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.
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…)
While I appreciate that your article on Jon Marvel took a moment to give credit where credit is due— it is most certainly true that Marvel has done more than any other conservation group in the state to fix the flawed public lands grazing program– the bulk of the article’s argument hinges on a demonstrably false premise: that Marvel would be more effective if he would just play “nice.”
First of all, as anyone who’s ever spoken out against this state’s obscenely powerful cattle industry (dairy or beef) can easily attest: the cattlemen most certainly don’t play nice themselves. Implicit intimidation and outright threats are common. I suspect that even those with saintly dispositions would find it difficult, if not impossible, to continue to show “mercy” and/or “understanding” in the face of such harassment. (more…)
In a heated showdown with Western cattlemen, Idaho environmentalist Jon Marvel, tries to outlaw livestock grazing on public lands.
A profile on Western Watersheds Project’s Executive Director, Jon Marvel
True grit University of Chicago Magazine
By Lydialyle Gibson
He can’t help looking. Even though Jon Marvel knows there’s probably no bluebunch wheatgrass here, that its numbers in this field have been declining for years, so that a person could walk a mile through the sagebrush—and Marvel has—without seeing a single delicate blond seedhead, he can’t help searching the ground for one. In central Idaho’s dry sage-steppe grasslands, bluebunch wheatgrass is a key native species, year-round forage for elk, deer, and antelope. It’s part of what keeps the ecosystem whole.
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.
But some environmentalist outlaws like the Western Watersheds Project had no interest in compromise and since have used and abused the legal system of this country to deny the ranchers their rights and seeks to have the U.S. Government abrogate the legal contracts that allows them to use public lands for grazing.
It’s a funny diatribe, Patrick goes to great lengths to sling every possible piece of mud drawing upon over a decade of uninformed cliché and baseless accusation.
Western Watersheds Project’s Montana Office recently won Summary Judgment from the Interior Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals remanding the Bureau of Land Management’s attempt to build fencing for livestock grazing within a Wilderness Study Area on public lands in Southwest Montana.
The fencing would have altered the wilderness characteristics of the landscape for many reasons, but the Administrative Law Judge specifically cited BLM’s failure to consider the impact that the fencing would have on the view of the public landscape. (more…)
Today, WWP’s Arizona office and our attorney at Advocates for the West filed a lawsuit against ongoing grazing on the Sonoran Desert National Monument. The monument was designated to protect unique vegetation, desert wildlife, gorgeous scenery, and irreplaceable historic and cultural resources- all resources harmed by grazing. The Proclamation closed about half the allotments on the monument to grazing already, and it also stated that grazing should only continue on the other half if it can be determined to be compatible with protecting the monument objects.
The BLM didn’t need WWP to tell them that grazing is bad news for the monument because the agency already knows this. It has commissioned two studies that analyze the viability of livestock management on the monument, one of which reached the conclusion, “There is no known system of grazing that would be compatible with resource protection.” Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it?
However, the BLM has been turning a deaf ear to conservationists’ pleas and the science, and the agency has even gone so far as to renew permits without having made a compatibility determination and without completing a NEPA review. You read that right: The BLM has renewed permits despite Proclamation language urging the agency to use utmost care in allowing grazing to continue, and it has done so without even an EA.
The BLM asserts that it is going to make the compatibility determination and permit adjustments in the forthcoming Resource Management Plan. We think that incompatibility has already been determined and that the agency should get the cows off now. We hope that the Court will agree.
Read more about the Sonoran Desert National Monument on our webpage.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife begins its process of environmental review of a decision to graze livestock on state lands acquired to benefit wildlife:
The state resisted its legal obligation to undergo environmental analysis of the impact to wildlife and habitat of its decision to graze until Western Watersheds Project intervened. Now, the state agrees to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement but is apt to employ fuzzy math in its determination as to appropriate use.
Steve Herman, WWP advisory board member, as quoted in the article:
“I’m concerned about the areas that are hammered. It’s absolutely inappropriate to average these things,” he said. “It’s like removing a limb from a person and then measuring the other three limbs and dividing by four and finding that there are still four limbs — they’re all just a little shorter.
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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.
