New book features Montana timber leaders Hurst, Petersen, Vincent
The Clark Fork Chronicle, January 31 2010 [here]
A new hardbound book featuring Montana timber leaders Jim Hurst, Jim Petersen, and Steve Vincent chronicles what was, and is, happening on the frontlines of the battle between the West and Washington, D.C.
The book, titled GRIT: Fighting for Western Land, Life, and Liberty [available here] showcases articles written by renowned experts, scholars, environmentalists, legislators, government officials and award-winning journalists from the past 20 years. What emerges is an astounding indictment of a never-ending onslaught of regulations and intimidation, and the struggle endured by ranchers and farmers to produce food and also survive.
Individually, the “GRIT” stories on conservation, water, wildlife, forestry, land grabs and enviros are compelling. Collectively, they are a chilling picture of fumbling federal bureaucrats, self-serving nonprofits, and Americans who seem to have forgotten the importance of self-sufficiency, while paying tribute to the courageous people who work the land.
“We have covered awful tales—of takings, overregulation, outrageous behavior and corruption,” said publisher Caroline Joy “CJ” Hadley. “Bloodsucking nonprofits and some environmental litigators have destroyed rural lives based on flimsy and peculiar rationales, lost their cases in court, and then been paid huge fees for losing—using Americans’ tax dollars.”
The book features writings by three leaders well-known to Montanans:
* Jim Hurst, former president of Owens & Hurst, a Montana lumber mill. The mill closed, leaving 200 workers without jobs, when applications to harvest salvage timber were delayed or litigated. The mill was within sight of the Kootenay National Forest, where more timber dies annually than grows or is harvested.
* Jim Petersen, co-founder of Evergreen Foundation, whose family has roots in logging, sawmilling, cattle ranching, and mining.
* Bruce Vincent, third-generation logger, speaker, president of Communities for a Great Northwest, co-owner of Environomics, and executive director of the Preserve America presidential award-winning Provider Pals’ cultural exchange program. His awards include “Timber Industry Activist of the Year,” “Montana Timberman of the Year,” and “The Sylvan Award for Service to the National Timber Industry.”
Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent
Rick Moran, American Thinker, January 31, 2010 [here]
The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.
We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate [here], tempgate [here], icegate [here], and now, disappearing Amazon forests [here] not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate [who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace] … [more]
Timber: To cut or not to cut?
Question of timber harvesting in Clatsop and Tillamook state forests divides residents
By CASSANDRA PROFITA, The Daily Astorian, 1/29/2010 [here]
SEASIDE - A proposal to cut more timber on the Clatsop and Tillamook state forests has divided North Coast residents.
At a hearing in Seaside Thursday on proposed changes to the Oregon Department of Forestry’s 2001 Northwest Oregon State Forest Management Plan, about a dozen people voiced opposing viewpoints on whether the new plan would be better or worse than the old one.
The plan aims to balance the economic, environmental and social values of the 630,000 acres of forestland in the Coast Range, including 150,000 acres of the Clatsop State Forest and 300,000 acres in the Tillamook State Forest.
But, as State Forests Deputy Chief Mike Cafferatta explained Thursday, the 2001 plan - which took about six years to create - is failing to meet its goals for generating timber revenue.
If foresters were to increase logging to meet the original revenue targets, they would fall short of the plan’s environmental goals of creating older tree stands that provide habitat and ecosystem health.
The Oregon Board of Forestry is now considering changing the plan to reduce the goals for older-type forests from 40 to 60 percent of the landscape to 30 to 50 percent to allow for more timber harvest and better economic returns on the forestland.
To free up more forestland for logging, the board is also looking at dropping its federal Habitat Conservation Plan, designed to protect species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and replacing it with a state-run Species of Concern Strategy, which would take a new approach to protecting habitat for 40 species, including those listed as threatened and endangered. The resulting level of timber harvest would put state forests at 72 percent of the output they would get under an industrial forest management model. … [more]
The Hole In The EPA’s Ozone Claim
By Michael Fumento, Forbes Online, January 26, 2010 [here]
To the EPA, “safe” is a constantly moving target—and that’s the way it likes it. Always something new to regulate, always a new hobgoblin from which to save us. Take the agency’s proposal to yet again lower allowable ozone levels. It’s another one of those win-win regulations for which the EPA is famous, supposedly saving both lives and money. But its assertions collapse when you examine the science on which they’re allegedly based.
