Public Lands
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When President Obama signs the 2016 Omnibus budget bill as he’s expected to do later this week, he’ll be signing off on a lot more than hard-fought spending agreements. In what appears as a victory for conservation, he’ll be approving funding for the new west-wide management plans for sage-grouse habitat, approved by the Bureau of…
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Once, years ago, I was hanging out with Doug Tompkins at his home in Chile, sipping tea and sitting by the fire, when Doug began telling me tales of his early climbing days with his first climbing partner, Johnny. I asked what became of Johnny, and Doug told me he had died in a climbing…
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Land and Water Conservation Fund reauthorized- Wildlife and Earth-trashing riders were deleted- There is some good news in the massive spending bill to fund the government. A months long battle to prevent a rider that would delist wolves in the Great Lakes and Wyoming was successful. The wolves will remain on the endangered species list…
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Lawsuit to the Supreme Court being prepared- Responding to a report from a New Orleans law firm hired by the Utah Legislature to do a legal analysis of Utah taking away the public lands of the United States, the legislature has ordered the preparation of a lawsuit to do that. In the past several years…
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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…