My Old Man and the Forest

You say you love America and want to preserve it as it is?

Good idea, and simple enough: Buy some of it.

Yes, that's right: save land the old fashioned way.

Buy it.

Buy land in a strategic manner, and give it back to the State or the Feds or a local conservation trust or conservancy so that it is part of a larger aggregated whole that can be handed down to your children and grandchildren to come.

People are doing this all over this great nation, and you should suit up and join the effort.

No, you do not have to be rich to help. In parts of this country, you can still buy land for a few hundred dollars an acre, and most everywhere you can still buy it for a few thousand dollars an acre.

Give an acre ... or 10 .... or more.

My father (see below) gave a square mile of land to the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust to help build the Pine Mountain Legacy Project, which aims to connect existing protected areas on Pine Mountain to form a contiguous forest block and migratory corridor from Virginia to Tennessee —- a distance of nearly 110 miles.

First Square Mile for Pine Mountain

David Burns is the first donor of a square mile of land to help preserve old-growth forest and habitat on Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky.

Burns gave to Kentucky Natural Lands Trust from 1997 to 2007 to purchase a square mile – 640 acres – for the Pine Mountain Legacy Project. KNLT is drawing attention to the First Square Mile to inspire others to give a mile, or a half-, or a fourth-.

Burns, 79, of Washington, D.C., says, "To me, it’s obvious. Kentucky's mountains are beautiful and full of life. If we want mountains for future generations – and our mountains are being blasted away right now – then we must buy the land and protect it. I am not rich, far from it. But I asked myself, is there a goal I might achieve
-- even if I'm able to give only a tiny bit at a time? So I pledged to do it. It was a stretch, and it took ten years, but it happened. This is the most significant thing I have ever done.'

David’s love of Kentucky's mountains developed as a child in Pineville. His ancestors are noted in Families and History [Bell County Historical Society] as early as 1808. His father, Judge Burns, worked for the Railway Express (Dave calls it "the UPS of its time and place.") The L&N depot was daily entertainment.

Dave’s mother, Louise, worked for the Modern Bakery, wrapping cakes (the beginning wage -- ten cents an hour! -- was common in 1940). Sweet cakes were essential for miner’s lunch pails.

Dave's uncle, thanks to intelligence and 'seniority,' eventually rose to superintendent of International Harvester coal operations at Benham.

Another relative, Annie Walker Burns of Wallins Creek, wife of his Dad's cousin, initiated the Mountain Laurel Festival to honor Dr. Thomas Walker. The festival was first held in 1931 at Clear Creek and is now Kentucky’s longest-running festival.

At 15, Burns made his way to Washington, D.C. "I was," he says, "an out-of-control adolescent with no adult supervision. Political patronage saved my life! Alben Barkley, majority leader of the U.S. Senate, gave me a job, and I attended Page School in the basement of The Capitol." Dave later had a second job as copy boy for The Washington Evening Star.

He served 1946-49 in the U.S. Air Force. He never graduated from the first half of tenth grade. He was rejected by the U. of Kentucky (and many other colleges), but was admitted to Princeton. "I wrote long letters to everybody I had ever heard of; I promised the Dean of Admissions 'I won't let you down.'" He graduated with
honors and won a Fulbright for graduate study in France and Austria.

He joined the Foreign Service in 1955, serving at U.S. missions in Damascus, Beirut, Isfahan, Rhodesia, Tunis,Bamako, and Algiers, and studied Arabic for two years in Tangier.

He was Project Director (1978-1990) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, coordinating scientists around the world to produce scientific studies of causes and effects of greenhouse climate change.

Burns is also a musician and writer. He led the Hot Mustard Quintet (1970-2005), which performed hundreds of gigs in the Washington area (and in Jakarta, Sumatra and Bali), and produced seven CDs. He is a singer and pianist, and also plays trombone, string bass, and tuba. His love of music started as a child in Pineville where, at age 2, he would sing atop marble soda-fountain counters at Rexall and Flocoe drugstores, earning a penny per song.

"I love music. But, really, my obsession is books!" As a child, he set a goal to read every book in the Pineville Public Library. "Well, I might have gotten close -- we didn't have that many books in 1934!" In fifth grade, he read The World Book Encyclopedia, A-to-Z.

The appetite for words led to writing. Dave’s articles and op-eds have been published widely, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. His book, Gateway: Dr. Thomas Walker and the Opening of Kentucky, is a richly-illustrated account of the first colonial explorer of Virginia's unknown 'wilderness' -- America's first Western frontier.

Burns and his brother donated $10,000 to create a Historical Site to honor their mother. The site is where Walker first saw and named the Cumberland River. A platform provides a dramatic vista through Pine Mountain Water Gap (known locally as "The Narrows.")



Anyone with the desire to join Burns in protecting a square mile, half a square mile, or any amount of natural areas on Pine Mountain, can contact KNLT at 1-877-367-5658 or email us at info@knlt.org.

In Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia we use to think the mountains would be there forever.

But that's not really true, is it?

Today we have mountain top removal, in which the tops are cut off the mountains, the coal is scooped off, and the toxic slag is pitched into the creeks to poison our fish and communities forever.

The jobs created are few, and the profits are shipped off to New York City.

Kentucky keeps the poison and New York City keeps the cash.

This is the oldest game in America -- what my old friend Garrett Hardin used to refer to as the CC-PP game of privatizing the profit and communizing the costs.

America deserves better, but it will not get better so long as people like you and I sit on our wallets and our asses.

Fight mountain top removal with a click of your mouse.

And donate land, either in Kentucky or closer to home in your own state or community.

Yes, America is worth fighting for and it's certainly worth protecting. But remember that not all the fights are overseas, and not all of those hell-bent on destruction live in far-off lands.


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American Hero: Real Hook & Bullet Conservation

This isn't the NRA. This is real hook and bullet conservation.

From Oxford American, the "southern magazine of good writing":

They’re the polluters’ worst nightmare: greens with guns. They hunt, but always eat what they kill. They work within the system, and they’re not afraid to go to court. They punch above their weight in government circles, operating on a budget smaller than your average lobbyist’s bar tab. And despite Florida’s best efforts to drain, pave, and overpopulate itself to death, they are hell-bent on saving it.

The Florida Wildlife Federation is the most effective environmental outfit in the South, maybe in the country. Over the past decade, this eclectic posse of deer hunters and bunny-huggers, backyard Darwins and bird-watchers, dedicated anglers and nouveau Thoreauvians, has become a force to be reckoned with. “We’re agile and we’re lean,” says Manley Kearns Fuller III, president of FWF. “If you’re not selective with what you emphasize, you can get bogged down. You need a plan, win or lose. When you get whipped, you’ve got to have a masterful retreat, like Robert E. Lee after Gettysburg."

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One Tough Old Bird

In the picture above, taken last Thursday, Florida Bald Eagle No. 512 is released back into the wild after being rescued and rehabilitated for the second time in 19 years.

This bird was first brought into rescue in 1996, after being shot in the leg and through the wing. Released back to the wild in 1998, she thrived until getting mugged by another eagle while attempting to defend her nesting site. It seems a younger female eagle kicked her off her roost in late November, pinned her to the ground, plucked her chest feathers, and then skewered her with her talons.

Rescued after the battle, Bald Eagle No 512 spent the next three months recovering from her injuries at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. Now healthy, #512 was re-released at the same exact same location she first flew to freedom in 1998.

