Archive for the 'Animals' Category

Tiger chasing a sloth bear in Pilibhit Tiger Reserve. Jungles never cease to amaze us.

VC: Siddharth Singh pic.twitter.com/JHlKztkkUX

— Ramesh Pandey (@rameshpandeyifs) April 3, 2024

Source.

This week, a bill to change the membership, authority, and scope of duties of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board took another step toward becoming law. In addition to requiring some “non-consumptive” users serve on the board, the bill would also ban hunting coyotes over bait and with dogs.

The attempted overhaul mostly comes from critics of how the board recently handled coyote hunting and trapping rule changes, Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department commissioner Christopher Herrick tells Outdoor Life. But it reflects a larger shift — one we’ve seen in other parts of the country — toward a more partisan approach to wildlife management than the default trust in agency biologists, managers, and other subject-matter experts. Most notable is Washington, where a wildlife commission recently staffed with multiple preservationist, anti-hunting members voted in 2022 to end the spring bear season, despite the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s stance that it was ecologically sustainable.

In addition to the coyote baiting and hounding ban, Vermont Senate Bill 258 would dismantle and restructure the board with members from varied backgrounds through a new selection process. It would also require that VFWD take over the board’s decision- and rulemaking powers. So if this bill becomes law, (and it looks like it might), then a birder, for instance, would get the same amount of clout that a duck hunter would — and VFWD would have to report to both when setting seasons, establishing Vermont’s antlerless hunt, and making other rules.

Like the regulatory bodies of wildlife agencies in other states, Vermont’s board is currently comprised of governor-appointed citizens. Those 14 members, one from each of the state’s 14 counties, oversee hunting, trapping, and fishing. While they aren’t required to have degrees or career backgrounds in wildlife biology or management, they are informed and guided by those who do: VDFW employees.

But their perceived lack of qualifications — and what many consider an undemocratic selection process — are part of why the bill’s proponents are trying to change the status quo. Herrick says this criticism undermines the quality work the agency has accomplished in recent years.

“If you look at the history of the Fish and Wildlife Board and Department, and the work that we’ve done, our wildlife is in a very good place,” Herrick says. “In the early seventies, we introduced wild turkeys to the state and now that’s one of our biggest game seasons, in May and in the fall as well. We have a healthy and vibrant deer herd. We have a good moose population that’s being managed very well. That doesn’t mention the work we do with our flora. To use a trite phrase, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

You don’t understand, Mr. Herrick. To them it’s broke if there is any hunting at all. They are rewilders, you see. They don’t admit to a good role of hunters and wildlife biologists in herd management. They think humans are the pestilence. There is an ulterior motive, of course.

If you claim you need your firearms for hunting, and not just for the amelioration of tyranny, they can outlaw hunting and you lose that excuse.

Do you see how this works?

Well, the jackasses who are perpetrating this can enjoy what they have created. It’s not Coyotes. They are Coywolves, and they have dog and wolf DNA too. They are a superbreed.

Over the past century, coywolves have slowly taken over much of eastern North America. Coywolves inhabit the forests and parks around people’s neighborhoods.

They can even be spotted in cities. While most people may think that these creatures are just regular ol’ coyotes, they are actually the results of a coyote and wolf mating.

[ … ]

The hybrid’s scientific name is Canis Iatrans var., and it weighs about 55 pounds more than a true coyote. It also has a larger jaw, a bushier tail, smaller ears, and longer legs.

The coywolf’s genetic makeup consists of the eastern wolf, western wolf, western coyote, and large breeds of domesticated dogs, such as Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds. On average, coywolves are a quarter wolf and a tenth dog.

There are currently millions of coywolves across the eastern region of North America. Their climbing numbers may be due to the advantages they have over their parent species.

Congratulations, dumbasses.  Enjoy your pets being eaten and your children getting attacked and mauled. This superbreed will attack in groups too, unlike their predecessors.

As for the good men and women left in Vermont, if there are any, never go into the bush without a large bore handgun. As for that matter, don’t even take the trash out without carrying.

Around these parts, we shoot Coyotes (Coywolves).

Source.

A well-funded environmentalist group played a key role in the push to remove dams in the Pacific Northwest’s Klamath River ahead of premature deaths of thousands of salmon.

American Rivers — an organization that has received millions of dollars from left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking organizations in recent years — was “the orchestrator of the Klamath dams removal project,” according to Siskiyou News, a local outlet in Northern California.

The drawdowns of several reservoirs pursuant to the scheduled removal of four dams in the river preceded the deaths of “hundreds of thousands” of young salmon in the waterway, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The push to remove the dams is often marketed as beneficial for salmon, as proponents of the plan — including American Rivers — have argued that the dams obstruct the natural movements of salmon as well as their access to habitat.

However, weeks after beginning the process to remove one of the systems scheduled for deconstruction on the river, a large number of the 830,000 young salmon released into the river on Feb. 26 had died as of March 2, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

CDFW officials attributed the mass-death to gas bubble disease, which is caused by changes in water pressure, and stated that the changes in pressure driving the deaths was attributable to old dam infrastructure that is slated for removal. The agency further stated that water turbidity and dissolved oxygen levels do not appear to have contributed to the mass-death.

