and challenges the cultural taboo around horse meat.
It is deliberately more provocative than Steppelands and focuses on slaughter, food, animal value, processing, and the uncomfortable end of the wild-horse management debate.
A field-based fellowship that aims to place an environmental student from a leading university with a working ranch to learn directly from land managers, contribute to applied research, and translate that experience back to academic and public audiences.
A future exchange connecting ranchers, tribal land stewards, herders, students, and conservation practitioners across the American West and Kazakhstan. The program is designed to create direct exchange between communities with geographically, culturally, and socially different relationships to land, livestock, and conservation.
A Kazakh-language children’s book introducing young readers to ranch life, cattle, horses, seasonal work, and the landscapes of the American West. The project is designed as a cross-cultural education tool, using everyday ranch life to connect children in Kazakhstan with another pastoral tradition.
The work is already happening in public. Follow the videos, discussions, field notes, and longer writing across our active channels.
Jamila founded Steppelands after moving between worlds that rarely talk to one another.
She studied forestry and environmental science, then spent much of her time in Wyoming working around cattle, public-land grazing, and natural-resource management. Born in Kazakhstan and raised in Germany, she came to these questions with a different cultural reference point. Pastoralism, livestock, and horses were never abstract ideas to her. They were part of how she understood land, food, and rural life long before she encountered them as environmental-policy debates in the United States.
Those experiences left her interested less in defending one side than in understanding why people looking at the same landscape can come away with completely different ideas about what should happen there.
Steppelands is building independent public education, research, and exchange around working landscapes.
Donations help us produce accessible environmental education, build stronger dialogue between environmentalists and producers, elevate perspectives that are often missing from national debates, and support cross-cultural exchange among communities shaped by very different relationships to land — from the American West and tribal nations to Kazakhstan and the wider steppe.
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DonateResearchers, ranchers, tribal communities, herders, journalists, students, policymakers, conservationists, and people who simply care about open country are all part of this conversation.