How long do Bald Eagles live? In zoos, they have lived as long as 48 years. On average, however, 15-20 years seems to be about average, so Bald Eagle No. 512 is doing pretty well thanks to a little help from her friends.

• Related Links:
  ** Bald Is Beautiful
  ** Return of the Bald Eagle
  ** Delisting the Bald Eagle a Sign of ESA Success
  ** Dead Frozen Eagles in a National Repository
  ** Let Us Give Thanks for Wild Turkey and Uncle Sam
  ** You Gotta Break Some Eggs to Build a Movement
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Population Growth & the Limits of Accommodation

I have, at various times in my life, been a ghost -- the hand inside the sock puppet, the idea and knowledge and voice behind the person with good hair who reads the lines in a speech and gets promoted up the chain of command for giving it.

There are no complaints here, so long as the check clears.

That said, sometimes, long after a speech has been given and no one can quite remember who gave it, I like to dust off a piece and trot it out for the ideas that are in it.

The speech, below, was given to Western land managers in Wisconsin some 5 or 6 years back by someone I will not mention, and it details the complex relationship between U.S. population growth, regulation, and the environment.

I post it here simply to illuminate the rather complex relationships that exists between population growth, economic growth, regulation, and agricultural policy.

The Limits of Accommodation

It's great to be here in Wisconsin, the home state of Aldo Leopold.

It is a true honor to be a stand-in for Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Father of Earth Day.

Senator Nelson was originally asked to speak about the environmental consequences of U.S. population growth for the American west.

I am going to speak on the same topic - a topic too often given short shrift in the environmental movement, but one that remains a core environmental issue.

My comments about population and the environment follow a pretty simple structure -- I am going to talk about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

I am not going to give you answers - I am going to give you scenarios and choices and ask you to think about those choices.

Good people can -- and will -- choose different futures for America and for the west.

That is perfectly fine. I am not interested in the choice so much as the process. I want the process to be thought through. I want the issues to be hashed out and mulled over.

And above all, I want the answers to come from the American people - not politicians in Washington or stock traders on Wall Street.

As Wood Guthrie said so well, "this land is your land."

First, let me talk about where we have been.

Well, we've been on Earth.

I make this point not to be flip, but to say that the story of U.S. population growth closely parallels that of world population growth --- at least through the first half of the 20th Century.

Between 1930 and today, world population tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion people.

This is a phenomenal rate of population growth, and it has shaped every thing on this planet, from coastlines to mountaintops, from the jungles of the Amazon to the pack ice of the Arctic.

During the same period of time, the population of the U.S. also grew by leaps and bounds, soaring from 122 million people in 1930 to over 285 million today -- not quite a tripling, but far more than a mere doubling.

Between 1935 and 1965, the U.S. and the world shared a similar population and environment story.

As human populations burgeoned, massive amounts of toxins - from raw sewage to pesticides - were washed into fresh water streams and rivers.

Overgrazing of marginal lands resulted in rapid erosion and desertification on all continents.

Over-fishing, pollution, and coastal development resulted in the systematic depletion of fish stocks and the destruction of reef systems.

New roads were ripped into once pristine areas - from jungles to mountaintops.

As more and more humans spread into new areas of the world, once-natural eco-systems were transformed into human-focused profit centers.

This is the population-environment history of the world, and for a long time it was the history of the United States as well.

Beginning about 1965, however, something interesting began to happen -- the environmental history of the U.S. began to diverge from that of much of the rest of the world.

While population growth continued apace, both in the U.S. and the world, the environmental consequences of population growth seemed to slow here in the U.S.

In the last 30 years our water has actually gotten cleaner

Our air has gotten better.

Much of our most depleted wildlife stock actually recovered.

We have more forest in the U.S. today than we did in 1930.

How is this possible?

The short answer is law, government and urbanization -- the stuff too many pure population pundits never talk about.

In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act which resulted in the federal government buying back millions of acres of denuded mountain tops that had been ripped and robbed by timber and coal mining interests. This land is the backbone of the National Forest system we have in the Eastern U.S. today.

At the same time, large-scale farm mechanization and the railroads made marginal farmlands in the eastern U.S. less profitable. Millions of cleared acres were allowed to return to forest.

Even as forests began to regrow back East, a new environmental awareness began to take hold in the U.S.

Led by people like Senator Gaylord Nelson, the nascent environmental ethic that had begun with Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, began to take off. By Earth Day 1970, environmentalism had become a mainstream political force - a widely shared common value uniting us across race, religion, political party, class, and geography.

This was a marvelous thing, and marvelous things came out of it. Thanks to the growth of the American environmental movement, new laws were implemented, including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

The result was that our air and our water actually got cleaner.

The same divergence that was occurring in terms of forests and clean water and clean air also began to happen with wildlife.

Commercial hunting of wildlife was banned at the turn of the century and, with the passage of the Lacey Act, wildlife hammered to the edge of existence began to slowly recover.

This recovery process was greatly accelerated with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and with the rise of a professionally-trained corps of science-based land, water and wildlife managers.

The result of new law and good government was extraordinary: things began to turn around.

And what is more remarkable - or perhaps most remarkable - is that things began to turn around even though the population of the U.S. grew by leaps and bounds.

Consider this: Between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the United States.

This is a LOT of people. One hundred million people is a population greater than ALL of the current populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Wisconsin COMBINED.

It is an extraordinary testament to America's environmental ethic and good government that between 1970 and 2000 we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. and the water got cleaner ... and the air got cleaner.

Today we have more forests in the U.S. than we did in 1900 or 1930 or even 1970.

Today we have more protected land in the U.S. than we did in 1900, or 1930, or even in 1980.

Whale watching is a growth industry.

Today it is hard to imagine that populations of Canadian geese, whitetail deer, and beaver were once in critical danger. Today the issue for these creatures is control, not protection.

Wild turkey have rebounded too. Today there are more wild turkey in the U.S. than there were when Columbus landed.

The American Bison - almost extinct 100 years ago - is now so abundant the federal government will spend $10 million this year to manage down their numbers.

Elk populations have rebounded nicely too. A small elk herd was recently reintroduced into Kentucky -- where they were last seen in 1850.

Elk are not the only thing showing up in old haunts. Red wolves are back in North Carolina. And in Minnesota there are now over 2,500 gray wolves -- twice the target number the Fish and Wildlife Service hoped to achieve for that state when wolves were first protected back in the 1970s.

The alligator story today is not that they are endangered, but that they are eating the poodles of the retirees in South Florida.

The Bald Eagle may soon be off the endangered species list. The Peregrine Falcon already is.

Blue bird houses have helped restore the eastern blue bird. Wood duck nest boxes have brought back the wood duck.

All of this is great news. And it is great news that occurred despite the fact that we added 100 million people to the population of the U.S. in the last 30 years.

* * * * *

Please don't misunderstand me. I am NOT saying everything is fine with the environment.

We still have very serious environmental problems in the U.S. These include:

• Phenomenal - even alarming -- wetlands loss across the U.S.
  
  
• A coastal fisheries stock decimated by overfishing.
  
  
• Massive crown fires in our forests out West due to 40 years of Smokey-the-bear fire suppression that wreaked havoc on the natural fire cycles.
  
  
• Migrant bird species in decline over vast portions of the U.S.
  
  
• Many wildlife species are still teetering on the edge - the condor, the ocelot, the lynx, and the grizzly bear - to name just a few.

