High-severity blazes are critical to healthy forest ecosystems. Photo George Wuerthner
I read yet another study circulated by UC Davis and doggedly promoted by the national media, encouraging more prescribed burning, thinning, and forest manipulation to reduce large high-severity blazes characterized as “bad.”
The headline from UC Davis proclaims that […]
Continue Reading →Cattle grazing and production is one of the most destructive of human activities, if a full accounting of all the costs were considered. Photo George Wuerthner
I recently received a video titled Audubon Conservation Ranching: Hooves on the Ground, Wings in the Air from the Audubon Society. The video promotes beef […]
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** 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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