Law

  • Hammonds had law enforcement issues long before the arson charges

    Ralph Maughan

    They were almost charged with a felony in 1994- Today Dwight and Steve Hammond are said to be reporting back to prison to finish their resentenced terms. There is a debate in the media whether their two convicted arsons were all that serious. It turns out that is not the entire history of the Hammonds…

  • Threatened spotted owl in decline due to barred owl

    Ralph Maughan

    Northern spotted owl declines about 4% a year- Throughout its range in the United States, the northern spotted owl has declined at nearly 4% a year from 1985 to 2013, according to a paper published in the Condor. The findings came from eleven study areas in northern California, Oregon and Washington. The owl also lives…

  • A fine new book on a famous grizzly bear family of Jackson Hole

    Ralph Maughan

    I recently wrote about the reinhabitation of grizzly bears in Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole. There, two female bears and their families have really caught folk’s attention for about the last decade. The book is about them. Grizzly bear 399 and her daughter 610, both of whom have now had many cubs, and…

  • Can ag gag be strangled?

    Ralph Maughan

    The State of Wyoming has officially responded to the suit by conservationists, photographers, and food safety advocates against their “data trespass law.” That law criminalizes data collection by private parties on open lands in Wyoming if their intent is to present the data to the government. The state has “move[ed] to dismiss Plaintiffs’ Complaint for…

  • It’s a bad year for Greater Yellowstone grizzly bear motality

    Ralph Maughan

    We have run a number of stories this year about bears, especially grizzly bears, getting in trouble in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.  Since then the berry crop failed and the whitebark pine nut crop is mostly just fair. The number of known dead grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone this year is approaching 50 (46 as…

  • Wyoming’s data trespass law unconstitutional? Question goes to federal court

    Ralph Maughan

    Groups call the law “Un-American,” “trampling free speech and other fundamental constitutional rights” Five quite different groups have gone to federal court in Wyoming seeking to overturn Wyoming’s new law making it a crime for citizens to gather data on public land with the intent to give the data to the state or the federal…

  • The Greater Sage-grouse Denied ESA Protection

    Ralph Maughan

    Outlook for Iconic Bird is Bleak- By Greta Anderson,  Dr. Michael Connor  and Travis Bruner (208) 720-5595 Hailey, Idaho ­­– In a double-whammy that will doom the sagebrush steppe and the iconic Greater sage-grouse to a dismal future, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced today the Obama Administration’s decision to rely on incomplete planning efforts…

  • BLM Given Notice about Endangered Species Act Violations in Idaho

    Ralph Maughan

    WWP Intends to Sue if Grazing Continues to Harm Bull Trout in the Little Lost River Watershed- Boise, Idaho — Today, Western Watersheds Project (WWP) gave the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) a 60-day Notice of Intent to sue for the agency’s failure to protect a federally protected species from livestock grazing impacts on eight…

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‎”At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.”

Edward Abbey

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