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Sunday, March 22, 2015
Will BLM be Cowed by Ranchers, Miners?
May 19, 2015 Fallon, Nevada
About 170 people crowded elbow-to-elbow in the Churchill County
Commission chamber. More spilled outside, eager to hear about BLM’s new Carson
City Resource Management Plan (RMP) for public lands.
Along with a few other wild horse advocates, I came to dispute a plan that would zero-out bands of mustangs but leave livestock
home on the range. BLM figures 4.8 million acres can sustain only 2,508 wild
horses but 12,600 cattle.
Right off, the crowd was disappointed. BLM staff wouldn’t
answer questions; they came to listen.
Four speakers mentioned wild horses and three represented
the Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone tribes. The
rest of the 6-8:30 pm comment period belonged to the Fallon Tea Party, mining and
livestock industries. Samples from my notes:
"Churchill County is not Sherwood Forest and BLM is not the Sheriff of Nottingham" (speaker dons green Robin Hood hat) "We have enough trees" "We have enough protected lands" "We got enough wilderness" "We’re not going through a drought; it’s just a dry period and mining’s our cash cow"
Why worry? Throughout
the West legislation is being introduced to prohibit the Federal government from managing lands within a state. That would mean an end to public lands and
the meager protection afforded to range, water, vegetation, sacred sites, wild
horses and other wildlife.
Remember Cliven Bundy, a rancher backed by an armed militia
(ladies in front, please) protecting his “right” to skip out on a million
dollars in grazing fees? On March 31 the Bundy Ranch gang, headed by
Cliven’s son Ammon, are coming to the Nevada Assembly to support a Resource
Rights Bill.
Nevadans only (sorry): Want to enter your opinion of AB408, which would turn all public lands over to the state? .Click here to vote AGAINST giving wild horse lands to ranchers & miners _______________________________________________________________________________ Please watch and listen for further developments.
Read Bundy’s letter to the folks, here at Ralston Reports
Labels: BLM, Bundy, Fallon, Jon Ralston, public lands, wild horses Permalink to this blog post Posted by Terri Farley @ 5:19 PM 8 comments  
Sunday, May 18, 2014 BLM Bloodlines Explain Lack of Horse Sense 
A couple weeks ago, I walked into conversational ambush with a new
retiree from the Bureau of Land Management, but it turned out okay. Because we met during a
social occasion and the spirit of retirement was upon him, this man talked openly and
I was reminded why I got along with BLM staffers years ago when we met for coffee and biscuits at Bruno's cafe, in sight of the Calico Mountains where we'd work at cross-purposes.
Dinner was about to be served when he turned away, and then turned back to me, palms up.
Of course I’d heard of the Taylor Grazing Act. It
had something to do with cows being sovereign over wild horses and wild life on public lands,
but I didn’t see it as that
influential in BLM actions. Wrong.
Everything that touches the lives of wild horses is
part of my work in progress, a non-fiction book about mustangs, so I pursued this tip. I'm passing on what I learned, because just as a
horse’s bloodlines can reveal his ancestors’ strengths and weaknesses, so can the bloodlines of government bureaus.
In 1946, two Federal agencies merged and gave birth
to the Bureau of Land Management.
Sire:
General Land Office, the agency that surveyed and sold off the
West’s public lands at such a speedy and profitable rate, it spawned the expression
“doing a Land Office business.”
Dam: U.S. Grazing Service, enforcer of the Taylor Grazing Act which “stops injury to the public grazing lands by
preventing overgrazing and soil deterioration; to provide for their orderly
use, improvement, and development to
stabilize the livestock industry dependent upon the public range.”
By GLO, out of USGS, what do you get?
There could be room for hope. But BLM's hidden talents haven't shown themselves, lately.
For those of us watching BLM's mistreatment of wild horses, it's hard to see the agency as anything more than an a coddler of cattlemen and hawker of America's wild lands.
If BLM won’t fess up to it’s real plans for America’s
wild horses, the public is left to fall back on an old expression that’s doubly true: blood will
tell.
Labels: BLM, Bundy, Government Land Office, Taylor Grazing Act, U.S. Grazing Service, wild horses, wildlife Permalink to this blog post Posted by Terri Farley @ 7:46 AM 1 comments
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