Advocacy

  • The seminal work on public lands livestock grazing and its web of impacts, Welfare Ranching – The Subsidized Destruction of the American West is now available for download.

  • Episode 123: Who Pays for Conservation, Being the Lorax, and Introducing A New Voice For Western Lands Conservation Join George Wuerthner and Jonathan Ratner in conversation with Jack Humphrey of The Rewilding Institute for a discussion about the direction of conservation in the United States, the shift of American conservation from its roots in biocentrism…

  • Dear Subscribers, Recently, Ralph Maughan, the founder of The Wildlife News, has turned over operations to myself and The Wildlife News will be supported and managed as a project of Sage Steppe Wild. As you may have noticed, the site is undergoing renovations and is now accessible on mobile devices. The Wildlife News will continue…

  • An important question regarding sagebrush ecosystems, and species that rely upon them like sage grouse has to do with exactly what constitutes the fire rotation in sagebrush habitat? And a corrolary question is do current fire management policies emulate these historical conditions? William Baker’s paper, Scaling Landscape Fire History: Wildfires Not Historically Frequent in the…

  • Giant Sequoia May Require High-severity Blazes for their surival. Photo George Wuerthner During the summer of 2020 and 2021, with one of the most severe droughts in California’s recent history, wildfires charred thousands of acres in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the mountain range’s magnificent sequoia groves were among the areas burned. I recently visited…

  • Yellowstone was established in 1872 primarily to protect the unique geological thermal features of the park. Photo George Wuerthner  I see almost weekly repetitions of the myths or revisionist history about Yellowstone and critiquing conservation efforts in general, primarily coming from Anthropocene boosters which now include many in leftish politics. In the long run, I…

  • Did Native American use of fire make it so that wild country never really existed? When reporting about wildfire, current stories in the media often claim that in prehistory, fire was deliberately set by tribal groups so often that big or severe wildfires hardly existed. So, if that practice is restored today, it will be…

  • A BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) decision to allow livestock grazing to grow up to three times in the Owyhee Country of southwest Idaho has been blocked for now by a Dept. of Interior judge. Dickshooter Cattle Company, owned by J.R. Simplot an Idaho-based agricultural conglomerate, asked to increase cattle grazing by up to…

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