Ginned up by the likes of
Kristi Noem, Ammon Bundy and Margaret Byfield tension is high in the Mountain West so local US Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service offices and employees are on alert for
militant zealots bent on violent disruptions or worse.
Even Earth haters in
my home state of South Dakota, including
the MAGA governor, are having (halving?) a cow over the BLM's proposed
Conservation and Landscape Health rule. There is
a straight line from Mrs.
Noem's American Legislative Exchange Council brainwashing to the
American Lands Council: both are
Koch-driven special interest groups seeking to open federal lands to private development bypassing environmental protections.
WANTED: The BLM South Dakota Field Office would like your help in identifying the person(s) responsible for damage at the Fort Meade Recreation Area on 1/26/2024 around 11:30 pm. A vehicle drove through four different closure gates, demolished an informational kiosk, drove through three sections of post and rail fence, and tore down the picnic shelter at the Alkali Creek Horse Camp. This senseless act will cost thousands of dollars in repairs and will take funding away from future improvements to the area. Please, if you have any information on this incident please contact the BLM at (605) 892-7000. [Faceberg post, Bureau of Land Management, Montana/Dakotas]
The Government Accountability
Office documented more than 350 incidents of threats and assaults against federal land management employees during
the Obama years but spurred by Donald Trump there have been many more culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Not just the BLM and Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and at least 15 other federal agencies also suffered hits to morale while in the clutches of the Trump Organization.
Most of the vegetation on the 274,000 surface acres of BLM in the South Dakota Field Office is prairie grassland or juniper woodlands but the trees at the Fort Meade Recreation Area are ponderosa pine and bur oak.
Around Lead and Deadwood pine and oak are mixed with spruce, birch, and quaking aspen. Much of it is leased for pennies a head to welfare ranchers for grazing including some four thousand acres at the Bismarck Trail Ranch but the BLM leases land to bentonite miners around Belle Fourche, too.
There's no telling how bad the chaos will get in western states but BLM Montana/Dakotas has been seeking a replacement for South Dakota Field Manager Chip Kimball.
Grazing fees are virtually unchanged at $1.35 per head per month since the 1960s and apply to nearly 18,000 grazing permits and leases administered by the BLM and nearly 6,250 permits administered by the Forest Service.
ip image: Mato Paha as seen from Fort Meade.