Archive for the ‘Public Lands’ Category
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
by Jon Marvel
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.
Check out WWP’s archive of our semi-annual publication, the Watersheds Messenger
Posted in Activism, Environment, General Conservation, Grazing, Interior, Livestock, Public Lands | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
By Miriam L. Austin
Water troughs kill innumerable birds and other wildlife on public lands
I breathe in sharply. The bird in the trough is large this time. The feathers are scarcely wet – the head lying face down in gentle repose – yet somehow as if at any moment it might spring awake and gracefully lift into the sky on those powerful wings tucked so neatly against the sides of the body.
No! I cry out. But there is no response. No head lifts, no eyes plead for assistance. I realize suddenly that life and hope have only been recently abandoned by this still form, and my imagination begins to race. If only – if only I had made it here just an hour before, perhaps even just minutes ago, before that last fateful breath was taken. If only I could have plucked this beautiful falcon from the alluring but deadly water and sent it winging back across the night sky, back to Echo Crater where the prairie falcons nest and scream from the rocky walls.
But this bird will never fly again. Nor will the hundreds and likely thousands of other birds that have drowned this summer alone in water developments on public and private rangelands in Idaho. The prairie falcon was only one of three found drowned this summer in Laidlaw Park, Idaho. The three falcons, along with approximately two dozen other birds, died recently in troughs and tanks in the Craters of the Moon National Monument Expansion, where a warning was issued upon establishment by Presidential Proclamation “not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of this monument.” (more…)
Posted in General Conservation, Grazing, Livestock, Public Lands, Wildlife, water | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
by Dr. Mike Connor, WWP California
Desert Tortoise, Photo © Dr. Michael J. Connor
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…)
Posted in Bighorn Sheep, California, Desert Tortoise, Endangered Species Act, Environment, Global Warming, Interior, Nevada, Public Lands, Wildlife | No Comments »
Monday, July 5th, 2010
by Dr. Erin Anchustegui
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…)
Posted in Activism, Environment, General Conservation, Public Lands | No Comments »
Friday, June 25th, 2010
Ironwood trees are lovely in bloom. Does this look like good grazing land to you?
This 129,000 acre gem is located northwest of Tucson, Arizona and provides an important patch of unfragmented habitat for Sonoran desert tortoise, desert bighorn sheep, cactus ferruginous pygmy owls, and the Tucson shovel-nosed snake. It is one of the only places where Nichols Turk’s Head cactus grows on public lands.
Sounds pretty special, right?
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…)
Posted in Bighorn Sheep, Desert Tortoise, Endangered Species, Environment, Fire, Grazing, Livestock, Over-grazing, Public Lands, Weeds | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
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.
Read the entire article …
Posted in Activism, General Conservation, Grazing, Livestock, Public Lands, Wildlife | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
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.
(more…)
Posted in Idaho, Interior, Nevada, Public Lands, Sage grouse, Wildlife Habitat, Wind, water | 3 Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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.
View Bell Canyon in a larger map
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…)
Tags: western watersheds project, wilderness
Posted in Activism, Court, ESA, Environment, Grazing, Livestock, Public Lands | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Greater sage grouse © Ken Cole, WWP 2008
Saving sage grouse
Tribune Editorial, May 13, 2009
Updated: 05/13/2009 05:42:14 PM MDT
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.
(more…)
Posted in Environment, General Conservation, Grazing, Interior, Livestock, News, Public Lands, Sage grouse, Wildlife, Wildlife Habitat | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
The Yellowstone National Park Ecosystem is home to the last wild and “free” roaming buffalo in the world, a universally cherished but imperiled remnant of a species that once dominated the North American landscape. In 2000, governmental agencies adopted the Bison Management Plan (BMP) “to ensure domestic cattle in portions of Montana adjacent to Yellowstone National Park are protected from brucellosis… and to ensure the wild and free-ranging nature of the bison herd.” Though it has been a spectacular failure on both counts, it remains stubbornly in place — the wildlife equivalent of apartheid, a notoriously racist South African social policy that emphasized territorial separation and police oppression to control natural resources.
Bison being rounded up near Yellowstone. Photo: NPS
While paying lip service to free-roaming buffalo, the over-arching purpose of the BMP is to protect the “brucellosis-free” status of Montana’s cattle industry. To borrow a military term, this has been carried out with “extreme prejudice.” During the winter of 2008, 1447 bison foraging in the lowlands near the park’s border were killed by government agents, reducing this precarious population by over a third. The death toll under the BMP to date is over 3000 bison, equivalent to the entire population today of a species that once numbered 60 million.
(more…)
Tags: bison
Posted in Buffalo, Feed/Forage, Grazing, Livestock, Public Lands | 2 Comments »
