Category Archives: Yellowstone everywhere

Grazing permit buyouts, Point Reyes, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Public Participation Problems With Point Reyes National Seashore Ranching Plan

3 Comments
Polvorosa_Kline_TuleElk5
Tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore. Photo by Matthew Polvorosa Kline, used with permission.

POINT REYES, California— The National Park Service closed its public comment period on a proposed planto shoot native tule elk in Point Reyes National Seashore to make room not only for beef and dairy cattle, but for new expanded uses that will include sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, and row crops in the Seashore.  This is a very bad precedent for all of our national parks and monuments.

Numerous conservation groups, including Western Watersheds Project, Resource Renewal Institute, For Elk, Conservation Congress, Wilderness Watch, Sequoia ForestKeeper, White Shark Video/Shame of Point Reyes, John Muir Project, and Ban Single Use Plastics, as well as many concerned former National Park Service employees and individuals, are opposing the Park’s current preferred alternative, which would extend Ranchers’ lease-permits for decades. Extensive comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) were sent in by the groups asking for Alternative F—the No Ranching alternative that would restore native tule elk to more of the Seashore.

Yet questions of how many members of the public are actually being heard has arisen.

Continue reading Public Participation Problems With Point Reyes National Seashore Ranching Plan →

Point Reyes, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Point Reyes National Seashore Proposes to Kill Native Elk and Keep Cows

3 Comments
Polvorosa_Kline_TuleElk5
Tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore. Photo by wildlife photographer Matthew Polvorosa Kline. Used with permission.

Point Reyes, CA – Today, the National Park Service released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to amend the General Management Plan for the popular Bay Area parks Point Reyes National Seashore and the northern portion of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Despite public opposition to the ongoing agricultural impacts to wildlife and waterways, the draft EIS indicates the agency will manage beef and dairy cows as “integral” to the parks. This includes lethally removing any of the native tule elk that interfere with ranching operations. Continue reading Point Reyes National Seashore Proposes to Kill Native Elk and Keep Cows →

Cliven Bundy, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Always Cows in the Campground

7 Comments

To escape the heat of late July my wife Kirsten and I hopped in the camper and headed for the Swift Creek Campground on the Yellowstone River which flows down the south slope of the Uinta Mountains directly south of Kings Peak. We drove from our home in Salt Lake City up I-80 over Parley’s Summit, past Park City to Highway 40 then over to Kamas and Francis and over the shoulder of the Uintas on UT-35, the road rising up to nearly 10,000 feet elevation.

The dirt road into Swift Creek Campground ends where Swift Creek flows into the Yellowstone River at the border of the High Uintas Wilderness in the Ashley National Forest at just over 8,000 feet altitude.

IMG_0807.JPG
Kirsten at edge of High Uintas Wilderness

Except for some background Forest Service Rangers and Conservation Corps crew passing through to work on the hiking trails, we had the camp to ourselves. I had been here over 30 years ago to backpack with my brother up the Yellowstone drainage and back down the Swift Creek side. The place had not changed much and I was surprised and grateful to see it was not much busier.

Not much busier that is, except for the damned cows. Continue reading Always Cows in the Campground →

Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

We are way upside down

4 Comments

Upside down

Our public lands could be so much better. So easily. But we manage them in an upside down fashion.

Instead of managing the land for its intrinsic value as a natural landscape for the benefit of the vast majority of the public whom owns the land, we manage them for a noisy, tiny, belligerent, special interest group. The majority of us end up financing the degradation of our own lands. It is dumb of us. We don’t need to continue.

The main threat to the health of the land in the West, hard to see although it is everywhere, is public lands ranching. Nothing does more damage to public lands than public lands ranching. Continue reading We are way upside down →

Cliven Bundy, Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

The Single Best Idea for America’s Best Idea

10 Comments

Put an end to public land livestock grazing

Utah is 90 percent urban. Much of the West is the same. Yet it is run politically as though it is mostly rural and agricultural. Most Utahns live along the urban Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo. The Wasatch Mountains bordering the Front are in the U.S. Wasatch National Forest. Even though the Wasatch forests receive traffic like a major national park with millions of visitors per year, these forests are in the best shape of any of the national forests in the state. The reason? No cows. No sheep. No barbed wire. The public would never stand for it.

The rest of the state is a different matter. A majority of the land in Utah is public and most public land is run for and by ranchers, used up and abused by their private livestock. As a result these open lands are in sorry shape, continually overgrazed, constantly mismanaged. The land could be so much more beautiful. Instead, it is hammered, more than we know. And there is no good reason for it. Certainly not an economic one. Only a lack of public awareness allows this travesty to persist. Continue reading The Single Best Idea for America’s Best Idea →