U.S. ground-level ozone concentrations have fallen by 25% since 1980 and 14% just since 1990. Yet in 1997 the EPA tightened the screws with what it called a “safe” standard at 80 parts per billion (ppb). Then in 2008 “safe” became 75 ppb. Now the agency insists “safe” is a maximum of between 60 ppb and 70 ppb. No doubt the agency is already laying the groundwork to drop the “safe” level yet again.
Along with the 60 ppb to 70 ppb standard the EPA has proposed a secondary one, measured differently and meant to help not humans but vegetation. For some areas, according to Roger McClellan, former chairman of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), this could be even more onerous than a 60 ppb eight-hour standard.
Depending on where the standard is set, the EPA estimates that by 2020 the proposal will cost $19 billion to $90 billion to implement. That’s partly because 300 U.S. communities don’t even comply with the current standard, while no urban area in California meets the 1997 one. … [more]
Ruling may sink Snake Valley water deal
Nevada Supreme Court decision puts the proposed $3.5 billion pipeline on indefinite hold.
By Patty Henetz, The Salt Lake Tribune, 01/29/2010 [here]
A top water official moved too slowly on a 1989 Las Vegas request for certain water rights, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled Thursday — a finding that could delay or even kill a $3.5 billion proposal to pipe water 300 miles from Snake Valley to Sin City.
The ruling prompted Utah officials to stand down on a pending Snake Valley water-sharing agreement with neighboring Nevada. A recent Salt Lake Tribune poll of Utah voters shows across-the-board opposition to that plan.
“Based on the additional requirements imposed by the Nevada Supreme Court,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, “an agreement, at this time, is premature.”
The unanimous Supreme Court decision said Nevada state Engineer Tracy Taylor “violated his statutory duty” when he failed to make a decision by 1991 on 34 applications made by the Southern Nevada Water Authority for rights to water in aquifers under three Nevada valleys. Government scientists and other geology experts say those aquifers are connected with Snake Valley. …
The ruling stems from a “due process” appeal of Taylor’s 2006 decision to deny petitions from at least 54 individuals and groups representing thousands of people who wanted Nevada to reopen the water-rights application protest period.
The separate due-process matter now must go back to the lower court, which has two choices: Make the southern Nevada utility reapply for water rights or reopen the protest period.
Either choice would mean Utah counties, environmental groups, west desert ranchers, wildlife advocates, scientists and residents, heretofore shut out, could have a say in the proceedings. …
Great Basin Water Network coordinator Rose Strickland called the ruling “a home run for the public.”
“If we follow the law and the science,” she said, “there will be no misguided pipeline threatening the environment and economies of rural Nevada and Utah.” … [more]
Keeping Canadian students in the dark on climate change
As far as I know, no Canadian university has ever had a formal debate on climate change
By Lawrence Solomon, National Post, January 29, 2010 [here]
“Climate change is natural. Spending time and money on the issue is largely a waste,” posited Steve Paikin, host of TV Ontario’s The Agenda, to his live studio audience at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies Thursday evening. Paikin’s statement to the students came in the middle of an hour-long debate on climate change in which I participated, along with four other panelists.
The statement, the first of three that Paikin posed to the university students, came from an earlier Leger public opinion poll, but unlike the results that Leger found (16% agreed with the statement), not a single student among the 80 in attendance raised a hand in agreement. Are these students so accepting of the prevailing orthodoxy that none believes that climate change is natural, I thought, scanning their faces from my perch on the stage. Or are these students too intimidated by their peers or by the presence of the Munk Centre’s director — Janice Stein, also on the stage with me — to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on climate change?
I found the students’ silence disquieting. The majority of the public in the English speaking world no longer gives credence to the view that humans are responsible for climate change. In the U.S. where the abandonment is most pronounced, only 36% blame humans, according a recent Pew poll. In the U.K., the figure is 41%. The abandonment is across the board, involving members of all major political parties, and all age groups, youths included. In the U.S., 45% of those under 30 blame humans, in the UK, 42%.