Having said that, the BIG environmental story of the last 30 years is that we have made a HUGE amount of progress right here at home thanks to the rise of environmental regulation and consciousness-raising over the last 30 or 40 years.

I am very proud to say Audubon was part of that effort - an effort you folks were instrumental in making happen as well.

I am amazed it was possible despite the addition of 100 million more people in the United States.

Population growth did not HELP the situation, but the fact that progress was made DESPITE rapid population growth is a remarkable story.

* * * * *

So that is where we have been.

Now let me tell you where we are.

Right now, in terms of population size, the U.S. is the third largest country in the world -- behind only China and India.

The U.S. has the fastest population growth rate of any industrialized country in the world. No country in Europe has a population growth rate as fast as the U.S., and neither does Japan or Canada or East Asia.

Right now, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half of all U.S. population growth is due to immigration from overseas, and about half is due to native-born Baby Boomers moving to complete their own families.

Taken as a whole, the population growth rate of the U.S. is 1.1 percent. This may not sound like much - but it means our current population is on a trajectory to double in about 60 years.

To put it another way, our population growth rate right now is faster than that of China or Argentina, and it is about 10 times faster than the population growth rate of Western Europe.

Right now, we are adding about 3 million people a year to the population of the U.S. To put it another way, in terms of population growth, we are adding the population of Iowa every year.

Of course, U.S. population growth is not uniformly distributed.

Out West - where water is scarce and our last pristine wild lands can be found -- we find population growth rates that are truly sobering.

Nevada's population growth rate is now more than 4.3 percent a year - a population growth far faster than that found anywhere in the less-developed world . . . Faster than that of any country in Africa . . . Faster than that of any country in Asia . . . . Faster than that of any country in Latin America.

And Nevada is desert country.

So too is Arizona, which has an annual population growth rate of 2.8 percent -- the same as Pakistan's . . . the same as Tanzania's . . . the same as Honduras.

Colorado's population growth rate is 2.3 percent per year - a rate of population growth equal to that of Ghana and El Salvador . . . and faster than that of the Philippines.

Texas has an annual population growth of 1.89 percent per year - about equal to that of Mexico, and faster than that of Lebanon or Indonesia.

Of course, the U.S. is not a Third World country - we can pipe water in from vast distances, we can invest in low-flow shower heads and toilets, we can put in drip irrigation systems.

And - if push comes to shove - we can ban golf courses, swimming pools, and grassy front lawns.

In many communities and in many states these measures are already beginning to be put into place as communities find that local population growth has overshot the ability of the region to supply people, business and agriculture with all of their competing water needs.

Water is only part of the problem, of course.

As we were recently reminded with the energy crisis in California and the controversy over drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge -- and in every twist and turn of Middle East politics -- the U.S. is an oil-importing nation.

The good news is that conservation has done great things in the U.S. in the last 30 years. Our refrigerators, air conditioners and home heating systems are far more efficient that they were just 30 years ago. Our cars get twice as many miles per gallon as they used to.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that U.S. population growth has entirely negated these oil-conservation measures.

Remember those 100 million people that we added to the population of the U.S. between 1970 and 2000?

Those 100 million people are equal to ALL of the population of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho ... ALL the states west of the Mississippi River COMBINED.

Now think about this: ALL of the cars driven in those states - and all of the homes heated and cooled in those states - represent the oil draw down of just 30 years of U.S. population growth.

Everything the current population of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River consumes, pollutes and builds -- now and into the future and forever - is equal to just the last 30 years of U.S. population growth.

The resource consumption and environmental damage caused by the population growth of the last 30 years is not a one-lifetime phenomenon. It will last for the lifetime of the kids and the grandkids of these 100 million new people. The human impact will NEVER stop. And the impact is huge - it is all of the land, water and resource use of the entire population of the U.S. now living west of the Mississippi River.

* * * * *

So that is where we are.

Now, let me talk about where we are going.

The first point I want to make is that we are going to have more population growth.

The question ahead - at least for the next 50 years or so - is not whether we are going to have population growth, but how much of it there is going to be.

The U.S. Census Bureau puts out three scenarios for the year 2050. The high and the low are outer-boundary possibilities, and the middle scenario is the "least likely to be wildly off the mark."

The Census Bureau's LOW scenario is that over the next 50 years the U.S. will add 35 million people -- or a population equal to that of all of California today. To do that, will require an 80 percent cut in net immigration to the U.S. and a pretty steep drop in the U.S. birth rates.

The Census Bureau's MIDDLE scenario for 2050 is that we will add 125 million people to the population of the U.S. in the next 50 years - a population greater than the entire population of the U.S. west of Mississippi River today. For this to occur, we would have to hold immigration at current rates, and keep birth rates from rising any further.

The Census Bureau's HIGH scenario for 2050 is that the population of the U.S. will nearly double. For this to occur, immigration would have to be allowed to double and then triple (what it has done in the last 50 years) and U.S. fertility rates would have to rise to the levels they were in 1967.

Obviously, adding 270 million new Americans to our population would have global resource implications, not just national, as we are the third largest nation in the world in terms of population and far-and-away the heaviest users of natural resources.

The Census Bureau's middle-series projection is probably closest to what we can expect.

It's basically a status-quo projection, and it would result in the addition of 125 million more people to the population of the U.S. over the next 50 years.

Let me remind you how many people 125 million people is. That's a population equal to ALL of the current population of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Wisconsin COMBINED ... plus the populations of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi thrown in for good measure.

* * * * *

OK, those are the numbers.

Now, here's a question: Can the U.S. handle the addition of this many people?


Of course it can!

The U.S. can handle 40 million more people.

It can handle 125 million more people.

It can handle 270 million more people.

The question is not whether the United States can handle this population growth -- but at what price.

What are the limits of accommodation?

You see, if we chose a population of 125 million or 200 million more people, other choices flow naturally from that choice.

As John Muir once observed, "if you pull on any one thing in nature, you will find it is connected to everything else." That is certainly true for population.

With the addition of 125 million more people, we may have to turn increasingly large sections of wild forest into tree farms devoid of most wildlife in order to meet our rapidly growing paper, pulp and wood needs.

With the addition of 125 million more people we may have to discourage sprawl by removing or limiting home-ownership tax incentives for those living outside of major urban beltways.

With the addition of 125 million more people - many of them in the arid West - we may have to ban swimming pools and golf courses and lawns . . . and mandate low-flow everything.

With the addition of 270 million more people, we may not be able to export food to the developing world.

I am not trying to be apocalyptic. I am trying to be honest.

If you chose one thing - continued rates of relatively rapid population growth - you may also be choosing something else as well.

* * * * *

Now, let me be a Devils' Advocate.

I started this talk by noting that we managed to accommodate the LAST 125 million people that we added to the U.S. population. While we lost our wetlands, mismanaged much of our western forests, and hammered our coastal fishing stocks, we also had some huge victories at the level of forest regrowth, clean water, clean air, wildlife reintroduction and wilderness protection.

Why can't we do that again?

Why can't we add ANOTHER 125 million people to the population of the U.S. and STILL have everything work out fine?

Perhaps we can.

In truth, no one knows.

In 20 years we may be flying around in solar-catalyst-enabled hydrogen-fueled cars.
In 20 years we may be growing twice as much food in half as much space.

