Category: Wilderness

Please pass the thistle …

Everts Thistle The plant to the left is commonly known as “Everts Thistle,”named after Truman Everts, a low-level bureaucrat who used its roots to survive during a 37-day ordeal that lasted from September 9 to October 15, 1870. The plant was and is abundant in Yellowstone National Park.

This post is not part of the normal fare of this blog. I have long known the survival tale of Truman Everts, but never the details. I have long known that cirsium scariosum, or Elk Thistle, was renamed in honor of this man.  On our way to Yellowstone last month, my wife read the Everts tale to our grandson and me from the book by Dave Walter, Montana Campfire Tales, and I was enraptured. It is an heroic tale, but Everts did not go on to become a governor or senator, to write a book or to even become famous. He was just a man who in the face of 37 days of insults to his body and mind, survived.

Continue reading “Please pass the thistle …” →

Little dictators

The above video is an interview of Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto, by Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and pundit. I don’t expect that the reader take time from other pursuits to watch it, but if you do, it is informative. Peterson talks about how far afield the gender identity movement has gone.

Over the past months I have become familiar with Steyn, and enjoy his writing and speaking style. He is a climate change skeptic, and at one time called Michael Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” In response Mann sued Steyn.

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YNP

We are in the last day, a travel day, after spending the last week in Yellowstone National Park with our 12-year-old grandson. What a fun time we have had! A few observations.

  • Over the years, especially when we lived in Bozeman, my wife and I have avoided the big attractions of YNP, Old Faithful, Lower and Upper falls and the Grand Canyon, and all of the geysers and mud pots and hissers. This time we made it a point to take the grand tour. We got to see those sites through the boy’s eyes. He was enthralled, as I was at his age. Our only regret, he did not get to see Morning Glory Pool … the day was waning, the drive ahead was long, it was two miles away. He offered to run there and back, as he is hockey-conditioned, but we had to move on. He’ll see it another day. Continue reading “YNP” →

Smarmy. MWA Embraces Sheep

Desertification is real, and irreversible.

The Montana Wilderness Association (MWA) has always thrown wildlife and native trout habitat under the bus when faced with a choice between a bigger budget and standing up to corporate enterprise.

https://wildmontana.org/wild-life/shearing-sheep-in-the-ruby-valley

Their latest sell-out, in alliance with other NGO sell-outs Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, Greater Yellowstone Coalition among others, is a deal with the devil — the industrial sheep business in Southwest Montana.


John Helle’s private, domestic sheep graze in prime grizzly bear, bighorn sheep (roadless, public land) habitat for 27 cents per head per month.

I have nothing against sheep, except when there are too many of them in one place, for too long. Ever been to the Middle East? Greedy men in the sheep and goat business have destroyed continents.

The story of conservationists and corporate capitalists working in harmony, side by side, whatever the industry, is a false one dependent on paid agents posing as people with a passion for nature. Their passion is for status, money and power. It’s that simple. One way to always tell the fake from the real deal is to look at the size of the budget and number of employees. Over $1 million annually pretty much guarantees nothing will get done for the land, water or wildlife. The other way to tell the shit from shinola is the media coverage. Lots of favorable, smarmy, human interest stories is a dead giveaway you’re being duped.

Mark and I have both been duped by MWA and similar ilk. If this little diatribe prevents one more honest conservation-minded person from being taken in and disappointed, it’s well worth the ink.

Quiet, Please! The Latest Threat to the Big Wild

It was another long summer of smoke-filled eyes in the West. An early snow storm in the Northern Rockies ushers in a season of peace and solitude. Wildfires frighten tourists, excite the media and reacquaint homeowners who built in the forest to Mother Nature’s laws.  Hey, I get it, fires are deadly and sexy – good ratings. But after decades of kicking the environmental can down the road, at the first sign of smoke most politicians want someone else to blame for their pathetic past performances.

