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The seminal work on public lands livestock grazing and its web of impacts, Welfare Ranching – The Subsidized Destruction of the American West is now available for download.
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Giant Sequoia May Require High-severity Blazes for their surival. Photo George Wuerthner During the summer of 2020 and 2021, with one of the most severe droughts in California’s recent history, wildfires charred thousands of acres in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the mountain range’s magnificent sequoia groves were among the areas burned. I recently visited…
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On August 16, 2020 record heat spread across California. In Death Valley the temperate reached 130 degrees. But even places on the coast, normally cool due to off shore currents, reached records seldom seen. In Santa Cruz, on Monterey Bay, the temperature rose for two days to 107 degrees. The rising temperatures gave rise to…
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Biden and Haaland’s Opportunity to Further Conservation President Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland could go down in history if they created additional National Monuments. Although Biden has created or enlarged seven National Monuments by executive proclamation so far in his Presidency, numerous other public lands should be given protection before the November…
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Roberts Fire near Glacier National Park, Montana. Photo George Wuerthner A few weeks ago, I attended a panel discussion about wildfires. All the panelists and the moderator suggested that large mega fires resulted from fuels that had attained unnatural levels due to a “hundred years of fire suppression.” The idea that fire suppression is responsible…
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How many people know that in the state of Washington, more wolves are killed by Native people than any other group? You probably haven’t heard about this, even from wolf advocacy groups. How many conservationists know that Native people are among the staunchest advocates for oil development on Alaska’s North Slope, including in the Arctic…
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Hatcheries are death on wild salmon. Photo George Wuerthner The Indian Iron Curtain surrounds wild salmon and tribal policy and fishery management. Nearly every tribe in the Pacific Northwest says things like “salmon are sacred,” and they typically assert that salmon are critical to their culture. The problem is that while there is some overlap…
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I published this piece in Sierra Magazine in 2017 when the Trump administration reduced the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante NMs in Utah due to “local opposition” to the designations. A history review shows that in most cases, there is “local opposition” to park and wilderness proposals. Timid conservationists often cite local opposition to scale…
Author
Jonathan Ratner has been in the trenches of public lands conservation for nearly 25 years. He started out doing forest carnivore work for the Forest Service, BLM, and the Inter-agency Grizzly Bear Study Team, with some Wilderness Rangering on the Pinedale Ranger District. That work lead him directly to deal with the gross corruption within the federal agencies’ range program.