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…)
Sage-grouse require expanses of mature and old growth sagebrush habitats in gently sloping areas, tall residual grass cover with sagebrush overstory for nesting, and wet meadows for brood rearing. Their habitat has decreased about 60% over the last 100 years with acceleration in that decline in recent years.
Now, sage-grouse populations are facing high risks from new energy projects across their habitat. Industrial wind energy projects and huge utility corridor proposals are proposed for some of the West’s most remote and intact sagebrush landscapes.
Developers of these projects parrot the same fearbased talking points that have driven so many policies of the US in over the past decade, only with a climate twist: “If we can’t build the Windy Ridge kazillion megawatt wind farm on top of 20 sage-grouse leks, polar bears will die”.
Two current examples of destructive energy projects are the proposed China Mountain wind farm near Jackpot, Nevada on the Idaho-Nevada border, and the Ruby Natural Gas Pipeline that seeks to build a new energy corridor through critically important sage-steppe landscapes of northwestern Nevada.
In response to the recent Wild Horse hazing/roundup on the East Fork of the Salmon River allegedly to cut down on resource damage to public lands, Kenny Bradshaw, a rancher from Clayton, Idaho asks:
“Why don’t they make these big cattle outfits cut down on their damn cows ?”
WWP’s challenge of 17 BLM Resource Management Plans incorporating tens of millions of acres of public lands has gotten the attention of Eureka County, Nevada. The County seeks to intervene in the lawsuit.
Marvel said the lawsuit “charges that the BLM failed to comply with the National Environmental Protection Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act by not analyzing adequate alternatives that would protect sage grouse and other sage steppe wildlife species.”
“WWP claims that all the RMPs (resource management plans) are inadequate and violate the law in similar ways. The lawsuit affects about 34 million acres of BLM-managed lands,” he said.
But others react differently.
Nevada Cattlemen’s Association President Dan Gralian told Elko County Commissioners in June the Western Watersheds lawsuit is intended to drive people off public lands, and the suit affects all of rural Nevada. More than 300 grazing permits in the state would be affected if Western Watersheds wins.
Gralian called Western Watersheds a “radical environmental group.”
A funny-looking bird that fluffs its feathers to dance an elaborate mating rite just might be able to accomplish what well-funded environmental groups have been struggling to do for decades: bring about regional protection of vast swaths of Western lands.
The sage grouse might turn out to be the Great Basin’s equivalent of the northern spotted owl, the bird whose near-extinction slowed timber cutting in the Northwest and saved millions of acres of old-growth forests after it was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Will "Change" benefit America's wildlife heritage ?
The inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009 started a new era in public land management. Without question the priorities of our new President will be different and, we hope, much better than those of the last eight years of Republican control.
President Obama has committed his administration to science-based decision-making and, as a strong part of that effort, to the assessment of human influence on global warming and all its many negative consequences for life on earth.
Unfortunately, it is much less clear what the new administration’s policies will be for western public lands and the habitat those lands provide for native wildlife and fish.
Much of the uncertainty regarding the future of public lands and wildlife come from the Obama appointments of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior and Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. Both of these experienced and thoughtful politicians have lengthy backgrounds that suggest they may be entwined very strongly with traditional extractive users of public lands. (more…)
Let’s Pick Ourselves, Up, and Dust Ourselves off – By Putting that New Obama FOIA Sunshine Memo to Good Use!
Barack Obama’s inauguration speech spoke of the need to dust ourselves off – from what one can only understand to be the pall and banality of evil that
hung over this country for 8 awful years. That includes especially the destruction and waste of human life – and the parallel waste of and to the natural world – that was carried out by the Bush administration. Bush’s evil was aided by Complicit lackeys like Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and the rest of the Idaho Natural Resources mafia that ran Interior and helped sack other land and Oversight agencies in DC.
A recent article illustrating how Bush’s administration is taking pre-emptive, unilateral action to rewrite history on the environmental legacy of his Interior Department:
The Washington Post article demonstrates a few ’stretched’ accomplishment and the omission of some critical details.
Closer to home in Idaho, Interior under Dirk Kempthorne has the nerve to claim that the Bush administration was somehow responsible for the dramatic expansion of Craters of the Moon by a Clinton administration National Monument.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 15, 2008
CONTACT:
Brent Fenty 541-330-2638
Jon Marvel 208-788-2290
Ninth Circuit orders Bureau of Land Management to evaluate wilderness values on public lands
PORTLAND, ORE. — The Bureau of Land Management must rewrite its land use plan for southeast Oregon due to a landmark decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. The BLM wrongly refused to evaluate impacts to wilderness values on the public lands in the challenged plan, according to the decision, which overturned a district court decision upholding the plan. (more…)
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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.
