No end to legal battle aver Nevada forest road and fish

Journalist Scott Sonner has been writing about conservation and fish and wildlife for a lot of years. I remember seeing his byline on stories moving on the Associated Press wire during my tenure at a Pennsylvania daily newspaper. In any case, the battle he writes about in this article has been going on just as long and it highlights what a road can do to fish and wildlife habitat.

Lethal bark beetles are heading to East

The invasive species has already killed millions of acres of pine forests in the West. This article has a nice-but-telling video.

Forest fire research questions wisdom of precribed burns

One major case study in this realm is the prescribed burn of earlier this century near the Los Alamos, N.M., National Laboratory that got out of control. Lay people have got to understand, though, that Wild Nature, in many cases, is dependent on natural fires, like those touched off by lightning strikes.

Forest fire research questions use of prescribed blazes

The research, examined in this article, says big, natural forest fires actually promote biodiversity.

New wave of tree-killing insects on the move in central Idaho

The media downplay, or fail to even mention, the fact that human actions are responsible for launching the infestations such as the one outlined in this article. Between bulldozers, loggers, road builders and tree-killing beetles it’s amazing that we have any substantial forests at all still standing and growing.

Wildfires in the West

The area along Interstate 84, the focus of this newspaper article, has been a fire-prone area for as long as I can remember. In fact, covering the occasional range fire outside the town of Gooding, Idaho, where I lived for just shy of a year while getting experience as a weekly newspaper reporter there, was a weekly deal during the summer of 1975.The temperature in Boise, Idaho, another former hometown of mine, reached 108 yesterday, a new record high for the date. Is climate change an underlying reason for the weather extremes were seeing across the country? The data appear to be saying yes.

Goodbye to the mountain forests of the West?

That would appear to be the new reality, as this piece from the New York Times states in good fashion. It’s no longer a matter of attempting to save and restore the status quo, it’s a matter of helping the land adapt to the climate humans are changing.

Bark beetle kill leads to more severe fires, right? Well, maybe

That’s the headline over this High Country News article. All of us who are advocating for an end to the emission of greenhouse gases should read and consider this piece. And that would include conservationists in the Adirondacks as well as conservationists and naturalists and birders in southeastern Arizona.

Spotted Owl listing could pale in comparison to Sage Grouse

So says the editor who wrote that headline for the Reno, Nev., paper. It’s a headline designed to serve up controversy of its own, likely for a follow-up by the local media folks. In any case, human disturbance, such as the logging of forests, building of roads, and outright habitat destruction via bulldozers is to blame. And still the human machine doesn’t learn. Here’s the article to which this headline belongs.

Drilling fee revenue buying new national forest lands

I have no problem with buying land for conservation purposes, but there’s something not right about allowing drilling just to get revenue for buying land. If society had its head on right, it would simply stop with the drilling and find another way to fund land purchases. Like a dedicated sales tax on gasoline. In any case, here’s an article about dedicating the revenue from drilling fees toward buying land.