• The Forest Service authorized a Special Use Permit in March to allow a private company to clear-cut and bulldoze a 50-foot wide, 18.2-mile-long corridor through six National Forest Inventoried Roadless Areas for construction of a gas pipeline from Montpelier, Idaho to Afton, Wyoming.  But here’s the deal: The pipeline was approved despite the fact that…

  • National outlets focused on tax cuts for the super rich funded by taking from assistance programs for the poor. In terms of public lands, the only thing that got any coverage was cutting the budget of the National Park Service. Will Pattiz & Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks did a deep review of…

  • The Dragon Bravo Fire that recently destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge at Grand Canyon National Park has devolved into a “firestorm” of accusations of mismanagement of wildfires. The loss of the lodge and other structures ignores several important conclusions one can take away from the blaze. The first is that allowing natural ignitions from lightning…

  •  A new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management “Significant mortality of old trees across a dry forest landscape, Oregon,” found that older larch and ponderosa pine are suffering increased death rates. The main author, James Johnston, formerly at Oregon State University Forestry School, now at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Resilient Organizations, Communities, and…

  • Numerous headlines on Ag network media are championing a new University of Idaho study that alleges that livestock grazing does not harm sage grouse, a proposed endangered species. Across the range of sage grouse, livestock grazing is the primary land use, so it’s not surprising that grazing might be a factor in sage grouse decline.…

  • A Conversation with George Wuerthner George Wuerthner talks with Derrick Jensen about the use of “collaboration” in the management of our public lands. You can listen to the conversation here. Or on Youtube here. Or read the transcript here.

  • Wyoming’s famous elk herd and the attempt to catch death before it strikes. KHOL, in Jackson, Wyoming, did a good long piece examining the issue of how our treating our wildlife like livestock has led to the inflection point of a crisis. The crisis is the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by the…

  • The abstract idea of wilderness began long before the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. As far back as the Babylonian Empire and Chinese Empire laws were written to protect sacred, unrestricted places in nature not yet deprived of freedom of action or natural expression. First recorded around 1200 AD, the word wilderness suggested wild…

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