Threats
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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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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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WHY FIRE SUPPRESSION HAS HAD LITTLE INFLUENCE ON WILDFIRES A common assertion, oft repeated by the timber industry, the Forest Service, and even far too many conservation groups (like The Nature Conservancy) is that a hundred years of fire suppression has contributed to the large wildfires we are seeing around the West. The logic goes like this.…
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Adams County doesn’t have any so-called “herd districts” or areas where livestock are not allowed to simply roam free and Idaho’s open range laws don’t require livestock owners to keep their livestock off of highways. As described in several news articles published on November 2nd, a Subaru carrying two people struck a black bull on…
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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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The State of Wyoming has officially responded to the suit by conservationists, photographers, and food safety advocates against their “data trespass law.” That law criminalizes data collection by private parties on open lands in Wyoming if their intent is to present the data to the government. The state has “move[ed] to dismiss Plaintiffs’ Complaint for…
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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…
