Public Lands
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On April 24th, 2024, the Vermont Law and Graduate School and Wild Horse Fire Brigade sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) District office in Medford, Oregon, proposing a collaboration between the Wild Horse (feral) Fire Brigade and the BLM to reduce wildfire threat through feral horse grazing on the Cascade-Siskiyou National…
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The Gallatin Range, which stretches from Bozeman’s backyard south into Yellowstone National Park, is the most significant piece of wildland of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that lacks permanent protection. Protecting this area as wilderness has been an ongoing battle since 1910, when Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, recommended special protection due to its…
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The Washington Post published an article a few years ago that repeated the old and flawed idea that ranching will “protect” the land and suggesting conservation easements are the solution to sprawl. If championing cows or hayfields is your conservation policy, one must rethink the strategy. Keep in mind that nearly all the development found…
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The seminal work on public lands livestock grazing and its web of impacts, Welfare Ranching – The Subsidized Destruction of the American West is now available for download.
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This past week the Biden Administration reversed a permit approved by the Trump Administration that would have allowed the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority to construct a 211-mile industrial road through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to access copper and zinc deposits in Northwest Alaska. Except for the route across…
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An important question regarding sagebrush ecosystems, and species that rely upon them like sage grouse has to do with exactly what constitutes the fire rotation in sagebrush habitat? And a corrolary question is do current fire management policies emulate these historical conditions? William Baker’s paper, Scaling Landscape Fire History: Wildfires Not Historically Frequent in the…
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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…
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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…