So why would no student in the room — either out of youthful brashness or defiance of authority or conviction based on knowledge — utter a peep? If any of them had done their homework on this issue, they would have found that the Arctic ice is expanding, not shrinking; that the Antarctic, too, is gaining ice, not melting; that polar bear populations are not in decline, that global temperatures have been dropping over the last decade, not warming as the computer models had predicted; and that, in any event, none of the computer models on which claims of climate change rest — not one — has been made to work.
The answer to the students’ reticence to speak up is surely a consequence of Canada’s educational system. At our high schools, climate change is taught as dogma … [more]
1975 `Endangered Atmosphere’ Conference: Where the Global Warming Hoax Was Born
by Marjorie Mazel Hecht, Executive Intelligence Review, June 8, 2007 [here]
“Global Warming” is, and always was, a policy for genocidal reduction of the world’s population. The preposterous claim that human-produced carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life, came out of a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, organized by the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1974.
Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of man-caused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development. Mead’s leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate-scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.[1] Guided by luminaries like these, conference discussion focussed on the absurd choice of either feeding people or “saving the environment.” …
It was at this government-sponsored conference, 32 years ago, that virtually every scare scenario in today’s climate hoax took root. Scientists were charged with coming up with the “science” to back up the scares, so that definitive action could be taken by policy-makers.
Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed.
Eugenics and the Paradigm Shift
Mead’s population-control policy was firmly based in the post-Hitler eugenics movement, which took on the more palatable names of “conservation” and “environmentalism” in the post-World War II period. As Julian Huxley, the vice president of Britain’s Eugenics Society (1937-44), had announced in 1946, “even though it is quite true that radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” Huxley was then director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). … [more]
Tester Tests the Waters and Forests of Montana for Sustainable Development with his Destruction of Forest Jobs and Recreation Act
Written by Dan Happel and Kathleen Marquardt, Freedom Advocates, 30 December 2009 [here]
Senator Jon Tester of Montana introduced S. 1470 in July, known as the “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009.” Regretfully the first two words of the title of the Bill, “Destruction of”, were left off.
The Bill was written with “collaborative groups”[1] excluding the general public and resource development groups from input during the writing of the bill and then afterward during public meetings. (As is the case with most partisan[2] legislation, this bill is but a small part of a much larger goal.)
When citizen and local government groups asked to hold an open and public debate on the proposed bill in Missoula, neither Senator Tester nor any other group supporting the legislation sent a representative. In fact, any supposedly “public forum” that he would be willing to attend would be orchestrated by him or his cohorts and would be made up of mostly or wholly supportive audiences.
Let’s look at the Bill itself now that we have reviewed how it was put together, by whom it was written, and how it is being fed to the general public. The jobs in Tester’s bill are limited to a few exclusive “green” jobs plus destruction of access roads and logging of dead standing timber in very limited areas for a maximum of 10 to 15 years.
One of the things to take into consideration when reading this bill is that Montana’s forests are being decimated by pine beetle infestation. Conservative estimates of the forest area that is already infested or dead range from one-third to one-half. It is impossible to have a hard estimate because a heavily infested tree can take up to a year to turn red; so many trees appear healthy when in fact they are infested and dying.
The only real jobs in Tester’s bill will be a few government “green” jobs studying wilderness (or what is left of it when the beetles are finished in Montana).
Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy?
By Patrick Wood, Editor, The August Review, January 26, 2010 [here]
Critics who think that the U.S. dollar will be replaced by some new global currency are perhaps thinking too small.
On the world horizon looms a new global currency that could replace all paper currencies and the economic system upon which they are based.
The new currency, simply called Carbon Currency, is designed to support a revolutionary new economic system based on energy (production, and consumption), instead of price. Our current price-based economic system and its related currencies that have supported capitalism, socialism, fascism and communism, is being herded to the slaughterhouse in order to make way for a new carbon-based world.
It is plainly evident that the world is laboring under a dying system of price-based economics as evidenced by the rapid decline of paper currencies. The era of fiat (irredeemable paper currency) was introduced in 1971 when President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world’s primary reserve asset, all other currencies eventually followed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increasingly undesired, unstable, unusable.
The deathly economic state of today’s world is a direct reflection of the sum of its sick and dying currencies, but this could soon change.
