George Wuerthner
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https://www.fs.usda.gov/projects/shoshone/landmanagement/projects It is with dismay that I find the Shoshone National Forest is continuing with its plans to log about 2000 acres along nine miles of the scenic Chief Joseph Highway between Cody, Wyoming and Cooke City, Montana, including part of a roadless area. Mind you an acre is about the size of a football…
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I recently went on a Forest Service tour with a collaborative which demonstrated how ignorance and industrial forestry paradigms dominate most forest management activities, including the mindset of so-called environmental representatives on these collaboratives. Among the things we discussed was what to do about mistletoe. Mistletoe is a tree parasite that is common in forests…
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Bob Zybach who works for the forest industry published highly inaccurate guest commentary in the Eugene Register Guard. You can find Bob’s commentary here: http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/36070698-78/help-california-rebuild-by-managing-our-forests.html.csp Bob Zybach’s October 31st Register-Guard guest editorial on wildfire was full of misinformation and incorrect assumptions. He suffers from the Industrial Forestry Paradigm that sees forests as either “fuels”…
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The headline in a recent Capital Press article proclaims that “Preliminary data shows cattle, sage grouse can coexist”. http://www.capitalpress.com/Livestock/20171016/study-preliminary-data-show-cattle-sage-grouse-can-coexist The article then goes on to quote various researchers who are at the beginning of a ten-year study. According to the article, grazing allotments were grazed according to traditional patterns for two years, then the…
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Montana GOP Senator Daines recently published a simplistic and misleading guest commentary on a wildfire in the Washington Post. In that editorial, Daines, like many other misinformed logging proponents claims more logging would reduce large wildfires and he blames “environmental extremists” for delaying the forest reduction projects. Most of the wildfires burning under low to…
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Recently rancher Ken Andrus had a guest commentary in the Idaho State Journal basically championing Idaho agriculture. However, like almost all folks in Ag, he has an overblown view of his place in the Idaho economy. http://idahostatejournal.com/opinion/columns/the-ranchers-side/article_f5881123-e136-5f04-8c5b-06a869515b57.html For instance, Mr.Andrus suggested that Idaho AG was Idaho’s largest industry. This claim is created by aggregating anything remotely…
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Recently a bunch of older foresters wrote a letter that has been published in a number of Montana papers advocating more logging and other fuel treatments of our forests to reduce wildfires. These foresters all seem to be influenced by the Southwest ponderosa pine model which has infiltrated so much of the thinking of foresters…
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Dear Tom I see that you are planning an article in Montana Outdoors on “green grazing”. Without having read the piece, I can say that it will perpetuate the myth of “well managed” grazing. For every example of “green grazing out there I can show you 100 examples of where livestock production is destroying and…