Jonathan Ratner
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I won’t go into the most disastrous of Biden’s mistakes, the appointment of the jellyfish-like Merrick Garland as Attorney General, instead focusing on public lands issues. Looking at the trajectory of public lands and wildlife issues over the last half century, what I have found consistently is that when there is a Republican administration, strong…
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Thirty years ago, this month, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. The writers at WyoFile and Montana Free Press teamed up on an excellent review of the history of the event up through the present. The article has interviews with many of the people involved. Check it out at The Year of the Wolves.…
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Longtime habitat management techniques don’t stimulate vegetation growth in one sagebrush subspecies and may have detrimental effects on sage grouse and sagebrush-reliant songbirds, several studies show. The subtitle could be “No Sh#t Sherlock”. ts always nice when science is heard. For decades virtually all sage grouse experts were against killing sagebrush for sage grouse. The…
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For those of us who still read, we got a suggestion from a reader, triggered by the comments of Ken Brower regarding the paradigm shift from bio-centric to anthropocentric in US conservation over the last 40 years. When change is not cataclysmic but takes place over a number of years, humans tend to lose track…
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Editor’s Note: For those of you not in Montana, you may not be familiar with the editorials of George Ochenski. George Ochenski was an environmental and tribal lobbyist at the Montana legislature for 22 years and and wrote, funded and passed many of the significant environmental bills in Montana during those decades. He is Montana’s…
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Some years back one supposed expert named Allan Savory did a TED Talk [the ultra-processed McDonald’s of information] claiming that he was able to make deserts verdant and reverse climate change through livestock grazing. His absurd claims racked up nearly 6 million views and was enthusiastically welcomed by both livestock industry supporters and people who…
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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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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…