Forces are already at work to position a new Carbon Currency as the ultimate solution to global calls for poverty reduction, population control, environmental control, global warming, energy allocation and blanket distribution of economic wealth.
Unfortunately for individual people living in this new system, it will also require authoritarian and centralized control over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave. … [more]
BLM to auction steam beneath Chalk Creek Valley landowners
Residents wary of geothermal plant
By Mark Jaffe, The Denver Post, January 24, 2010 [here]
Nathrop, Colorado - Syd Schieren uses the geothermal waters of the Chalk Creek Valley to heat his organic-vegetable greenhouse. Harold Palmer uses the water to heat his house, and Patty Kreski rents a vacation home with its own hot spring.
The hot springs are the biggest lure to this scenic valley at the foot of Mount Princeton, but they are now the source of a looming fight over whether it will be the site of the state’s first geothermal electric plant.
“What is frustrating is that they keep referring to this as an untapped resource, and a lot of people living here have been using it for years,” Schieren said.
On February 11, the Bureau of Land Management is scheduled to offer the first lease for geothermal development in Colorado — 800 acres in the Chalk Creek Valley.
Why the valley? Because an unidentified party nominated the land for lease sale. It is bureau policy not to reveal the nominator until after the sale.
And following a congressional mandate, the bureau is trying to expedite geothermal leases in the West.
“Congress voted for us to identify the low-hanging fruit, get out of the way and let the market decide,” said Kermit Witherbee, manager of the bureau’s national geothermal program.
That has left property owners worried and frustrated, because most of the lease acreage is on private land but the federal government owns the mineral rights below.
“The whole process seems to have been fast-tracked without a lot of details being worked out,” said Schieren, who lives and has hot spring vacation rentals in the valley.
Federal and state officials are still trying to work out an agreement over control of well drilling and water management — since state law controls the use of Colorado’s water.
“We don’t own the land,” said Witherbee. “We don’t own the water. We own the heat.” … [more]
NASA Global Warming Alarmist Endorses Book That Calls For Mass Genocide
by Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com, January 22, 2010 [here]
Prominent NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen has endorsed an eco-fascist book that calls for cities to be razed to the ground, industrial civilization to be destroyed and genocidal population reduction measures to be implemented in the name of preventing climate change.
Hansen, who was back in the news today commenting on a NASA press release that claims the last decade was the warmest on record, said that Keith Farnish, author of a new book called Time’s Up, is correct in calling for acts of sabotage and environmental terrorism in blowing up dams and demolishing cities in order to return the planet to the agrarian age.
Hansen is a key figure in the global warming movement, for it was his 1988 with testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore that really got the ball rolling for the elite in their mission to hijack the environmental movement and promote apocalyptic fears of climate change as a means of seizing absolute power over humanity.
Author Farnish “believes – as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does – that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged,” writes James Delingpole.
“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,” writes Farnish, adding that “people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses”.
Farnish echoes similar talking points to those featured in White House science czar John Holdren’s Ecoscience textbook, which called for a “planetary regime” to carry out forced abortions and mandatory sterilization procedures, as well as drugging the water supply, in an effort to cull the human surplus.
Farnish explains his desire to see rampant population reduction in the name of saving the planet.
“In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people,” he writes.
And how is the collapse of industrial civilization to be achieved? By indiscriminate acts of sabotage and eco-terrorism.
“Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage,” writes Farnish. … [more]
UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters
by Jonathan Leake, The Sunday UK Times, January 24, 2010 [here]
THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”
Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm”.
The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.
The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.
It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” … [more]
Roseburg BLM to bring owls, logging to table
by DD Bixby, The News-Review, Jan 24, 2010 [here]
Utter one fowl name and it can draw long sighs from many in Douglas County and around the state.
The northern spotted owl has deeply affected the economic, environment and community landscape in the 20 years since the bird was first listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
With the proposed Western Oregon Plan Revisions to the Northwest Forest Plan rescinded, officials at the Bureau of Land Management’s Roseburg District are hoping to take advantage of the current policy limbo and again affect that landscape with a ground-up approach that can find room for owl habitat, logging and social values to coexist.
