Currently viewing the tag: "land use"

A Proposal To Create A Civilization Area System

On April 5, 2022 By

 

Our current means of protecting wildlands is to set a boundary around the area. Humans do not create wilderness with survey lines. Any more than we create blue skies with a weather report. We can only recognize and sanction what already exists.

San Francisco may well be one of the more […]

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Antidote For Rural Sprawl–Land Use Zoning

On April 1, 2021 By

Rural subdivision in Gallatin County, Montana. Photo George Wuerthner

Back when I was a student at the University of Montana in Missoula, I had a girlfriend who managed to rent a house adjacent to the Bitterroot Mountains near Hamilton. All of us were very jealous of her luck in obtaining a place […]

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Ag is the Biggest Threat to Biodiversity and Ecosystems

On November 17, 2020 By

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 […]

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Misinformation from Gallatin Land Trust

On January 20, 2020 By

 

 

  The Gallatin Valley from the air showing that Ag fields dominate the valley (George Wuerthner).

The recent commentary promoting agriculture by Brenden Weiner of the Gallatin Valley Land Trust was full of misinformation. https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/county/gallatin-county-open-lands-program-changes-with-shift-from-bond/article_a93eff24-eaec-5005-8b70-a442972d5627.html

Weiner suggested that “working farmlands grow our food, provide scenic open space, give wildlife […]

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Rewilding the West–reduce Ag land uses

On July 31, 2019 By

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 […]

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Build-wherever-you-want leader perhaps dead in Washington landslide

On March 28, 2014 By

Did militant unlimited property-rights firebrand die in Oso landslide?

Many speculate why there was so little action to prevent building below an obvious landslide area near Oso, Washington, where now 25 bodies have been recovered. A likely contributing factor has just emerged in the news.

Living in the path of the landslide was Thom Satterlee, 65, and […]

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Lessons From Wolves

On November 4, 2010 By

The survival or defeat of the wolf symbolizes the way people are able to access the land according to their culture-

Lessons From Wolves by Jami Wright. Izilwane .

Ms. Wright is a graduate student completing her thesis for a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at Western Washington University. […]

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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