Public Lands
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by Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project The Trump administration has just launched a process to dismantle the greater sage-grouse land-use plan amendments that were put in place in 2015 to avert an Endangered Species listing for the bird. The emerging consensus is that this move undermines wildlife conservation, and represents yet another attack on science,…
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by Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project On Monday, President Trump took his first trip to Utah to sign a proclamation gutting the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to make way for drilling, mining, and other commercial exploitation fundamentally incompatible with protecting fragile and priceless treasures. In his speech before an invitation-only crowd of…
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Conservation groups win injunction in Sheep Experiment Station grazing lawsuit BOISE, Ida. – A federal court in Idaho blocked domestic sheep grazing in bighorn habitat on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest yesterday, ruling that the risk to the South Beaverhead Mountains bighorn sheep population from deadly disease outweighs any possible benefit to the government-run grazing operation.…
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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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By Stephany Seay, Darrell Geist, and Ken Cole A female buffalo separated from her family group who will all be killed, is held in a sorting pen at Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap, where she waits before being loaded onto a stock trailer that will take her to the slaughter house. BFC photo by Stephany…
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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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By Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project and Val Cecama-Hogsett, Citizens Against Equine Slaughter When Erik Molvar of Western Watersheds Project (WWP) and Val Cecama-Hogsett of Citizens Against Equine Slaughter (CAES) met at a law conference in the spring of 2016, they had differing views of wild horses but they also had one clear common goal:…
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NASA just reported the drought in eastern Montana is so severe it is a once in a century event. Not surprisingly, despite livestock grazing that some suggest could preclude large blazes, the drought in Eastern Montana has spawned some recent blazes including the 270,000-acre Lodgepole fire. The fire raced across grazed public and private pasture…