Last week at a Douglas Timber Operators meeting, Roseburg BLM District Manager Jay Carlson presented what he is tentatively calling the Roseburg Collaborative Forestry Pilot Project.
The goal of his pilot project is to bring the members of various interest groups and the public together to streamline the process of project planning and develop a more holistic plan of habitat, fuel reduction and timber management.
Local BLM spokesman Bob Hall said an announcement will be publicized in the near future that will invite “anyone and everyone” who’s interested to get involved. No date or location has been set, yet.
Council urges citizens to write to Smurfit bankruptcy judge
The Clark Fork Chronicle, Friday, January 22 [here]
Dear Citizens of the West Valley Community:
As our community absorbs and increasingly understands the impacts of the Smurfit-Stone Mill Closure on us personally and collectively, we all wonder: What can we do about this?
At last night’s Town Hall meeting hosted by the Missoula County Commissioners and the West Valley Community Council, we learned there is a very specific action we can all take: Write a letter to the Smurfit-Stone Bankruptcy Judge and to the Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation and provide them with your opinion about what should be done with the Smurfit-Stone mill site.
Smurfit-Stone has a history of shuttering old mill sites…and not selling the properties to others who could make use of the facility for the economic benefit of their community. Examples included Circleville, Ohio; Alton, Illinois; Carthage, Indiana; and Bathurst, New Brunswick. We don’t want this to happen here.
Please consider writing a letter to Smurfit-Stone’s Bankruptcy Judge, Chairman of Smurfit-Stone’s Board and others listed on the information in the link below. This tactic is also being used in Ontonagon, Michigan, and attached is a sample letter from that community. Here are some suggested examples of what to include in your letter:
* The Smurfit-Stone industrial site is a crucial part of our valley’s economy, providing a $40 million annual payroll and jobs for 417 highly skilled workers.
* The Smurfit-Stone industrial site provides more than $2 million annually to local governments for essential county services, including public schools and a rural fire district.
* The mill supports 34 small businesses which provide services, supplies and inventory to the site.
* The mill site involves thousands of acres of prime agricultural lands and wetlands supporting migratory and domestic birds. Water rights held by the Smurfit-Stone Corporation constitute a significant portion of the valley’s water. Local concerns exist as to the future uses for that water.
* The mill site’s future economic significance to our community is a serious concern. A shuttered mill site for years on end would have a profound negative impact on the area within a radius of at least 50 miles.
* As part of bankruptcy proceedings, an order to sell the mill would provide Montana-based interests the opportunity to purchase the industrial site for alternative and future uses, and provide resources for meeting other Smurfit-Stone creditor demands.
When you write your letter, please send a copy to: Missoula County Commissioners, 200 W Broadway, Missoula, MT 59802 or via email to: bcc@co.missoula.mt.us
A hearing of the Bankruptcy Court is scheduled for January 29, 2010. Letters reaching the court in advance of this deadline would be most effective. … [more]
Biologist predicts grizzly bears’ removal from endangered list
By CHRIS PETERSON Hungry Horse News Wednesday, January 20, 2010 [here]
The lead biologist in the recovery of grizzly bears said he expects the bears in the greater Glacier National Park area will come off the Endangered Species List within five to six years.
The bears were listed as threatened south of Canada in 1975, but over the past 30 years, the bears have slowly, but steadily, expanded their presence in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — a swath of land that runs along the continental divide from Canada south to Lincoln and includes all of Glacier National Park.
The current estimate is that there are more than 750 bears in the NCDE and Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recover coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said he expects the bears will eventually be de-listed.
But that doesn’t mean grizzly bear managers will turn back the clock, he cautioned. Far from it. Bear managers will begin work on a broad conservation strategy for bears, a document that “institutionalizes the guidelines that got the grizzly bear where it is today,” Servheen said.
That includes everything from managing road densities in national forests to habitat conservation of the Rocky Mountain Front and garbage regulations in campgrounds and towns near prime grizzly habitat. …
More open spaces are also being protected, either through conservation easements or through government programs. Hundreds of thousands of acres of Plum Creek lands in the Swan Valley, for example, were recently protected from subdivision and will eventually be transferred to the Forest Service through a deal with the Nature Conservancy that uses a blend of private money and government funds. … [more]