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 […]
Continue Reading →Recently it was announced by Montana Senator Steven Daines that he plans to introduce a bipartisan bill with Senator Diane Feinstein of California to protect communities from wildfire.
The senators are concerned that wildfire season is getting worse and large fires are a threat to communities. On both counts, the senators are correct. However, the […]
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The livestock industry and its apologists are trying out a new spin to justify their unwillingness to coexist with native wildlife, arguing that it is necessary to kill large predators from time to time to appease the locals and create “social tolerance.” This is a false and self-serving narrative, and is causing a public backlash […]
Continue Reading →When I was a kid, one of the favorite games we played in elementary school was “dodge ball.” In the game, a circle is made around a person who attempts to “dodge” a ball thrown by the other kids. You get to stay in the middle of the ring until a ball hits you, and […]
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CAPTION: Open space is not the same as good wildlife habitat. The hayfield shown here has limited wildlife value. The willows and other shrubs on the left are along a creek protected from livestock by a rural subdivision. The right side of the photo dominated by grasses and an entrenched […]
Continue Reading →Recently Nevada Bureau of Land Management (BLM) State Director Jon Raby suggested that the agency will try “targeted grazing” among other methods to reduce wildfires in the sagebrush ecosystem. Raby says the BLM is implementing this action “because of the threat of annual invasive grasses, specifically cheatgrass, play in altering fire regime conditions that intensify […]
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 […]
Continue Reading →In June the BLM released a draft EIS Programmatic EIS for Fuel Breaks in the Great Basin. The proposal would authorize the creation of 11,000 miles of fuel breaks primarily in sagebrush ecosystems across parts of Nevada, California, Utah, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. https://eplanning.blm.gov/epl-front-office/projects/nepa/71149/175534/213852/FuelBreaksDraftPEIS_Bulletin.pdf
This plan is a government boondoggle that will cost […]
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Sometimes a “win” is the fight you don’t have to have. Instead of victories proclaimed from the steps of the courthouse, some wins are the quiet kind which involve not having to go back to court at all.
Western Watersheds Project and our allies recently had such a win, in a […]
Continue Reading →Monitoring project shows two weeks of cattle is decimating the understory
FISH LAKE, Utah – Conservationists today released a new report showing that cattle grazing in the world-famous Pando aspen clone and neighboring aspen groves exert more than four times as much grazing pressure over less than two weeks as do mule deer grazing over the […]
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