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The Aspen Decline What will our forests in the west be like in fall without those golden yellow leaves shining in the sun? Aspen forests in the Intermountain West support levels of biodiversity only exceeded by riparian (stream) communities. In this time of Climate Breakdown, aspen have been declining due to drought and temperature stress,…
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Chaparral is one of the least appreciated natural communities in the West. Yet this shrubland assemblage occupies 9-10% of California’s land area and is one of the most abundant vegetative communities in the state. Wildfire is a significant feature of this community. High-severity fire is the dominant fire regime. However, there are substantial myths about…
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A phrase attributed to labor organizer Joe Hill is fitting for this moment: “Don’t Mourn. Organize.” Or in the words of writer Ed Abbey,: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” During the last Trump Administration our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued the Trump Administration 18 times to…
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Top Line: Many bitter lemons can make quite fine lemonade, but only if the conservation community reinvents itself. As I sat down the morning after the election to pen some thoughts about the existential threat that Americans just elected to a second term, I went back and reviewed my Public Lands Blog post from eight…
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NOTE: Written in 2018, I offer this as a response to a TWN reader curious about “fortress preservation”. Once a year the NPS offers a guided tour so you, too, can experience a preserved piece of public lands [w/o citation & monetary fine].) In the 1990s I worked at Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. I…
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The Biden Administration and Secretary of Interior Haaland are ready to destroy one of the primary protections of the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Biden Administration, with the apparent support of Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, has sided with some Alaskan Natives and the previous Trump administration to approve the construction of a road through the…
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The Forest Service spends billions of dollars fighting fires and implementing fuel treatments like logging and prescribed burns to reduce large wildfires. A further problem with the emphasis on logging the forest is that a significant acreage charred each year is in non-forested landscapes like sagebrush, grasslands, and chaparral where “fuel reductions” by logging have…
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The folks at Population Balance have a lot of resources on the fundamental issue facing humans, every other species and the planet itself. While it is no longer ‘acceptable’ within the environmental community and society at large to mention the obvious elephant in the room, human population driving every problem we face, Population Balance is…
