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Dear Oregon Bureau of Land Management staffers, I am writing today to ask you to please defend the proper administration of public lands. The recent decision to award Hammond Ranches, Inc. a livestock grazing permit and grazing preference to use four allotments in the Burns Field Office appears to have been politically influenced, and we…
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*Trigger warning: Animal cruelty and wolf abuse discussed below For over a year, my colleague at Western Watersheds Project and I have been paging through gory reports of dead livestock, most of them (questionably) attributed to Mexican wolf predation. I’ve gotten somewhat inured to seeing the bloody corpses of cattle, decapitated calves, and dissection necropsies.…
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There’s an organized campaign underway to get wild horses off America’s western public lands, and the livestock industry is both its primary salesman and beneficiary. It’s all about the money and expanding the livestock industry’s stranglehold on western public lands. The livestock industry has cooked up a cock-and-bull story about how wild horses are the…
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Prescribed burning by Forest Service. Photo by George Wuerthner There has been a spate of articles in various newspapers and magazines asserting that if the Forest Service were following burning practices of Indigenous people the large wildfires we have seen around the West would be tamed. Here are some representative of Indian burning will save…
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In Mexican wolf country, ranchers and agencies bandy about the word ‘coexistence’ as if it means an end to conflict between humans and lobos. If only that were true, and that the playing field were somehow level. Let us review, shall we? Coexistence: 1: to exist together or at the same time 2: to live in peace…
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Most land trusts and many conservation groups frequently ignore the impacts of Agriculture and focus on urbanization and sprawl as the main threat to biodiversity and ecosystems. A good example is the Teton Land Trust, Idaho. A recent story about their board president, John Nedrow, a farmer, talks about how he put a conservation easement…
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In September, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, testifying on behalf of Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso’s latest bill to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA) peddled the fake-news narrative that the ESA is “broken.” States would do a better job recovering endangered wildlife, Gordon testified, ignoring the obvious reality that every single species protected under the ESA…
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With the election of Joe Biden, we have a leader who recognizes that we need to use science to effectively deal with the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. To address these twin threats to the planet’s stability and integrity, the president-elect supports the goal of using science-based decision-making to protect 30 percent of…
