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Betrayal of the Upper Green River

March 14, 2018

Betrayal on the Upper Green River

Recently I attended a meeting with the Bridger Teton National Forest (BTNF) officials to discuss future grazing plans for the Upper Green River grazing allotment.

The allotment, one of the most outstanding wildlife areas in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, contains the headwaters of the Green River and lies north of Pinedale Wyoming between the Wind River Range and the Gros Ventre Range.

Basically, the Forest Service plans to allow the continued degradation of public resources by livestock grazing on what is one of the most important wildlife areas on the entire BTNF. The Upper Green Allotment is an excellent example of PPSC or “privatize profit, socialize costs.”

The Upper Green Allotment is the largest Forest Service grazing allotment in the West. It is a mixture of aspen, rolling sagebrush/grassland, willow-lined creeks, intermixed with ponds, and springs.

It contains the best wildlife habitat outside of a national park. Home to grizzlies and wolves, endangered Colorado cutthroat trout, sage grouse, elk, moose, pronghorn, and various rare amphibians, among other outstanding wildlife values.

That is one reason why the BTNF Forest Plan has categorized 93% of the area as DFC 10 and 12 status where protecting wildlife values is the primary goal.

Unfortunately, this amazing wildlife habitat is annually trashed by private livestock for the profit of a few ranchers, all with the collusion and indeed the cooperation of the BTNF. It treats the Upper Green area as a feedlot for livestock.

In a recent Final Environmental Impact Statement, the BTNF acknowledges that the range condition of the clear majority of the allotment is between poor and fair. Don’t let the word “fair” fool you. It’s a nice sounding euphemism chosen by range managers to hide the real condition of the landscape. In range parlance, this means that much of the Upper Green allotment is in terrible range conditions.

Some 74% of the plant species that would be expected on this allotment are so rare as to be non-existent due to livestock grazing. In other words, by their own admission, the allotment is already severely degraded.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat

August 11, 2015

Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat

The amount of meat humans eat is immense. In 1965, 10 billion livestock animals were slaughtered each year. In 2012, that number was 55 billion. More chickens are killed in the US every year than there are people in the world, and there are one billion cattle alive, weighing twice as much as the human population.

All that livestock needs land, which places pressure on wildlife habitat and forest. Livestock is the world’s largest land user. Grazing occupies 26 per cent of the earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface, and feed crop production uses about one third of all arable land.

Factor in that meat production requires staggering amounts of land, water, and energy compared to plant foods, and it’s not surprising that a 2010 UN report explained that western-type dietary preferences for meat would be unsustainable in future, given that the expected rise in world population. Demand for meat is expected to double by 2050. Meat consumption is already steadily rising in countries such as China, which once followed more sustainable, vegetable-based diets.

A person existing mainly on animal protein requires ten times more land to provide adequate food than someone living on vegetable sources of protein. Far more energy is put into animals per unit of food than for any plant crop because cattle consume 16 times as much grain as they produce as meat: it takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef.

Animal farms use nearly 40 per cent of the world’s total grain production. In the US, nearly 70 per cent of grain production is fed to livestock. If humans continue to eat more and more meat, it means we are going to place far more strain on land and water use and are also going to manufacture much more chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We will thus be creating far more pollution and greenhouse gases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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