Public Lands

  • I previously wrote a piece about wolves killed by Gardiner, Montana. As I noted in my original post I was not able to independently confirm the details and have since learned more about the situation. Here’s the latest information I have been provided. Bison at Beatty Gulch just north of Yellowstone NP border. Photo George…

  • Giant Sequoia May Require High-severity Blazes for their surival. Photo George Wuerthner During the summer of 2020 and 2021, with one of the most severe droughts in California’s recent history, wildfires charred thousands of acres in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the mountain range’s magnificent sequoia groves were among the areas burned. I recently visited…

  • How many people know that in the state of Washington, more wolves are killed by Native people than any other group? You probably haven’t heard about this, even from wolf advocacy groups. How many conservationists know that Native people are among the staunchest advocates for oil development on Alaska’s North Slope, including in the Arctic…

  •   High-severity blazes are critical to healthy forest ecosystems. Photo George Wuerthner  I read yet another study circulated by UC Davis and doggedly promoted by the national media, encouraging more prescribed burning, thinning, and forest manipulation to reduce large high-severity blazes characterized as “bad.” The headline from UC Davis proclaims that scientists have documented, “Unprecedented…

  • Yellowstone was established in 1872 primarily to protect the unique geological thermal features of the park. Photo George Wuerthner  I see almost weekly repetitions of the myths or revisionist history about Yellowstone and critiquing conservation efforts in general, primarily coming from Anthropocene boosters which now include many in leftish politics. In the long run, I…

  • Did Native American use of fire make it so that wild country never really existed? When reporting about wildfire, current stories in the media often claim that in prehistory, fire was deliberately set by tribal groups so often that big or severe wildfires hardly existed. So, if that practice is restored today, it will be…

  •   The Richfield Ranger District of the Fish Lake National Forest in Utah released its draft reauthorization for grazing the Southern Monroe Mountain allotments in Sevier and Piute Counties. The economic analysis of its reauthorization document is typical of many Forest Service and BLM grazing decisions, whereby the agency emphasizes livestock grazing as an economically…

  • A BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) decision to allow livestock grazing to grow up to three times in the Owyhee Country of southwest Idaho has been blocked for now by a Dept. of Interior judge. Dickshooter Cattle Company, owned by J.R. Simplot an Idaho-based agricultural conglomerate, asked to increase cattle grazing by up to…

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