** Guest post by Richard Spotts**
An open letter from a former Bureau of Land Management employee to Secretary Deb Haaland.
Dear Secretary Haaland:
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in your Interior Department is broken and I know how you can and should fix it.
BLM’s dominant management culture has long been (and […]
Continue Reading →Cattle congregating in the riparian area, Chama, New Mexico. Photo George Wuerthner
SOIL CARBON AND LIVESTOCK
Rangelands make up a large proportion of the Earth’s surface, and the soils hold a significant amount of sequestered carbon (Schuman,G.E et al. 2001). Rangelands are estimated to contain more than one-third of the world’s above […]
Continue Reading →The Gallatin Range south of Bozeman is one of the many wildlands that would receive wilderness designation in NREPA. Photo George Wuerthner
On March 10th, Representative Maloney of New York reintroduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) legislation into Congress. NREPA is visionary. The legislation is big—it would protect 23 million […]
Continue Reading →Most land trusts and many conservation groups frequently ignore the impacts of Agriculture and focus on urbanization and sprawl as the main threat to biodiversity and ecosystems.
A good example is the Teton Land Trust, Idaho. A recent story about their board president, John Nedrow, a farmer, talks about how he put a conservation easement […]
Continue Reading →The Washington Post recently published an article that repeated the old and flawed idea that ranching will “protect” the land and suggesting conservation easements are the solution to sprawl. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/expanding-efforts-to-keep-cows-over-condos-are-protecting-land-across-the-west/2020/04/10/96ec2f80-79c6-11ea-9bee-c5bf9d2e3288_story.
If championing cows or hayfields is your conservation policy, one must rethink the strategy. Keep in mind that nearly all the development found along […]
Continue Reading →Wilderness designation preserves many values. Designated wilderness is a storehouse for carbon and insurance against climate change. Wilderness preserves critical wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors. Wilderness provides for clean water and clean air. And, of course, designated wilderness protects the scenery and ecosystem integrity that supports Montana’s economy.
However, there is yet another value preserved […]
Continue Reading →The Lolo National Forest is proposing to “salvage” log a portion of the 28,000-acre Liberty Burn near Seeley Lake, Montana.
The Forest Service (FS) approved the logging using a categorical exclusion (CE) process. CEs were initially designed to permit the FS to do minor actions like replace an outhouse in a campground or replace signs […]
Continue Reading →Currently, there is a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that would ban logging on all of the state lands. The premise of the legislation is that logging contributes significantly to CO2 emissions. The legislation sponsors argue that the best use of Massachusetts state-owned property is to maintain intact forests for carbon storage.
If […]
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WHEN IT COMES TO SAFEGUARDING BEARS, SCIENTISTS SAY WILDERNESS-CALIBER LANDS, FREE OF RIDERS, ARE IMPORTANT TO BRUIN PERSISTENCE
Reposted from Mountain Journal with permission of the author, Todd Wilkinson (click at original link for photos)
— Does mountain biking impact wildlife, any more than hikers and horseback riders do? More specifically: could rapidly-growing […]
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Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and Olaus Murie, legendary biologists and founders of The Wilderness Society (TWS), must be crying in their graves.
When Marshall founded the Wilderness Society, he wrote: “We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no (fence) straddlers for in […]
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