The Wildlife News

BLM

  • Time for some truth on the BLM’s ‘conservation’ rule

    Jonathan Ratner

    Editor’s Note: For those of you not in Montana, you may not be familiar with the editorials of George Ochenski. George Ochenski was an environmental and tribal lobbyist at the Montana legislature for 22 years and and wrote, funded and passed many of the significant environmental bills in Montana during those decades. He is Montana’s…

  • Invasion of the Pinyon – Juniper: Part II

    Jonathan Ratner

    I had a few minutes to polish and varnish a group of new samples I had collected on my last trip down to southern Utah, so I though I would provide a few examples, for those of you who run around P-J habitat. These three examples are from San Juan County, UT. This little pinyon…

  • The Invasion of the Pinyon Juniper

    Jonathan Ratner

    Back in 2017, the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, the supposed ‘crown jewel’ of the BLM’s National Landscape Conservation System proposed a massive pinyon-juniper (P-J) removal project in the Skutumpah area. The BLM announced that the project’s purpose was to remove post-European settlement ‘invading’ P-J and create sage grouse habitat. Given my experience that virtually…

  • Nearly 60 million acres of BLM land fail to meet agency’s standards for land health

    Jonathan Ratner

    The Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of public land across the U.S. More than 60% of that rangeland is being managed through leased livestock grazing allotments in Oregon and nine other Western states. But according to the nonpartisan Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, livestock grazing is the main reason why nearly 60…

  • On Agency Capture…

    Jonathan Ratner

    While those of us who care about our public lands and wildlife are often focused on on-the-ground conditions for this species or that, we can lose sight of the bigger picture. So many of the wildlands and wildlife problems we are concerned about are merely symptoms of agency capture, corruption. “The tendency of regulators to…

  • Sage Grouse “Collaborative Conservation Effort” is an On-Going Disaster

    Mike Garrity

    The numbers don’t lie — and the sage grouse “collaborative conservation effort” is a total and on-going failure. There were 16 million Greater Sage Grouse before Europeans arrived and began the destruction of the “sagebrush sea” in the Great Plains. The iconic birds were down to 400,000 in 2015 when Obama’s Secretary of Interior, Sally Jewell, rejected…

  • Potential New National Monuments Biden Should Establish

    George Wuerthner

    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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‎”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

“The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.”

Jim Fowler

“Our forests offer much more than just beautiful landscapes and wildlife. Each one has a different story to tell.”

Raveena Tandon

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