New Mexico yardbirds enchant

 

Mr. and Ms. Scott's oriole are nesting nearby.

The photos of a black-headed grosbeak and western tanager are shot through the porch screen, so sue me.

Okay, here's a better image of the tanager.

Coverup of Brady Folkens' wrongful death continues

Brady Folkens of Brookings died in state custody after a botched diagnosis at the former State Treatment and Rehabilitation (STAR) Academy in a county named for a war criminal on December 21, 2013 then the State of South Dakota’s Office of Risk Management and Republican Avera lawyer, then-Lt. Governor Matt Michels helped to bury the evidence of negligent homicide. 

After a public outcry the death camp was shuttered and the sprawling property put up for auction. The stigmatized site was recently sold for a fourth time at a substantially reduced price. 

The state has a history of poor choices made by state employees. Fourteen year old Gina Score died after a forced run in 1999 then the state settled with Score's family for just over a $million without accepting guilt for her death. 

A cynical observer might see Republican former South Dakota Governor Denny Daugaard's decision to close two state-owned boot camps as a vehicle to drive kids into the clutches of the Children's Home Society where he enjoys a financial interest. 

No doubt Republican Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg is enjoying similar cover. 

Dawn Van Ballegooyen and I found this interesting letter in Brady Folken’s file at Gary Thimsen’s law office at Woods, Fuller, Schultz, and Smith in Sioux Falls. Thimsen was hired to defend South Dakota authorities from liability in the death of 17-year old Brady. Notice the letter was date stamped by both the Office of Risk Management (run by Craig Ambach) and by the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office (run by then-AG Marty Jackley) – under the aegis of then-governor [Daugaard]. Proves to us that the South Dakota authorities made Brady’s cover-up a very high priority – so high that the law firm of Heideprim, et al., backed off. [Dr. Lars Aanning, Faceberg post]

Factory farm facing furor

Here's a story that condemns the decision to end environmental protection in the chemical toilet, sacrifice zone, perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area that is South Dakota. 

Dwayne Beck is a soil scientist who manages South Dakota State University's Dakota Lakes Research Station. He has taken on irrigators and the main stem dams killing the Missouri River but now he has taken aim at food giant General Mills who developed a 30,000 acre factory farm in the center of the state. 

Breaking West River ground for the Keystone XL pipeline will end with the same result. The same geology that thwarts railroads and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

Take Gunsmoke Farms, a vast property that covers 53 square miles just northwest of Pierre, S.D. "It scared me, because normally organic [farming] entails lots of tillage, and those soils are very fragile," he said. He collected photographs of the damage: small drifts of wind-blown soil in a roadside ditch, and a country road that disappears into a brown cloud of blowing dust. General Mills doesn't own Gunsmoke Farms or control it directly. It signed a "strategic sourcing agreement" with an investment firm called TPG, an early investor in Uber, which acquired the land to supply General Mills with organic wheat, peas and other crops. TPG then spun off another firm, Sixth Street, which currently owns Gunsmoke. [Dan Charles, NPR]

SDSU researcher: climate change disrupting bison sustainability

If cattle grazing is the key to preventing wildfires why is Republican ranch country still suffering near daily high or even extreme grassland fire danger indices so often even during winter? 

After the Soviet Union fell Republicans began their war on the environment in 1991 substituting a new Green Scare for the old Red Scare.

Today, urban sprawl, accelerated global warming and drought are reducing productivity on the remaining grasslands of the Great Plains, writes Dr. Jeff Martin. He's the Director of Research at the Center of Excellence for Bison Studies at South Dakota State University.

Only 3 percent of the Earth's surface remains untouched by human development and a sixth mass extinction is underway. Putting the country on the path of protecting at least 30 percent of its land and 30 percent of its ocean areas by 2030 (30x30) is imperative to preserving public lands and moving the US Forest Service from the US Department of Agriculture into the Department of Interior would be just one step toward that goal. 

That Republican welfare ranchers are angry about rewilding means it's the right thing to do. 

In 2019 Democratic then-New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland led a House subcommittee hearing on anti-government extremism emphasizing that the violent ideologies expressed by the Bundy clan were spurred by white elected Republicans in the Mountain West. Now, under Interior Secretary Haaland the Bureau of Land Management has even hired a security specialist to outline strategies to defend federal employees and property. 