In 20 years we may find a boundless clean-energy source that enables us to desalinate the ocean and pump it to Arizona for a fraction of a penny a gallon, enabling us to put golf courses and swimming pools in the desert without any perceivable harm to aquifers, streams or rivers.

I doubt that this will happen, but it COULD happen. Who knows?

Even if all that happens, however, I think we have questions to face because some things are NOT going to happen again.

We are not going to be able to make progress by enacting obvious legislative remedies like we did in the 1970s. Al of the "easy picking" stuff has been picked. We've already taken most of the slack out of the rope.

Nor are we going to be able to create more political muscle to pull that rope. We are not going to create a new environmental movement in the U.S. We already have a pretty big environmental movement in the U.S. right now -- so big, that Atlantic magazine notes that "everyone is an environmentalist now."

Let me tell you something else that is not going to happen: We're not going to get more wild western land.

Has anyone been to Yosemite or Zion National Park, or the Grand Canyon recently? God isn't making any more places like those. In Yosemite and Zion and the Grand Canyon we already have to park our cars and ride buses to see the natural wonders.

In National Parks and National Forests across the country we ALREADY have to reserve camping spots parks on line -- as if we were going to a rock concert.

What will it be like with 125 million more people?

How about birds? The birds in the Rocky Mountain west are in pretty good shape because there are still so many large blocks of unbroken forest. If we add 125 million more people to the U.S., however, we can expect to see increasing forest fragmentation due to roads, fires, and private developments. The relationship between forest fragmentation and bird loss is clear. If you fragment the forests you WILL have dramatic declines in many of the songbird species so many of us know and love. Is that OK? And what if some bird species - like the sage grouse - go extinct all together. Is that OK?

And how about fire? This is a hot topic right now - no pun intended. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars right now to put out fires we might once have let burn. But we can't let them burn now, because there are million dollar homes up there on those timbered ridgelines. We have to suppress the fire to save the real estate. And the more real estate development there is, the more fire suppression we will have to do, and the bigger the fuels accumulation in the woods. Is that an expensive and unnatural cycle that we can live with? (Note: we can log, but the Federal Government LOSES a huge amount of money on logging every year. The more logging, the more money lost).

Anyone here hunt or fish?

Across vast sections of the American West the Mule Deer population is in rapid decline due to increased roading of once wild lands. At the same time our best trout and salmon streams are not only getting fished harder by more anglers, they are suffering from increased siltation due to more roads.

Anyone here believe that adding 125 million more people to the population of the U.S. will help either situation?

In fact, does anyone here believe that adding 100 or 200 million more people to the population of the U.S. will help improve ANY environmental issue we face today?

It's a Socratic question - a rhetorical question.

* * * * *

Now, you may have noticed I have not told you WHAT to think.

I have NOT told you that America will keel over with 100 million more people -- or even 200 million more people.

In fact, I think the PEOPLE will do fine.

I'm not so sure about the wildlife, however.

I'm not so sure about our last great wild places.

I have given you the Census Bureau's possible population scenarios - I have not made them up, I have only spelled them out.

I have NOT told you which one to pick ... only to think about the choices that each scenario may force us into -- as land managers, as environmentalists, as citizens, and as mother and fathers interested in passing on the essence of the American West to our children and grandchildren to come.

I have asked you, in short, to choose your future.

I do not live in the Western part of the U.S., and I am not going to tell you what choices to make. Different people have different values and may have different answers.

I would like to close with the words of Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer, one of the founders of the "EnLibris" platform that seeks to have the western states decide their own future for themselves.

Governor Geringer's writes in his guidebook on conserving Wyoming's open
lands:

"Today, the primary human impact on Western land has shifted from resource development to urban development and subdivisions that can reduce and fragment agricultural land and open spaces.

"Fragmented lands may cause progressive irreversible deterioration to the wildlife, natural resources, economic diversity and culture that define the West.

"Without the scenic views, agricultural land and wildlife habitat that open spaces provide, quality of life in Wyoming will decline.

"Rapid growth has created housing booms in the Rocky Mountain states,diminishing our neighbors' most fertile agricultural land, wildlife habitat and open lands. Strip malls destroy grain fields; housing subdivisions replace meadows. It's like paving the pastures of paradise ..."

* * * *

"It's like paving the pastures of paradise. "

I leave it to each and every one of you to decide if that is a good thing, or not.

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The Cull of the Wild

This book set out the tenets of wildlife management still in use today.

This post is reprinted from this blog circa June, 2005

Despite a three-fold increase in U.S. population since 1900, the U.S. now has more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

Though animal rights organizations decry sport hunting, the truth is that organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, Quail Unlimited, and the National Wild Turkey Federation are the backbone of true wildlife protection in the United States. These organizations, and their state and local affiliates, work to protect and improve habitat across the U.S., as well as fund wildlife reintroduction and research campaigns.

For their part, groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are little more than direct mail mills. Both organizations are entirely absent from all habitat protection efforts in the U.S., and neither organization runs even a single animal shelter in the U.S. despite the scores of millions of dollars they collect from the public. Instead these organizations send out millions of pieces of direct mail every year -- all of it highly emotional and designed to get suburban matrons to part with their "most generous gift of $10, $20 or even $50".

One of the perennial topics of animal rights direct mail campaigns is a push to outlaw trapping. Carefully staged photos and antique traps are used to pluck at the heartstrings, but donor beware! It should serve as a warning that blue-chip environmental organizations such as the National Audubon Society have sued the Humane Society (and won) in order to preserve the use of leghold traps as a wildlife management tool. All of the wolves now in the Yellowstone, for example, are routinely caught in leghold traps in order to inoculate them against rabies and distemper and to switch out the batteries on their radio-tracking collars. Modern leghold traps, properly set, are far more selective and less brutal than those that existed 100 or even 50 years ago -- a fact conveniently omitted from the direct mail literature of animal rights advocates.

Trapping for pelts in the U.S. is now largely independent of wildlife numbers -- when trapping numbers go down it is not because of a dip in the target species population, but because of a dip in pelt prices.

As of this writing, green (untanned) fox or raccoon pelts sell for between $8 and $12 dollars apiece -- not much considering the time and effort it takes to boil, dye and and wax a trap, set it out, check it daily, and skin and flesh the resulting catch.

That said, a surprising number of fox and raccoon are still trapped in the U.S. In the winter of 1999-2000, for example, when pelt prices were quite low, 29,739 fox were trapped in the state of Virginia (15,632 red fox and 14,107 Gray Fox), as well as 83,369 raccoon, 3,304 coyote, and 3,050 bobcat. In Pennsylvania that same year, 63,654 fox were taken (26,794 Gray fox and 36,860 red fox), as well as 107,407 raccoon, 9,508 coyote, and 58 bobcat.

For comparison purposes, the state of Virginia is 42,700 square miles in size, and Pennsylvania is 46,058 square miles in size as compared to England, which is 50,800 square miles and all of the UK which is 94,200 square miles in size.

