Terry Tempest Williams writes “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found.”
I remember kneeling on the wet ground, the reddish-brown earth painting circles on the knees of my favorite jeans. Dew was everywhere and the smell of wet sagebrush seemed to soak into every pore. We sat watching the sun slowly begin to rise, sending streams of orange and pink light cascading over the Lost River Range. Then we heard it, the first “boom.” I remember being so disappointed with that sound. There had been all of this hype over the ‘booming’ the night before at the dinner table, and now it just sounded like my brother had popped his knuckles.
Then my dad handed me the binoculars. As a ten year old somewhat prissy girl, even I was impressed. Three or four male sage grouse were strutting back and forth on the lek in the distance. They would puff up the sacs on their throats and chest, and I just knew that if they had arms they would start beating their chests like King Kong atop the Empire State Building. Instead, they would kind of bob their heads and a hollow sounding ‘Pop! Pop!’ could be heard. Their tail feathers were fanned out in a magnificent array, looking almost like black spears against their reddish bodies, the same color as the circles on my knees. I watched the hens peeking out of the sagebrush seeming to hide just like us, not wanting to interrupt the magnificent display. (more…)
With only 1.1% of the beef production in the United States coming from BLM managed lands in the west, and a management system where all costs exceed income by a factor of eight to twelve, there is no economic reason to continue an activity that has resulted in the essential destruction of 80% of stream systems, the elimination of water quality and radical modification of wildlife and native plant habitat. It is time to start the end of this destructive use. I propose that public lands ranchers petition their representatives in Congress, who have always been ready to do their bidding, to provide for a buy out of whatever interest in these lands ranchers may have. If they fail to do this, they face inevitable economic extinction as their livestock use withers in the face of environmental and economic realities many of which they have brought down on themselves by their selfish and heedless excesses over many decades.
Jon Marvel is executive director of WWP. He lives in Hailey, Idaho.
The verdict is still out on what the specific impacts of global climate change really will be for our desert wildlands but government responses are definitely posing new challenges to already stressed wildlife on public lands. Climate change does pose a threat to biodiversity and may even threaten entire ecosystems. Meeting these threats requires more protection of sensitive habitats, particularly those providing connectivity for species movements, to preserve ecological flexibility. Unfortunately, so far the response of the agencies has been just the opposite of what is needed. They are allowing many of the public lands that would provide this flexibility to be considered for the industrial scale development of so-called green energy projects by private industry. (more…)
People often ask me what I teach at Boise State University and the answer invariably engenders glazed eyes, looks of puzzlement, or long, breathy yawns. Environmental ethics and logic are, unfortunately, seen to be dull and superfluous by so many people. More importantly, this indifference often silently sanctions the careless destruction of public land habitats and ecosystems. As an educator, I try to tackle this indifference by uniting environmental ethics and activism in the minds of students. Moreover, I teach my students that effective activism cannot proceed without a philosophical understanding of its own ethical motives and goals. (more…)
Those of us who care about public lands’ ranching tend to think about the ecological costs of livestock on the landscape: ruined streams, trampled and compacted soils, and degraded vegetation communities. Many of us care deeply about the impacts of cows on wildlife habitats and worry about the permanent damage that this powerful special interest group inflicts on our publicly-owned forests, deserts, and grasslands.
Thinking about these things in terms of the economics is just as frustrating. From grazing fees to fat cows, the balance is constantly tipping towards the side of the cowboys. (more…)
We think so too, and we’ve been urging the BLM to protect this place from the adverse affects of livestock grazing. We’ve been protesting proposed decisions to renew grazing permits on the Ironwood Forest National Monument because the BLM needs to complete a Resource Management Plan (RMP) for the monument before reissuing ten-year permits. (more…)
On March 5, 2010, in response to a court order from an earlier Western Watersheds Project lawsuit, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that Greater Sage-Grouse warranted the protection of the Endangered Species Act but that the FWS was precluded from listing the species by higher priorities. At the same time the FWS found that rare and declining subspecies of Sage-Grouse found in the Mono Basin of California and eastern Washington State were warranted for protection but also precluded from listing as threatened or endangered.
Recent news that sage grouse would not be listed under the Endangered Species Act, while celebrated by industry, was for some of us a moment of great sadness. Not because it was unexpected; it wasn’t. But because it confirms again that nothing really matters to us but human comfort and material prosperity. We continue to believe that only humans are necessary and important.
Sage grouse are a sagebrush-dependent species, which for us laypersons can be understood simply as a species whose health directly mirrors the health of the habitat it occupies. If sage grouse are becoming extinct, the habitat is also so fragmented and degraded it can no longer support them. There were once hundreds of millions of sage grouse, along with vast numbers of bison, bears, mountain sheep, elk, deer, wolves, lions and billions of smaller animals, birds and fish occupying the sage-steppe ecosystem. We have ruthlessly and in many cases systematically exterminated them and their habitat for our own benefit and continue to do so to this day.
Meat the Truth is a high-profile documentary, presented by Marianne Thieme (leader of the Party for the Animals, the Netherlands), which forms an addendum to earlier films that have been made about climate change. Although such films have convincingly succeeded in drawing public attention to the issue of global warming, they have repeatedly ignored one of the most important causes of climate change, namely: intensive livestock production. Meat the Truth has drawn attention to this by demonstrating that livestock farming generates more greenhouse gas emissions worldwide than all cars, lorries, trains, boats and planes added together.
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With only 1.1% of the beef production in the United States coming from BLM managed lands in the west, and a management system where all costs exceed income by a factor of eight to twelve, there is no economic reason to continue an activity that has resulted in the essential destruction of 80% of stream systems, the elimination of water quality and radical modification of wildlife and native plant habitat. It is time to start the end of this destructive use. I propose that public lands ranchers petition their representatives in Congress, who have always been ready to do their bidding, to provide for a buy out of whatever interest in these lands ranchers may have. If they fail to do this, they face inevitable economic extinction as their livestock use withers in the face of environmental and economic realities many of which they have brought down on themselves by their selfish and heedless excesses over many decades.
