On the Range

Stop Welfare for Wolves

Subsidizing the diet of wild wolves with domestic livestock is a form of animal welfare and leads to moral decay. It’s time to hold ranchers accountable for their practices of subsidizing predator diets with their four-legged picnic baskets known as cattle. 

George Wuerthner's On the Range

Commentary on William Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness” essay

William Cronon was recently featured in Ken Burn’s documentary on the National Parks. Cronon is a well known historian but his knowledge of the conservation movement context is limited in my view. Cronon is part of new post modern movement that critiques the conservation movement as imperialistic or trivial--only concerned with setting aside places to hike. However, he appears to miss many important contextual aspects of the debate. Below is a critique of his essay “The Trouble With Wilderness” where he outlines many of his concerns. I originally wrote this critique shortly after his essay appeared in Uncommon Ground, but I feel after viewing Burn’s movie it is still relevant to the larger wilderness debate today.  Cronon’s original essay can be viewed here.

On the Range

Are Hunters Stupid? The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Those advocating wolf hunting may be doing more to solidify opposition to all hunting than any other action they could take. 

Wilderness Bill Analysis

Perspective on the Tester Forest Bill

I’ve been holding off writing anything about Senator John Tester’s Forest Jobs bill for a while. I’ve talked to many people, both supporters of Tester’s bill and those who have many questions about its implications. As most people in Montana know, Senator Tester combined three different logging/wilderness proposals formulated by collaborative efforts affecting all or portions of the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest, Seeley Lake District of the Lolo National Forest, and Three Rivers Ranger District Kootenai National Forest into one bill that will designate wilderness areas. But the bill also mandates a minimum acreage for logging, new ORV and mountain bike trails, plus some other tax payer supported goodies like the specific subsidy of a biomass plant for Pyramid Lumber in Seeley Lake. He then added some twists of his own.

Unlike some of my friends and associates, I do believe there are some good things in Tester’s legislation and other things that I could live with if there were some modification of the bill’s language.

Beetle Hysteria Again

Beetle hysteria has raised its head again, and I am not talking about the Fab four. A prominent article in the New York Times titled “Tiny Beetle Adds New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” quotes many foresters and others who suggest that beetle-kill trees across the West will create larger wildfires and by implications are “destroying” our forests.

For instance, Montana’s State Forester Bob Harrington said as much at conference recently, as in the article. While it may seem “intuitively obvious” that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increases risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

At the heart of this and many other media reports are flawed assumptions about fires, what constitutes a healthy forest, and the options available to humans in face of natural processes that are inconvenient and get in the way of our designs.

On the Range

Wild Bighorns Threatened by Domestic Sheep

At one point in my life I was very interested in studying wild sheep. I almost accepted a graduate research project at the U of Alaska to look at winter diet and behavior of Dall sheep in the Brooks Range. I wimped out when I realized that I’d be alone months at a time in a tiny cabin on the North Slope peering through a night vision scope to watch the animals in the near 24 hours of darkness of mid-winter forage in 50 below zero weather. It just didn’t sound like that much fun -- though definitely interesting. But for a number of years I read everything I could about wild sheep, and I continue to follow research and news about wild sheep to this date.

Wild bighorn sheep were once fairly common in the western United States and Canada. Some estimates suggest as many as 1-2 million wild sheep once roamed the West. By 1900, over-hunting, habitat degradation and perhaps most importantly disease transmission from domestic sheep to wild sheep had brought the bighorns down to an estimated 15,000. Today there are about 75,000 sheep in the western US and Canada.

While that is a significant growth from its low point, wild bighorn sheep populations are nowhere near their biological potential. There is no doubt in my mind that the West could easily support far more sheep were it not for one thing -- domestic livestock.

Factory Farming’s Long Reach

The impact of factory farming upon the American land and native biodiversity is seldom discussed, but animal protein production has a significant impact upon the Nation’s land and water. The direct environmental problems like air or water pollution associated with large factory farming operations may be clear, but less obvious are the environmental impacts associated with the agricultural production of feed crops and other consequences associated with large factory farming operations.

Community Blogs: George Wuerthner

Mountain Biking and Wilderness—Not Convinced

I have been thinking a lot lately about mountain biking and wilderness, in part, because New West’s Outdoor Columnist, Bill Schneider, recently published a couple of thoughtful columns suggesting that wildlands enthusiasts join with mountain bikers to protect roadless lands from motorized uses.

George Wuerthner's On the Range

Why State Fish and Game Agencies Can’t Manage Predators

Without exception, state game and fish agencies do not treat predators like other wildlife. Even though state agencies are no longer engaged in outright extermination of predators, persecution and limited acceptance of the ecological role of predators is still the dominant attitude. State wildlife agencies only tolerate predators as long as they are not permitted to play a meaningful ecological role.