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Shooting Out the Land

Ranger McEntire of the Malheur National Forest (Eastern Oregon), Winter 1912 - 1913

A repost from this blog circa 2005

In 1887, 14 years before he became President, Theodore Roosevelt joined with a distinguished group of sporting Americans -- including George Bird Grinnell, William Tecumseh Sherman, John Lacey, and Gifford Pinchot -- to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The men who created the Boone and Crockett Club were all dedicated hunters. Grinell was editor of Field and Stream magazine, a hunting and fishing journal, and as editor, he was shocked at the rapid depletion of America’s wildlife due to unregulated market hunting

Though by charter the Boone and Crockett Club numbered only 100 people, it was a very influential group. John Lacey eventually became a Member of Congress from Iowa and, in 1900, just before Roosevelt became President, he managed to get Congress to pass the Lacey Act which made it a federal crime to transport wild game across state lines if had been killed in violation of state laws — the first federal restriction on commercial market hunting in the United States.

Roosevelt, of course, became Vice President and then President upon the assassination of William McKinnley. An avid sport hunter, Roosevelt was also an accomplish naturalist, and counted among his friends John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and best-selling wildlife author John Burroughs.

It is hard to overstate the importance of hunting in Roosevelt’s life. Suffice it to say that he chose not to run for President after his second term so that he could go to Africa on a year-long safari, hunting big game and collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution.

During his presidency (1901 to 1911), Roosevelt more than tripled the National Forest system to 148 million acres (and made Gifford Pinchot the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service), oversaw the creation of 150 new national forest areas in 21 states, created four national game preserves, 51 federal bird sanctuaries, and established 18 national monuments. No president, before or since, has created such a sweeping public lands legacy.

In 1911, shortly after Roosevelt left office, Congress passed the Weeks Act to authorize the purchase of forest lands in the east. Much of this land later became part of the National Forest system in the eastern United States.

That same year the American Game Protective Association (AGPA) was founded and funded by gun and ammunition companies such as Winchester. This was the first sportsman-supported organization in the U.S. with a full-time professional staff, and it was later renamed the Wildlife Management Institute. In 1913, the shooting of migratory birds was regulated — the first step toward building back game bird populations deeply impacted by over-hunting.

America’s hunters lead the charge for wildlife habitat protection and the regulation of hunting seasons, providing an intellectual and moral framework now known as “hook and bullet conservation”.

Hook and bullet conservation has produced truly astounding results in the U.S. over the course of the last 100 years. Despite a three-fold increase in the U.S. population since 1900, we now have more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, elk, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

All of this has been made possible because the land and the forest -- otherwise voiceless -- has a voting constituency among American hunters and anglers. Not all hunters and anglers are good sportsmen who understand the need for conservation, but all good sportsmen are conservationists who understand the value of habitat and self-restraint.
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Otter Ironies

One of the ironies of wildlife management is that the very devices that pushed so much wildlife to the edge of extinction -- guns and traps -- are the very things that are now working to bring wildlife back.

The difference between today and 120-years ago is the rise of hunter-conservationists who understand the value of hunting seasons, the need for limits, and the necessity of wildlife habitat conservation and reclamation.

In earlier posts, I have detailed the history behind the return of the wild turkey which, in the space of 50 years, went from teetering on the edge of extinction to a population of 5.5 million birds distributed over a greater range than occurred even in pre-Columbian times.

Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.

The article below is about the return of the river otter to Middle America. As Audubon magazine noted just a few years ago, "More than 2,000 river otters have been caught in legholds in the South and released virtually unscathed in Midwestern states where the species had been extirpated."

Back in the 1990s, when the river otter was being reintroduced in Ohio, Audubon was not only defending the use of leghold traps as necessary for the reintroduction of species like the river otter, but also for management of such species as the wolf and nuisance abatement of other species such as beaver, raccoon, and red fox.

For those interested in the foundation history of wildlife management in America, Aldo Leopold's book on Game Management is still in print more than 70 years after its first publication. Chapter 10 is on predator control. >> Click here to buy

January 21, 2005

Ohio wildlife officials consider allowing otter trapping after success of reintroduction programs

By: Carrie Spencer, Associated Press

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The wily and playful river otter was once on the verge of extinction in Ohio. Now they're thriving - and causing so much damage that wildlife officials are considering allowing hunters to trap them.

It's a situation other states have had with other animals. In Florida and New Jersey, it's the black bear. The Rockies and Alaska have the gray wolf. Nearly everywhere else, it's the white-tailed deer and Canada goose.

"In a human-dominated landscape, it's really tough to keep wildlife in the numbers we feel are appropriate," said Greg Butcher, a zoologist with the Washington-based National Audubon Society. "We have affected the environment so much that a lot of natural checks and balances are gone."

The otter's numbers have soared in just two decades - from 123 to about 4,300 - and Ohio wildlife officials are proposing a permit-only two-month trapping season. The Ohio Wildlife Council will vote on the proposal in April.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wildlife causes US$1 billion ([euro]770 million) in crop and livestock damage each year, while deer collisions injure about 29,000 motorists a year and cost another $1 billion ([euro]770 million). Bird collisions cost the aviation industry $740 million ([euro]572 million) annually.

The otter's story is familiar. Fur trapping drove the native species from Ohio by the early 1900s, but their reintroduction - starting in 1986 and lasting seven years - has been so successful that farmers are starting to complain. A family of otters can eat half the fish in a privately stocked pond before the owner gets wind of their visits.

"If they find a nice trout farm, they're pretty happy with that," said C. Greg Anderson, assistant biology professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.

Otters used to be in every U.S. state except Hawaii but were wiped out over 70 percent of their range, Anderson said. Reintroduction programs began in the 1980s in 21 states, all successes. Missouri, one of the first with 19 otters released in 1982, now has more than 10,000 and allows trapping, he said. Kentucky began its first otter season this winter, running through February.

Government-sanctioned hunting of all kinds of animals is proliferating across the country.

Starting in February, private landowners in Montana and Idaho won't need written approval to kill gray wolves harassing livestock, while Wyoming is suing the federal government to get its wolf management plan approved. From about 30 wolves introduced 10 years ago, 825 or more now live in the three states.

Florida wildlife officials reported a record number of sightings of threatened black bears in 2004 because of sprawling development and busier roads. The state is studying the bear population and could lift its protected status this year.

New Jersey's second annual bear hunt was called off this year amid a dispute over the state's management plan. New Jersey has more than 3,000 bears, up from fewer than 100 in the 1970s.

Hunting groups once feared the disappearance of white-tailed deer, but management encouraging reproduction worked too well. Last fall, the Cleveland suburb of Solon became the latest Ohio community to hire sharpshooters to cull the prolific landscape munchers.

Few success stories compare with that of the giant strain of Canada goose, which was nearly extinct in the 1960s because of hunting and lack of their preferred grassland habitat.

In the Midwest, restrictions on hunting coincided with the explosion of office parks with manicured lawns and lush golf courses. The birds, with their 6-foot wingspans, are now fouling picnic spots and hissing and nipping at golfers. States from North Dakota to Pennsylvania have expanded hunting allowances.

While some see overpopulation as triumph over extinction, the Animal Protection Institute sees it as failure on the part of wildlife officials. Reintroduction of a native animal requires planning to prevent an overrun, said Barbara Schmitz of the Sacramento, California-based institute.

"A lot of times, lethal solutions are looked at first," Schmitz said. "It is possible for them to become part of the balance of nature again."

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Polarization is Bad for Conservation

Salt Lake City Tribune columnist Tom Wharton has a very nice piece in which he writes:

It was refreshing to see the National Rifle Association sit down with Democratic leaders in Congress recently to close loopholes in background checks that could prevent a future tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech.

That's because polarization on issues dealing with gun rights, wilderness, wildlife management and open-space preservation often results in stalemate.

Part of the problem, according to Paul Hansen of the Izaak Walton League of America, is many hunting and gun groups identify with Republicans, but environmentalists mostly gravitate toward Democrats. Those groups avoid meeting with each other for fear of alienating longtime supporters.

The other problem Hansen identified at the recent Outdoor Writers Association of America conference is that, too often, groups are so self-righteous that they leave little room to move the party line.

"When people act too self-righteously, they hurt the cause," said Hansen, who represents a hunting-oriented group with a long history of protecting the environment.

"It could help the cause if there was more humility and groups did more listening .... Polarization is bad for conservation."

To read more >> click here

Buy Land, God Ain't Making Any More of That

Will Rogers advised folks to "Buy land because God ain't making any more of that," and some of the richest folks in America are following up on that sage advice and scooping up vast areas in the U.S. for a variety of reasons.

The Wall Street Journal of May 20th, for example, notes that Kentucky native Brad Kelley sold his cigarette manufacturing company, Commonwealth Brands Inc., for $1 billion and promptly bought hundreds of thousands of acres of West Texas ranch land back in 2001. He has also snapped up 60,000 acres of land near Sarasota, Florida where he breeds antelope and critically endangered anoa, a type of wild miniature water buffalo native to Indonesia.

Over in Texas, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has acquired several ranches that total 300,000 arid acres, some of which he is using to test a developmental vehicle for his space-flight company, Blue Origin LLC.

Up in Maine, Roxanne Quimby, who is the co-founder of "Burt's Bees" cosmetics, has acquired about 80,000 acres from timber companies. She hopes to add even more acreage in the years ahead before she turns the whole thing over to the Federal Government as a new National Park.

Some Maine residents are up in arms because Ms. Quimby has said the land she has bought is now off-limits to all logging, hunting and motorized vehicles. Of course, as the actual owner of the land in question Ms. Quimby is well within her rights, and besides her management rules are pretty similar to those that now govern our National Parks. America in general -- and Maine in particular -- can only benefit from the creation of another National Park. Instead of criticism, Ms. Quimby deserves a little applause!

The nation's largest private landowner, of course, is the wonderfully colorful Ted Turner whose acquisitions include 15 ranches in seven Western states spread over a total of about 2 million acres.

Ted Turner and his son Beau are true hook-and-bullet conservationists and are engaged in some of the best wildlife and wild lands management in this nation.

Turner's land goal has always been to show that environmentally-sensitive lands can be managed at a profit, and so far he has done remarkable things while working to prove his point.

Turner's properties are now home to about 45,000 bison, which are managed as free-range commercial livestock with the meat sold as steaks and burgers through both grocery stores and Turner's restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill.

Turner's vast land holdings are also home to elk, moose, mule deer, white tail deer and some other species which are hunted at a price, making a profit for the ranch and ensuring that Turner's large wild land holdings remain well-maintained and well-managed.

Ted Turner has also moved his vision of profitable wild lands management overseas to vast land holdings he has in South America. Some of this land turns a profit as cattle and hunting ranches, and some turns a profit through eco-tourism, but the principles are the same in both in the U.S. and overseas: Keep the land green and balanced, work to preserve wildlife and wild and open spaces, and remain creative in developing an income stream to keep the whole thing self-financing beyond the initial capital outlay. This is not the rip-rape-ruin-and subdivide management of Mobile Oil and small-time land owners. A larger vision and a larger lasting purpose is in action here.

Some narrow-minded folks resent the philanthropic super-wealthy, but in fact some of these truely rich people represent not only business success, but also a deep transformative social and environmental consciousness that is a powerful force for good.

When the dust settles, a lot of America and the world will be protected because of the actions of folks like Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, Brad Kelley, Roxanne Quimby, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates.

God bless them for turning their enormous purses to the public good. And what a shame that the Walton family (of WalMart fame) cannot do the same!

The Land Report lists the top 100 private land owners in the U.S. (list searchable by state, by name or by acreage. The Top Twenty from the list is appended below, and a short profile on each of the top 100 land owners can be read >> HERE. For the record, 640 acres is one square mile.

1. Ted Turner - 2 million acres
2. Archie Aldis 'Red' Emmerson - 1.722 million acres
3. Irving Family 1.2 million acres
4. Singleton Family - 1 million + acres
5. King Ranch Heirs - 851,642 acres
6. Pingree Heirs - 850,000 acres
7. Brad Kelley - 789,851 acres
8. Reed Family - 770,000 acres
9. Ford Family - 740,000 acres
10. Huber Family - 600,000 acres
11. Lykes Bros. Heirs - 578,302 acres
12. Dolph Briscoe Jr. - 560,000 acres
13. W.T. Waggoner Estate - 520,000 acres
14. D.M. O'Connor Heirs - 500,000 acres
15. Robert Earl Holding - 400,000 acres
16. J.R. Simplot - 355,746 acres
17. East Family - 350,000 acres
18. Anne Marion - 345,000 acres
19. Gerald Lyda - 320,035 acres
20. Collins Family - 305,313 acres

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Animal Rights Lunatics are Starving for Logic

Amazingly, people who know almost nothing about wildlife and wild places, are often quite sure they are capable of being good stewards of wild lands and wildlife.

"What's to know and what's to do?" they ask. "You just buy the land and keep the hunters out, and everything works out great."

Well, maybe not.

Proof can be seen at the wildlife "sanctuary" managed by the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) at Baronsdown in Somerset, U.K. The romantics at the League got a big bequest some time back, and put it into acquiring 225 acres which they decided to use as a "deer sanctuary."

The first thing they did, of course, was put up signs to keep hunters out.

Guess what happened then? Well, for starters, the deer population skyrocketed and the deer started stripping all the vegetation from the forests and fields.

So what did the folks at LACS do then? That's right -- they began feeding the deer in winter.

Of coure even more deer showed up, and soon an area of just 225 acres had more than 300 deer on it.

The animals, still hungry and now even more overcrowded, began eating each others foeces, thereby spreading flukes and worms across the entire herd.

Reports that the deer were sick were summarily dismissed by the League Against Cruel Sport's know-nothing spokesperson who said "We really don't accept there's a problem."

What happened next was as predictable as the tides: Animals already crowded and stressed got weaker, setting the stage for a more serious kind of pathology to ride in and take the herd. This time it was tuberculosis.

The end result: about one-third of the Baronsdown deer herd died in a single year, and more deer deaths followed in subsequent years.

Now down to about 150 deer, the Baronsdown herd is still overcrowded and emaciated as the vegetation has never had a chance to recover.

In fact, the deer herd at Baronsdown is so overcrowded and sick that regular citizens are now stopping by the road to get out of their cars in order to engage in mercy killings of weak and stunned animals staggering near the fence line.

Don't believe it? Well, you can watch the video taken on LACs land right here -- just click below, or go to the link.

None of this is entirely new, of course. Management of the Baronsdown deer has been called into question for many years, and studies have show that the herd is in very poor shape.

The British Deer Society, which is not a hunting group, tried to work with LACS on the quiet and keep herd management issues separate from the hunting debate, but LACS has continued to ignore reality and at last Veterinary Advisor Peter Green decided he had to speak out. He has described what is going on at Baronsdown in plain and simple language:

"During a two hour period some fifty red deer were carefully observed; none were in good condition. Many were judged to be poor and several were classed as emaciated. Many were showing signs of enteritis [diarrhoea] and loose foeces were widespread on the ground. One yearling staggie in poor condition was too weak to jump a sheep fence."

Is there a message in all this? There certainly is. That message is that wildlife management issues should be left to folks who actually have degrees in wildlife management, and not to philosophers, unemployed anarchists, and suburban matrons.

If there is good news, it is this: The League Against Cruel Sports does not own or control very much land, and most deer herds in the U.K. are under professional management and subject to regulated hunting. As a result, the Countryside Alliance reports, "There are more deer in the U.K. now that at any time since the Norman conquest."

Less we think stupid-on-a-stick deer management is confined to the other side of the Atlantic, however, it's worth remembering that we have our share of know-nothing Animal Rights lunatics.

In a cover piece for Audubon magazine entitled "Wanted: More Hunters," Ted Williams describes what the Crane Estate, 30 miles north of Boston, looked like in the early 1980s when roughly 400 white-tailed deer -- 340 more than carrying capacity -- had denuded 2,000 acres fragile acres along the coast following a hunting ban:

"There wasn't a scrap of green to the height of a saddle horn. One of the last undeveloped barrier-beach complexes in the East had been shorn of native plants. Dunes were blowing away. The property, owned by the Trustees of Reservations, was supposed to be a wildlife refuge, yet the deer had eliminated wildlife that rear young and/or find cover in midlevel vegetation. Each winter most of the fawns died because they couldn't reach the browse line. In their weakened condition adults were being eaten from the outside in by dogs, and from the inside out by parasites. Their skin stretched across their ribs like cloth on Conestoga wagons."

So what are the options? Returning to an ancient balance between large ungulates and top-end predators is not in the offering. Marauding wolf packs are not going to be introduced into the sheep country that is Somerset, anymore than they are going to be introduced into the landscape of suburban Boston.

What this means is that the only real choice for deer, either at Baronsdown or in Boston, is between a miserable life and slow death by starvation and disease, or a healthy life and sudden death that comes out of the blue. One method we would not wish on our enemies, while the other we pray for ourselves.

What will we choose for the deer? Let us choose carefully.

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Dead Man's Curve

The Saiga is a kind of odd-looking Eurasian antelope that inhabits the open dry steppe grasslands and semi-arid deserts of Central Asia.

In 1993 the total population of Saiga was estimated at over one million. By 2000, however, the Saiga population had decreased to less than 200,000, and by 2003 surveys indicated that less than 30,000 remained in the wild.

This represents a population collapse of over 90% in a span of just 10 years.

Ironically, the conservation community bears some responsibilty as a causal agent in the Saiga's rapid population decline, as Saiga horn was promoted by the World Wildlife Fund as a replacement for the Rhino horn sometimes prescribed by traditional Chinese apothecary shops.

Increased pressure from apothecary suppliers in China, coupled with relaxation of hunting restrictions in the Soviet Union, resulted in rapid overhunting of the Saiga, and a population crash that appears to have pushed wild populations past the tipping point.

Right now, there is a very real possibility that the Saiga may become extinct in the wild within the next decade.

I tell this story as a cautionary tale about unintended consequences, hubris, and the speed of destruction in the modern world.

The goal of the World Wildlife Fund was not to wipe out the Saiga -- it was to offer buffering protection to critically endangered Rhino populations while giving a nod to the demands of traditional Chinese apothecary shops. With more than a million Saiga running free in large herds in Central Asia, getting traditional medicine shops to use Saiga horn instead of Rhino horn seemed a reasonably safe and culturally-sensitive idea.

The problem, of course, is that things are rarely as simple as they appear. With a population of over 1.2 billion people, the apothecary demands of China cannot be appeased by any animal in the wild -- an important point initially lost on the good people at the World Wildlife Fund.

When an insatiable demand for wild animal horn was coupled with increased access to modern rifles, Central Asia experienced its own version of The Last Buffalo Hunt.

I am reasonably certain the Saiga will eventually be brought back from the edge, just as the American Buffalo has been brought back from the abyss here in the United States.

That said, a turnaround is going to be slow and expensive.

The troubles of the Saiga are not entirely unique. In this country alone, we have stopped just short of wiping out the Condor, the Buffalo, the Black-footed Ferret, the Peregrine Falcon, the Manatee, the Red Wolf, and the American Crocodile.

The developing world is poised to follow our path in all things. What remains unknown is whether they will employ the conservation brake in time to prevent their own wildlife treasures from tumbling into the abyss.

A central problem is that in this modern world we can no longer afford to go slow. It took 2 million years to go from "Adam and Eve" in the Olduvia Gorge to a human population of one billion people, but it took only 100 years to add the second billion people, 30 years to add the third, and 15 years to add the fourth. Today, the world's population is past six billion and is sure to climb past seven billion within the decade.

Even as human population has soared, so too has technological progress. Muzzle loaders and iron sights have been replaced by spiral cut barrels and powerful optics. Hemp gill nets a hundred yards long have been replaced by nylon drift nets that can stretch for miles. The ax has given way to the chainsaw, and the chainsaw to the feller-buncher. The shovel and sledge hammer have given way to massive mechanical earthmovers and sequentially-fired dynamite relays. The backyard vegetable plot has given way to thousand-acre monoculture farms planted and and harvested by massive and complicated machines.

Along with technological changes have come cultural and social changes as well. Limited local demands filled by well-known suppliers have fallen away to unlimited international demands and a global marketplace oblivious to the cause-and-effect ramifications of satisfying global needs.

The bottom line is the bottom line, and nothing more.

Chinese demand for horn means disappearing herds of antelope in Russia and Mongolia. Japanese demand for cheap plywood means disappearing forests in Indonesia and Malaysia. The need for catalogue paper in the U.S. means huges swaths of Canada's boreal forests are being cut to the ground to supply bright white copy. What we eat in the grocery store (including what we feed our dogs) may come from China, Chile, Australia or Antarctica. The fibers we wear on our back may come from pesticide-soaked fields in Africa and may be sewn in sweat-shop factories in Asia.

Out of sight is out of mind. We have no idea where things come from, or under what conditions.

Where it will all end, no one knows, but it's clear that at the speed we are going, we are going to miss a few turns and end up in the ditch -- or worse -- a good percentage of the time.

When that happens, it will not be an "accident," but a predictable consequence of our speeding down the highway, addled by too much population growth and turbo-boosted by technology.

Yet, when the crack up occurs, it is sure to be labeled an "accident" anyway. That's what they call every wreck at Dead Man's Curve. Never mind the signs, full speed ahead.
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Coffee and Provocation

A Bucket of T-Rex Please:
The New York Times and other sources report that chickens are descended from T-Rex. Well actually, the truer story is that all birds are descended from dinosaurs. Hmmmm. So they didn't all die out with the meteor crash?

Are Breed Restrictions Code Talk?:
The Bluedogstate blog asks whether breed-specific bans, and pit bull bans in particular, are the new "code talk" for keeping blacks and poor folks down and out? In the era of Imus, that's not crazy talk, and there are some good points scored here. That said, I am not always thrilled by some of the numbskulls who own pit bulls. One can admit there is a problem without necessarily embracing the solutions offered by know-nothing politicians.

Manatees are Doing Well:
More evidence that the Endangered Species Act works: US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are considering reclassifying the manatee as threatened instead of endangered, a sign that the numbers are up a bit thanks to motorboat and development restrictions. And, yes, manatees will still be under Federal protection.

