Grazing and Livestock

  • Sage Grouse, Livestock Grazing, and the Bovine Curtain

    George Wuerthner

    There is a lot in the news about the potential listing of sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Western politicians are using heated rhetoric about how a listing would destroy their economies, and the “western way of life” (read death and destruction to native wildlife). And in good western tradition, they blame the federal…

  • 19 years later, Cliven Bundy ordered to remove trespass cattle or face seizure by BLM

    Ken Cole

    The long running battle between southern Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM may be coming to an end soon. On July 9th, Nevada District Judge Lloyd D. George ordered Bundy to remove his cattle from BLM and National Park System lands in the Gold Butte and Overton Arm areas of southern Nevada. He was…

  • Mohave National Preserve bighorn sheep hit by pneumonia

    Ralph Maughan

    Suspected to have come from a domestic goat- The entire population of bighorn sheep in the Mohave National Preserve could die from pneumonia transmitted, probably, by a lone domestic Angora goat found in the desert near where the outbreak originated. The number of bighorn near Old Dad Mountain (200 to 300) has clearly declined and…

  • Western Watersheds Project Litigates 145,000 Acre Vegetation Treatment Project in Nevada

    Ken Cole

    In early June, Katie Fite and I visited southeast Nevada to examine the results of past vegetation treatments meant to “restore” sage grouse habitat in the Schell Field Office of the Ely District BLM. What we found was quite astonishing. Rather than restoring sage grouse habitat, the BLM targeted the best sage grouse habitat, near…

  • Impressions of Savory Institute International Conference

    George Wuerthner

    Boulder, Colorado. This past week the Savory Institute sponsored an International conference in Boulder, Colorado with a title of “Transforming the Landscape: Using Holistic Management to Create Global Impact”. The conference featured Allan Savory, a former Rhodesian game warden and parliament member. For forty years Savory has been promoting the idea that rangelands suffer from…

  • Bill would allow ranchers to voluntarily end their grazing allotments in exchange for private compensation

    Ralph Maughan

    Rural Economic Vitalization Act reintroduced- The Rural Economic Vitalization Act (REVA) would allow private parties to pay willing ranchers to relinquish their grazing permits on public lands, and then the grazing allotment would then be permanently closed to livestock grazing.  U.S. Representative Adam Smith of Washington State has just reintroduced this legislation. Conservationists and economists…

  • BLM Abuse of its Public Trust Duty – Conservationists Win Duck Creek Case

    Ken Cole

    Western Watersheds Project and Wild Utah Project had a significant win this week on the Duck Creek allotment of Utah.  In the longest running administrative grazing appeal hearing in the history of the Department of the Interior, including 12 weeks of hearings and a record of 15,000 pages, WWP demonstrated that BLM’s rangeland health assessments…

  • Wolves act to help bighorn sheep near Yellowstone National Park

    Ken Cole

    I recently visited Yellowstone National Park and, while there, my father and I used a friend’s place as a base camp in Gardiner, Montana.  From there we would drive about 10 miles to the Park where we watched wildlife, took photographs, and just enjoyed some of the solitude that Yellowstone provides during this part of…

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‎”At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.”

Edward Abbey

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