From the monthly archives: December 2020

A week ago, eight prominent scientists sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) declaring that the agency’s proposed Tri-State Fuel Break (TSFB) is flawed and will endanger sagebrush ecosystems.

The Final Environmental Impact Statement (“FEIS”) and other project documents are available on the agency’s website at https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/42341/510.

To quote the scientists: […]

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High elevation forests like the mountain hemlock seen here at Crater Lake have long intervals between fires. They only burn when there is the right combination of climate/weather. Fire suppression has had little influence on such forests. Photo George Wuerthner

The recent piece published in the December 22 Guardian titled: […]

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*Trigger warning: Animal cruelty and wolf abuse discussed below

For over a year, my colleague at Western Watersheds Project and I have been paging through gory reports of dead livestock, most of them (questionably) attributed to Mexican wolf predation. I’ve gotten somewhat inured to seeing the bloody corpses of cattle, decapitated calves, and […]

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Glacier National Park is home to 30-40 wolverine. Photo George Wuerthner 

On December 14, 2020, 24 organizations and one individual (me) filed two different lawsuits to challenge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) decision not to list the wolverine as a threatened Distinct Population Segment (DPS) under the Endangered Species […]

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If cattle graze to bare soil, it is true that fires are slowed under such conditions, but the ecological impacts are enormous. Photo George Wuerthner 

When I worked for the BLM, us “ologists” (hydrologist, ecologists, biologists, archaeologists, geologists, and botanists) used to refer to Range Conservationists as Range “Cons” because they conned […]

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Upper Deschutes River is essentially an irrigation cancel for irrigators. Photo George Wuerthner

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will soon decide whether to approve a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for the Deschutes River Basin. The HCP was initiated by local irrigators and the city of Prineville who want to maintain their privilege […]

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Black-tailed praire dog. Photo by George Wuerthner

Years ago, I went out of my way to visit the Thunder Basin National Grassland. With a name like “Thunder Basin,” how could I resist.

The Thunder Basin National Grassland is located in northeastern Wyoming in the Powder River Basin between the Big Horn Mountains and […]

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There’s an organized campaign underway to get wild horses off America’s western public lands, and the livestock industry is both its primary salesman and beneficiary. It’s all about the money and expanding the livestock industry’s stranglehold on western public lands.

The livestock industry has cooked up a cock-and-bull story about how wild horses are the […]

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The Idaho side of the Tetons, much of it in the Jedediah Smith Wilderness or proposed additions. Photo by George Wuerthner.

The Caribou-Targhee National Forest plan to implement prescribed burns on 1.7 million acres along the Tetons’ west slope deserves a response.

As reported in the Jackson Hole Guide, the “problem,” according to […]

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Quote

‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey