Once again, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is faced with opposition to its way of dealing with wild horses on public rangeland. For many decades, wild horses and burros have proliferated on public lands—descendants of escaped horses going back as far as the years of Spanish exploration, plus horses lost or abandoned by settlers…
Tag: Habitat
Biden’s ’30 by 30′ Plan: 30 percent of U.S. Land ‘Protected’ by 2030
President Biden plans to raise the percentage of land “protected” in the United States from about 12 percent to 30 percent over the next nine years. That would mean protecting an additional area more than four times the size of California. From the White House fact sheet: “The order commits to the goal of conserving…
Free Market Environmentalism Is Action, Not Theory
How a would-be academic discovered he was an ‘enviropreneur’ Wallace Kaufman, a regular contributor to this blog, describes his discovery of how profit-making projects can protect land. In the late 1950s what new college student with a social conscience didn’t think the world needed a better way of motivating people than profits? My parents had…
How Do We Save the Monarch Butterfly?
Monarch butterflies hit a record low in California this winter, reports Business Insider, citing an annual count by the Xerces Society. The western Monarchs migrate as much as 3000 miles a year, arriving in California from the Pacific Northwest, usually staying in the state until March and then moving to other parts of the country….
The Troubled Art of Restoration Ecology
Liam Heneghan is a restoration ecologist, whose professional field—only forty years old, if that—is full of uncertainties. Its goal is to reverse environmental damage and restore land to a more pristine past. He explains: “Where ecosystems have been degraded because of human activity—including an overexploitation of useful species, invasion by exotic pests, erosion of soils,…
The Future of Wildlife Funding: Hunters and Non-hunters
This post by contributor Wallace Kaufman is a reply to Sterling Burnett’s post, “Where Are the Eco-tourists’ Dollars?” For openers, let me suppose that I am a lion, a giraffe, or a Cape buffalo. I ask myself, “Who is going to save me from a poacher?” And “Who will put up the most money to…