Tag: Utah
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Inside Utah’s PR Campaign to Seize Public Lands
Utah used actors, AI, stagecraft and NDAs as it sought to sway public opinion and take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land In light of the immediate and severe threats to our public lands from the current bill in congress to sell off some 3.2 million acres of our shared heritage, this…
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Comb Wash – Check It Out Before A Quarter of a Century of Recovery is Destroyed
The Comb Wash allotment and the adjacent Cottonwood allotment within what, at the time of this writing, is still within the Bear’s Ears National Monument features prominently within the annals of litigation against the abuses of livestock grazing on our public lands. For decades after the passage of The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) the…
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Utah’s War on Cougars
Twenty-seven states (at last count) now have “right to hunt and fish” constitutional amendments. These laws are an attempt to secure public hunting, trapping, and fishing rights in perpetuity. They also help secure the future of traditional state wildlife governance & management that caters almost exclusively to people who engage in hunting, trapping, and fishing…
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People Hate National Parks and Monuments–Until they Don’t
Last week, the state of Utah filed a court challenge to the Biden Administration’s expansion of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments in southern Utah. The state is claiming the designations were unlawful and besides the state could do a better job of managing this land (which incidentally is federally owned by…
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BLM Fails To Protect Public Patrimony Through Renewal of Grazing Privileges Without Environmental Review
BLM lands in Oregon. This kind of abuse of public patrimony is legalized vandalism. Photo George Wuerthner Western Watershed Project (WWP) recently completed a review of Bureau of Land Management livestock grazing permits that are supposed to be regulated under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. With climate change and the West…
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Monroe Mountain Grazing Economics Flawed
The Richfield Ranger District of the Fish Lake National Forest in Utah released its draft reauthorization for grazing the Southern Monroe Mountain allotments in Sevier and Piute Counties. The economic analysis of its reauthorization document is typical of many Forest Service and BLM grazing decisions, whereby the agency emphasizes livestock grazing as an economically…
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Rancher Vandalism on the Dixie National Forest Utah
The nearly complete annihilation of vegetation by livestock vandelism seen here should result in the termination of any grazing privileges. Photo George Wuerthner I recently spent a few days on the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah. One of the defining characteristics of the forest is that nearly all the acreage that is not…
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Wilderness or Game Farm?
The Forest Service and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) are conspiring to weaken the 1964 Wilderness Act. They propose to use helicopters to capture and radio-collar exotic mountain goats which inhibit a few of the Wasatch Range wilderness areas like Lone Peak, Mount Timpanogos, Twin Peaks Wilderness Areas. In total, they will make at…