Posts by: George Wuerthner
Recently rancher Ken Andrus had a guest commentary in the Idaho State Journal basically championing Idaho agriculture. However, like almost all folks in Ag, he has an overblown view of his place in the Idaho economy. http://idahostatejournal.com/opinion/columns/the-ranchers-side/article_f5881123-e136-5f04-8c5b-06a869515b57.html
For instance, Mr.Andrus suggested that Idaho AG was Idaho’s largest industry. This claim is created by aggregating anything […]
Continue Reading →Recently a bunch of older foresters wrote a letter that has been published in a number of Montana papers advocating more logging and other fuel treatments of our forests to reduce wildfires. These foresters all seem to be influenced by the Southwest ponderosa pine model which has infiltrated so much of the thinking of foresters […]
Continue Reading →Dear Tom
I see that you are planning an article in Montana Outdoors on “green grazing”. Without having read the piece, I can say that it will perpetuate the myth of “well managed” grazing. For every example of “green grazing out there I can show you 100 examples of where livestock production is destroying and […]
Continue Reading →Last year when the Profanity Wolf Pack was killed in Washington after depredation on cattle, Washington State University predator researcher Robert Wielgus suggested in several articles that the livestock losses were preventable, and thus, so was the killing of the Profanity Pack.
Wielgus was subsequently punished by the university who placed a gag order on […]
Continue Reading →Our public heritage is at risk from a lawless logging bill that effectively eliminates all reasonable checks on the timber industry. The threat comes from House Natural Resources Committee passed out of committee H.R. 2936 known euphemistically as the “Resilient Federal Forest Act” or as the Westerman bill for short after its chief sponsor.
The […]
Continue Reading →NASA just reported the drought in eastern Montana is so severe it is a once in a century event.
Not surprisingly, despite livestock grazing that some suggest could preclude large blazes, the drought in Eastern Montana has spawned some recent blazes including the 270,000-acre Lodgepole fire. The fire raced across grazed public and private pasture […]
Continue Reading →NASA just reported the drought in eastern Montana is so severe it is a once in a century event.
Not surprisingly, despite livestock grazing that some suggest could preclude large blazes, the drought in eastern Montana has spawned some recent blazes including the 270,000-acre Lodgepole Fire. The fire raced across grazed public and private pasture […]
Continue Reading →The shooting of the Profanity Pack last year and now a kill order for the Smackout Pack in Northeast Washington clearly demonstrated the failure of the current strategy of many conservation groups who are involved in wolf recovery efforts.
In this case, a number of organizations, including Wolf Haven International, Conservation Northwest, Defenders of Wildlife, […]
Continue Reading →During the 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton famously coined the phrase:
It’s the “economy, stupid” to admonish George H.W. Bush for his failure to understand the real problem facing voters.
Today the timber industry and Forest Service continuously advocate logging to reduce fuels and assert that this will reduce large wildfires. But fuels […]
Dr. Hess burg’s wildfire presentation has some good points that are worth reiterating, however, he also misrepresents some finer points of fire ecology. Basically, he promotes the notion that fuels are what drives large wildfires which he pejoratively calls “mega-fires”. The pejorative language is found throughout his presentation with terms like “destructive wildfires” “unhealthy” […]
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