August 2019
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The New Yorker recently published an article titled Trailblazing plan to fight California Wildfires https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/a-trailblazing-plan-to-fight-california-wildfires that contain misinformation. I’ve had many people ask me what I thought of the piece. Given the influential nature of the New Yorker itself, I decided to respond here. The writing is good. There is much that is accurate about…
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On Friday afternoon, this came across my desk: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan, Region 2, intends to issue a sole source award utilizing Simplified Acquisition Procedures to William Bennett Nelson dba Bill Nelson Wildlife Control (DUNS# 117125795) Datil, New Mexico for trapping, capturing and radio collaring of wolves. The contract…
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The Tim Ferriss Show just released a two-hour podcast this week, interviewing Mike Phillips, one of the biologists who spearheaded the successful wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park in the early 1990s, a long-serving Montana legislator, and currently a professional conservationist leading efforts to get gray wolves restored to the mountains of western Colorado. According…
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LARAMIE, Wyo. – Conservationists today questioned the inaction of Wyoming state lawmakers and law enforcement in light of social media’s removal of a video montage of “coyote whacking.” The video shows a number of snowmobilers chasing coyotes to exhaustion using snowmobiles, running over the animals repeatedly with their machines, then beating the animals to death…
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In June, the Bureau of Land Management announced its draft plan to carve 11,000 miles of fuel breaks into the fragile Great Basin landscape. The agency is forging ahead with this plan despite recent scientific paper concluding that there is a lack of empirical evidence validating the effectiveness of fuel breaks in reducing fire spread…
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The National Park Service has released a plan for Pt. Reyes National Seashore this shocks and angers me, and here is an alert/story by the group, “Restore Pt. Reyes National Seashore.” . . . Ralph Maughan – – – – The National Park Service (NPS) has released its Draft General Management Plan (GMPA) and (EIS)…
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The recent killing of more grizzly bears by the Wyoming Game and Fish, a listed endangered species, to protect ranchers in the Upper Green River Allotment on the Bridger Teton National Forest is another shameful example of the mixed-up priorities and mismanagement of our public lands. Why should native animals, especially, endangered animals, be killed…
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In a message on wildfires I just got from Congressman Greg Walden, he asserts, “A lack of management has left us with overstocked federal forests full of fuel just waiting to burn.” Unfortunately, his statement is full of misinformation. He neglects to put this into context. In the decades between the 1940s and 1980s, the…