Three of the last four summers (2015, 2017, 2018), Glacier National Park erupted in a fury of smoke and flames. Tourists scampered away to Yellowstone, “inholder” homes were evacuated, some incinerated. But that’s not why I picked up the pen today. Let’s talk about quiet, yes quiet.  Where has our quiet gone? Continue reading “Quiet, Please! The Latest Threat to the Big Wild” →

YELLOWSTONE GRIZZLIES RETURNED TO ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST 

MISSOULA, Mont. – A federal judge today restored Endangered Species Act protections to grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem after they were prematurely and illegally delisted last year. This victory means that the grizzlies will remain protected as a threatened species pending additional scientific analysis and a more comprehensive plan for their recovery.

“The Trump administration wants to see Yellowstone’s grizzlies taken off the Endangered Species list so they can be hunted, killed, and mounted on the walls of wealthy trophy hunters like Trump’s sons” said Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “But grizzly bears remain a tiny fraction of their former population and are living in an even tinier fraction of their former range.  Due to increased development and lack of connected habitat, it’s safe to say the grizzly bear isn’t really recovered yet.  These incredible animals deserve better from humans than a rush to the taxidermist.”

Continue reading “YELLOWSTONE GRIZZLIES RETURNED TO ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST “ →

Campaign of Illusions: Where the Zero Cut Movement to Save the National Forests Went Wrong

Zero-Cut No Commercial Logging again? A quarter century after it became the banner and guiding star for much of the grassroots forest movement, and then over a decade of semi-retirement, the campaign for this legislation is trying to mount a national revival. My question is simple: Is it the best strategy for a collapsed forest movement, daily confronting the debacle of rapidly increasing logging and roadbuilding in the national forests?

The combination of President Trump and an overtly hostile Republican-controlled Congress has shocked the grassroots, non-collaboration forest movement. Awakening from over a decade of a sort of slumber, these forest defense activists are daily burning up internet chat rooms with news chronicling cascading losses in Agriculture and Interior Department rules, regulations, administrative edicts, and newly-passed laws and congressional riders that roll back decades of environmental laws and court victories.

They are stunned to see the reality that their strategy of timber sales appeals and lawsuits are no longer holding back the bulldozers and chain saws of the timber industry and its U.S. Forest Service puppet. As they ponder these mounting losses, they watch their local forests logged with increasing ferocity, a comprehensive assault on public lands with transgressions that few imagined they would live to see. Continue reading “Campaign of Illusions: Where the Zero Cut Movement to Save the National Forests Went Wrong” →

Trial by Fire

Last evening I participated as one of five presenters in a live-audience,  multi-media discussion/presentation with a group of foresters, a smoke jumper and State of Montana’s tourism specialist in the Dept. of Commerce.  The topic was “Can we manage wildfire; Should we manage wildfire.”  As the lone “tree-hugger” on the stage, I tried to probe other panel members for the reasons for their beliefs – most believed in management as a “solution” to our wildfire “problem.”  Needless to say, the anthropocentric viewpoint predominated.

Soldiering on, I tried very hard to interject a few self-evident truths about nature and fire’s natural role in the continuous mystery of life in its many forms.  When cornered with truth, however, the other participants simply lied to escape reality.  I’m sure they believed their lies, but even to the live audience lying seemed obvious, but generally an acceptable answer to a confrontation with an inescapable truth.  Continue reading “Trial by Fire” →

21st Century Rape Culture

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

Is there an environmental “rape culture” in the United States? Yes, of course, there is. Most contemporary ecological problems, or “rape the land” mentality, is deeply rooted in Western patriarchal culture.

Rape (transitive verb) definition for this piece: 1a: (archaic) to seize and take away by force b:despoil 2: to commit rape on Continue reading “21st Century Rape Culture” →

“Saving” Watersheds and Urbanites

The Prussian “Iron Chancellor” Otto Von Bismarck is often credited with the saying: “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) recently introduced legislation to speed forest clearcutting and thinning projects in the Forest Service’s Northern Region.

The “Protect Collaboration for Healthier Forests Act” would adopt a regional approach to disputes over forest management projects that Daines has sought to implement nationally. According to Sen. Daines, “fringe litigators — radical environmental extremists — sue to stop commonsense collaborative forest management projects that would reduce the risk of wildfire.” Continue reading ““Saving” Watersheds and Urbanites” →