George Wuerthner
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Most of environmental/conservation groups in the West are participants in various public land collaboratives. The majority are forest-oriented like the Northwest Forestry Collaborative https://www.conservationnw.org/our-work/wildlands/forest-collaboration/ or the Deschutes Forest Collaborative in Oregon http://deschutescollaborativeforest.org/ or the Southwest Crown Collaborative in Montana https://www.swcrown.org/. Though there are others like the Wyoming Public Lands Initiative https://wcca.wygisc.org/wpli/homepage/index.html which focuses primarily…
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The Pinedale Ranger District on the Bridger Teton National Forest (FS) just came out with its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Upper Green Grazing Allotment. This allotment covers 170,00 acres and is the largest FS grazing allotment in the country. The FEIS is a huge Christmas present for the ranchers grazing this area…
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Oregon Public Radio had a story about the Deschutes River and its water flow problems. The Deschutes River which historically had one of the most constant flows of any river in the United States due to the abundance of springs that form its headwaters. The annual difference in high and low flows was about 6…
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With the final recommendations by Secretary Zinke and Congressional Greg Walden asking Donald Trump to reduce the size of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument to facilitate more logging, it behooves Oregonians to work towards increasing the protection of this unique area. It is well established that many national monuments designated by Presidential proclamation eventually…
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Among the many threats to our public lands now before Congress is House Bill HR 1349 which would amend the Wilderness Act to allow mountain biking throughout the nation’s wilderness preservation system. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate. The legislation is being promoted by a mountain biking group with the happy sound inclusive…
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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”…