Public Lands
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Conservationists, if they wish to succeed in legislating more wilderness and parks in the West, must actively counter the misinformation and flawed logic surrounding forest health, thinning and wildfires. It may seem counter-intuitive, but fighting the fear of fire is, often, the best way to promote new wilderness/park designation. There is an on-going effort by…
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The Plan to Turn Brooks Camp Into a Theme Park- By Dr. Barrie Gilbert One of Alaska’s most treasured bear-viewing sites is about to be turned into a destination theme park, sacrificing grizzly bear habitat on the altar of commercial development. After a decade of development planning, EIS and public input, once aimed at major…
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One of the assumptions behind federal legislation like the Resilient Federal Forest Act is that more thinning of our forests will halt or significantly reduce large wildfires. Yet the scientific evidence for such a conclusion is ambiguous at best. Any number of studies have find that thinning usually fails under severe fire conditions. First, the…
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BLM Plans to Turn Landscape into a Cattle Forage Zone. The highly vaunted, but meaningless, land management plans to save sage grouse are being put to the test with the recovery plan for the Soda Fire which burned 225,953 acres along highway 95 on the Oregon/Idaho border in August. Instead of focussing on reestablishing native…
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Award-winning documentary exposing Wildlife Services’ war on wildlife coming to four different communities in Idaho Moscow- An award-winning wildlife documentary that Jane Goodall wants millions of people to see is coming to Idaho. Predator Defense’s film, EXPOSED: USDA’s Secret War on Wildlife, features three former federal agents, and a prominent Congressman, blowing the whistle on…
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http://www.nature.org/magazine/archives/new-life-in-the-badlands.xml The above link is to an article published by The Nature Conservancy exalting the Malpai Borderlands group in Arizona and New Mexico. You can read the article for a little background on the Malpai group, but the basic story is relatively simple. A very large ranch called the Gray’s Ranch lying along the Mexican…
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Court resentences the Hammonds saying the original judge let them off easy — so easy it was against the law- Back in 2010 to 2012 it was a big story, an Eastern Oregon ranch family, Dwight and Stephen Hammond were believed to have set fires to illegally burn public land, cover up poaching crimes, and perhaps…
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The decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) not to list the Greater Sage Grouse under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was an adroit dance of politics. The plan to “save’ the sage grouse has no clothes. The government proposed solution to the bird’s decline includes 14 new sage-grouse recovery plans—consolidated from 98…