Bite Sized Snacks Released to Wild:
Twenty endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, Brachylagus idahoensis, were reintroduced to the wilds of Washington state just three weeks ago, but 14 of them have already been eaten by coyotes, hawks and owls. These little rabbits are the only burrowing rabbits in this hemisphere, weigh just 1 pound, and their wild population got so depleted a decade or so ago that they were all rounded up and put into a captive breeding program to ensure their survival. One has to wonder how retarded the scientists were to not do basic predator abatement at the reintroduction site.

Wired Monks Gone to the Dogs:
The Monks at the New Skete monastery are the stars of the new Animal Planet series "Divine Canine: With the Monks of New Skete" which premiers on Monday. I hope the brothers will explain why they stay away from AKC dogs and always import breeding stock. See Inbred Thinking on how the AKC's closed registry system wrecks dogs.

Wild and Working Dogs on PBS:
PBS channels will be showing "Dogs That Changed the World" on April 22 and 29. The series promises to offer a broad look at dogs and the human-dog relationship and features a round-robin of clips "from the jungle to the arctic" of dogs hunting, herding, guarding, pulling, and guiding. Again, we can only hope the series explores a little bit of the Inbred Thinking that undermines dogs today.

Animal Planet Plays Catch Up to Cesar Milan:
Animal Planet is trying to play catch up with Cesar Milan with their new series "It's Me or the Dog" where Briton Victoria Stillwell tries to sort out dysfunctional pets and people. The series starts Monday. Once again, it seems only people with accents can train American dogs and owners. Walkies anyone?

Wolf-Man, Dog-Man or Idiot?:
Once again we have a Briton, but this time it's Shaun Ellis who took in three abandoned wolf pups (from where?) and decided he was just the guy to raise them up in a big zoo-cage enclosure in order to teach them how to be a wolf. Apparently long hair and a disdain for a bath is all you need to do the job. It was all filmed for the National Geographic Channel series "A Man Among Wolves," and shot "on location" at the 25-acre (is that all?) Combe-Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon. Call of the wild indeed!

Spring Thanksgiving:
Spring turkey season starts this week in most places -- be careful out there. Meanwhile, let's give thanks for what the National Wild Turkey Federation has helped give us. .

Why "Stupid On Stilts" is Good for the Environment

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Governor of Idaho, C.L. "Butch" Otter, wants 550 wolves killed in his state -- enough to keep the wolf just above the threshold for endandered species listing (and a return to full federal control of the animal).

One is tempted to review the history of political idiocy and national embarassment that is Idaho politics, from the late Rep. Helen Chenoweth to current Sen. Larry Craig, but let's skip that and, instead go straight to a map and "ground truth" the reality of land ownernship and land management in Idaho.

Idaho politicians, like most Western politicians, do not actually control all that much land within their state. You see, out West, most of the land is owned by the Federal Government and is either National Forest land, Bureau of Land Management land, National Park land, or National Wildlife Refuge. These are lands owned by all Americans for all Americans. Or, as Woody Guthrie sang, "This land is your land, this land is my land."

Along with National Parks, National Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, and BLM land, there are also other large tracts of federally-owned lands: Indian Reservations, military bases, and lands owned and managed by the Bureau of Reclamation (fresh water lakes and reservoirs) and other Federal agencies.

The short story here is that if you take a look at the map of Federal Lands and Indian Reservations in Idaho at the top of this post, every bit of land in color is a Federal property -- only the stuff that is colored white on the map is privately owned property or under states control (state parks, state forests, etc.).

In short, the Governor of Idaho is "governor of not very much," relative to what is around him.

Which is not to say that the Governor of Idaho (or any other western state) has ever been shy about throwing his weight around -- that's what Western politicians do.

Western politicians talk a good game about "property rights" and like to describe their constituencies as being strong, self-sufficient, anti-tax conservatives, but in fact a very large percentage of the political money in a state like Idaho comes from greedy welfare ranchers (and miners, drillers, and timber cutters) sucking on the Federal teat for ever-increasing tax-payer money in the form of crop supports, water subsidies, road constuction subsidies, mining rights, timber-cutting rights, and fire suppression subsidies.

Edward Abbey noted that "Cattle ranching on the public lands of the American West is the most sacred form of public welfare in the United States" and that the environmental consequences of supporting so much "welfare ranching" was a palpable level of environmental degradation:

"Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call 'cow burnt'. Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of [cows].... They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle [tumble weed], and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle."

Of course, not every rancher out west is a welfare rancher, and not every range is mismanaged. That said, there are huge financial incentives to "privatize the profits" and "commonize the costs" when you allow private profits to be made on public lands, and that is true for everything from grazing to timber harvest, and from water removal to hard rock mining and oil and natural gas removal. Why pay to clean up your mess, when Uncle Sam will force the American taxpayer (yes, that would be you) to do it?

Which brings us back to wolves.

You see, the Governor of Idaho's "big idea" is to to kill Federal wolves on Federal land, for private ranchers who are being subsidized to raise sheep and cattle that America does not actually need, and which are degrading public land that all of us taxpayers (from Redwood City to the New York island) will be taxed to restore.

This is stupid on a stilts -- so stupid, in fact, that it's actually a good thing. Insanity this tall in the saddle exposes the lunacy of "state rights" claims that we should all be subsidizing private interests on federal land.

Killing off 500 wolves in order to enable more "welfare ranching" in the American West is something so stupid and warped that redneck hillbillies and suburban housewives will find common ground in opposition to it.

Groups like the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council, and The Wilderness Society should send the idiot Governor of Idaho a thank you note and roses for giving them a simple and just cause to fight for -- and a cartoon-like idiot of a politician to fight against.

Thank you, Governor Otter. Idiots like you do not grow on trees. If you did not actually exist, the American environmental movement might actually have to invent you.

Now, here's the kicker: Right now, if a wolf can reasonably be shown to have killed a cow, sheep or any other type of livestock anywhere in the United States, that animal is bought and paid for by American environmental organizations like Defenders of Wildlife. Last year Defenders paid bill out over $150,000 to cover the costs of 158 cows, 204 sheep, and a couple of goats and stock dogs.

That's right -- in the American west there is NO economic loss from wolves because groups like Defenders of Wildlife pay the full market value of any animals killed by wolves.

To put an even sharper point on the matter, no one in the American environmental movement thinks any individual wolf is sacred. If there is rogue wolf that has taken to stock-killing in a regular way, that animal is going to be killed by a professional, federally-licensed sharpshooter, and no one is in opposition to that.

Which is not to say that compensating ranchers for risks they assume by grazing on federal land actually makes any sense. As conservationist, hunter and author Jonathan Hanson notes on his excellent blog (which you really should check out):

"Where did the idea of public liability for wolf predation come from, anyway? If a cow falls off a cliff on leased public land, do we reimburse the rancher? If a lamb dies from a rattlesnake bite, do we reimburse the rancher? Obviously not. The idea behind wolf compensation came about, ironically, because we were properly bringing back an animal that had been eliminated for the convenience of ranchers in the first place."

So is there good news in this mess?

I think there is, because the Governor of Idaho reminds us that there are a lot of idiots in the world, which is why we need conservation organizations, why we need laws, and why a federated system of government with federal control over vast expanses of public lands is a very good thing.

God bless America. We get some things right, and wildlife management is one of them.