Herr Trump's first Interior secretary blamed wildfires in the West on those he called “radical environmentalists” despite most acres burned occur on private ranch land in Republican counties. On the final day of Trump’s presidency his last Interior secretary even restored a grazing permit to the Hammond Ranch whose prescriptive burn escaped onto federal land. Only a tiny fraction of public lands offered by the Trump Organization to the extractive industries were even leased yet Republicans see the Biden White House as hostile to their causes especially after the Hammonds' grazing permits were again rescinded. 

David Treuer was born of a Holocaust survivor and Ojibwe mother. He wrote in The Atlantic that he believes that most land held in America's national parks should be remanded to Indigenous peoples but it's my view that the land held in the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service should also be part of that trust. 

Indigenous peoples set at least 47% of fires in the Interior West between 1776 and 1900 because smoke from cultural fire has been long-applied to control tree pests and just 150 years ago over 10 million bison would be clearing the grasses that drive large range fires but just 600,000 bison still exist in the United Snakes today. 

“Climate change directly affects bison by increasing thermal stress and decreasing forage and water availability, issues that also challenge range beef cattle,” Martin says. “Indirect consequences of climate change include increasing distribution and intensity of parasites and several diseases that are known to reduce reproductive success. These stresses have been estimated to collectively reduce bison body size by 50% if global temperature warms by 4°C near the end of the 21st century.” “Currently, 90% of grasslands and 85% of bison are privately owned, which justifies the need for robust private land conservation strategies to maintain this iconic species and its grassland habitats,” Martin says. [Brookings Register]

Photo: bison graze Wind Cave National Park in occupied South Dakota.

The passing of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) should be a priority for the 30x30 campaign. @Carole_King @ForRockies @wildclearwater @wildearthguard pic.twitter.com/h4XTSIyvq1

— Wilderness Watch (@WildernessWatch) April 16, 2021

30x30 Initiative a road map to rewilding the West

Indigenous peoples set at least 47% of fires in the Interior West between 1776 and 1900 because smoke from cultural fire has been long-applied to control tree pests and just 150 years ago over 10 million bison would be clearing the grasses that drive large range fires. 

After the Soviet Union fell Republicans began their war on the environment in 1991 substituting a new Green Scare for the old Red Scare.

This blog was established in 2010 as a vehicle for rewilding the American West. 

In 2019 Democratic then-New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland led a House subcommittee hearing on anti-government extremism emphasizing that the violent ideologies expressed by the Bundy clan were spurred by white elected Republicans in the Mountain West. Now, under Interior Secretary Haaland the Bureau of Land Management has even hired a security specialist to outline strategies to defend federal employees and property. 

If cattle grazing is the key to preventing wildfires why is Republican ranch country still suffering near daily high or even extreme grassland fire danger indices so often even during winter? 

Herr Trump's first Interior secretary blamed wildfires in the West on those he called “radical environmentalists” despite most acres burned occur on private ranch land in Republican counties. On the final day of Trump’s presidency his last Interior secretary even restored a grazing permit to the Hammond Ranch whose prescriptive burn escaped onto federal land. Only a tiny fraction of public lands offered by the Trump Organization to the extractive industries were even leased yet Republicans see the Biden White House as hostile to their causes especially after the Hammonds' grazing permits were again rescinded. 

Today, only 3 percent of the Earth's surface remains untouched by human development and a sixth mass extinction is underway. Putting the country on the path of protecting at least 30 percent of its land and 30 percent of its ocean areas by 2030 (30x30) is imperative to preserving public lands and moving the US Forest Service from the US Department of Agriculture into the Department of Interior would be just one step toward that goal.

That Republican welfare ranchers are angry about rewilding means it's the right thing to do.

David Treuer was born of a Holocaust survivor and Ojibwe mother. He wrote in The Atlantic that he believes that most land held in America's national parks should be remanded to Indigenous peoples but it's my view that the land held in the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service should also be part of that trust. 

Editorial cartoon: Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune.

Learn more about the 30x30 Initiative linked here. More about connectivity conservation strategies here.

#rewilding https://t.co/QT8PGy3wd1

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) May 1, 2021