The Wildlife News

Logging

  • Response to Gallatin Working Group on North Bridger Logging Proposal

    George Wuerthner

    The recent guest commentary by Joe Prinkki and Joe Skinner, members of the Custer-Gallatin Working Group, supporting the logging of Bridger Canyon was full of misleading and scientifically inaccurate common myths about forest health and wildfire. The editorial asserts that the forest is “unhealthy” and at risk of death from wildfires and bark beetles. That…

  • MOJO article on Gallatin Range and Wilderness

    George Wuerthner

    http://mountainjournal.org/gallatin-mountains-in-montana-deserve-wilderness-protection Gallatin Range Deserves Wilderness Protection: An Ecologist’s Op Ed GEORGE WUERTHNER SAYS ONE OF GREATER YELLOWSTONE’S MOST IMPORTANT WILDLIFE AREAS IS UNPROTECTED by George Wuerthner A view of the Madison Range, distant, from Ramshorn Peak in the wild Gallatin Range. Photo courtesy George Wuerthner Over the last 40-some years I’ve visited dozens of federal Wilderness…

  • North Bridger Range Forest Health Project Subterfuge

    George Wuerthner

    The proposed North Bridger “forest health” project on the Gallatin National Forest north of Bozeman, Montana near the already heavily logged area by Bridger Bowl is based on numerous false assumptions. The proposal displays the Forest Service’s Industrial Forestry bias and its subterfuge of science. The public no longer gives the agency a “social license”…

  • Forests or trees?

    George Wuerthner

    “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope?” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers encapsulated the idea that evolutionary processes shape all plants and animals.  Unfortunately, far too many in the Forest Service and the collaboratives that work with them fail to understand this basic idea—a “healthy” forest is…

  • Public Forests Should be Carbon Reserves

    George Wuerthner

    One of the biggest impacts resulting from logging our forests that is largely ignored by public land management agencies is the contribution that timber harvest makes to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Increasingly it is clear that the greatest value of our public forests might be to end all thinning/logging and protect them as carbon…

  • Forest Health Myths

    George Wuerthner

    We often hear that our forests are “unhealthy” and among the indicators of forest ill-health are large acreages burning in wildfires. However, if you look back a few centuries or more, you find that we have a fire deficit. Many paleoclimate studies document major wildfires long before there was “fire suppression”. Indeed, one study by…

  • Happy Talk about Weeds by Deschutes National Forest

    George Wuerthner

    I recently attended a presentation on invasive weeds by a representative of the Deschutes National Forest. The problem with the presentation was that it promoted and legitimized an industrial paradigm to weed threats. The Forest Service (FS) promotes an Industrial Forestry Paradigm that treats the symptoms, not the causes of ecological degradation. The biggest factors…

  • Protecting Forests Good For Climate

    George Wuerthner

    Logging, conducted ostensibly to “thin the forest”, “reduce fuels” or for so-called “restoration”, causes a net loss of carbon from forest ecosystems.   One of the best strategies for reducing CO2 levels is by protecting our forests. Yet few environmental groups, even those who focus on climate change, advocate for the reduction of logging on…

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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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