The young salmon that died travelled through a tunnel involved in the dam infrastructure that had previously not been accessible to the fish before officials altered the flow of water through the system as part of the removal process, Peter Tira, an information officer for the CDFW, explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The deaths were primarily a function of where the fish were released into the water, and the outcome, though unfortunate, is a learning opportunity for stakeholders who remain committed to making the Klamath River a free-flowing cold water river system again in the long-term, Tira told the DCNF.

Oh those goofy, dumb, uneducated, hillbilly rewilders. They make such a mess of things. They always do things that are counterproductive to their stated goals.

We’ve discussed this before.

Yes, I remember now, we’ve discussed this before, in detail.

Listening to this video I wasn’t sure I was listening to Chuke! He goes down a very long list of calibers that may be a potential deadly affect on large game.

I doubt some of this. Put me up against a large predator like a brown bear and I want a .45 SMC, .44 magnum, shotgun or semiautomatic rifle.

The Alaskan can weigh in since he is experienced with large predatory animals in Alaska. I doubt he will agree with Chuke on this video.

Texas Monthly.

By the age of thirty, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring high-risk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-twenties, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God.

So as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, he couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.”

As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land stretched out before him, a rustic valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment.

But mostly, he thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, seven-inch tusks to stab him at least fifteen times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.

It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig. “For years, that animal trusted me everyday and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”

They’re not pets. Feral hogs will kill you, folks.

Wild boar tries to steal some snowboards pic.twitter.com/tT3s4GdnhK

— Crazy Clips (@crazyclipsonly) February 7, 2024

They attack out of pure meanness, or spite, or just because they can, or for no reason at all.

And the hog doesn’t seem to me like it’s having any problem at all dealing with the cold and snow.

And just imagine – some folks want to keep them around, idiot rewilders, they are.

We’ve discussed the contradictions, confusion and befuddlement in the rewilding movement before.  From the destruction of dams in California in an attempt to save the river fish, only to introduce beavers who then build dams, to the massive solar farms that divert water and kill plant species making for essentially dead deserts, they can’t seem to make their minds up about much of anything except that they hate humans.

The reintroduction of wolves into Colorado has peaked the interest of rewilders everywhere. In fact, it’s practically romantic.

“It was so perfect. You could look around, and it felt like at any moment John Denver was going to show up. It was ‘Rocky Mountain High’ in every direction,” said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecology and conservation biology professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the American Canid Project. The stars rolled up last: five wolves, silent in their crates but omnipotent in the waft of their musky aroma. It smelled like the wild, Lambert observed.

But why would they care? Well, you see, they think it’s better for the environment.

The study was conducted by scientists at CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources, focusing on the effects of three apex predators: wolves, cougars, and grizzly bears in Yellowstone. These carnivores, positioned at the top of the food chain and not preyed upon by other animals, had populations that were depleted over time.

The return of wolves to the park in 1995 was concurrent with the natural recovery of cougar and grizzly populations. Their absence for nearly a century had significantly altered the park’s landscape and food web, transforming regions rich in willow and aspen along small streams into grasslands due to intense elk browsing.

Too many Elk, they say. But they didn’t think that way when they were throwing bales of hay over the fences to the Elk when they thought they needed feeding in particularly harsh winters, causing the Elk not even to return to Yellowstone (when you’ve got a handout, why leave?).

But why are grasslands bad? The rewilders believe that trees are a more productive means of carbon reduction. But is that correct?

Forests have long served as a critical carbon sink, consuming about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pollution produced by humans worldwide. But decades of fire suppression, warming temperatures and drought have increased wildfire risks — turning California’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Well, we’ve discussed the stupidity of fighting forest fires before, but let’s continue.

A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

So if the rewilders are wrong, does it matter? Not to them. It’s an evolving religion, you see.  And even the most absurd claims can be made on behalf of carbon sinks and the environment.

An unscientific bias against “feral” or “invasive” animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier, a new paper argues.

Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of “rewilding”  — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science.

The study argues against widely held beliefs about whether invasive species are harmful — or what Lundgren described as the quasi-religious perception that some species inherently belong in a given landscape and others don’t.

That belief is the driving force behind a wave of expensive and often futile campaigns since the 1990s that eradicate species including feral hogs in Texas, wild horses across the American West and donkeys and camels in Australia.

We’ve discussed feral hogs at great length here on these pages.  Feral hogs adversely affect water quality, attack pets, destroy the environment they are a part of, dig up crops, spread diseases and parasites that only they can carry,

What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

Feral hogs have run farmers in Georgia and Texas completely out of business.

But if rewilding is your newfound religion, you can make any claim whatsoever and it’s okay, because mother Gaia.  Or something.

But remember what I told you about mother Gaia.  “The problem with mother Gaia is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch.  She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator.  So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why.  So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.”

Prior:

Canadian Super Pigs Poised to Wreak Environmental Havoc and Spread Disease in Canada

Can Whitetail Managers Take Back Feral Pig Country?

How You Know That Dummies Are Making Suggestions About Containing The Feral Hog Problem

Hogs in Houston

Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S.

Feral Hogs in Canada

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!

They’re trying to take your hunting away from you.  Source.

Earlier this month, a group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would prohibit the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from allowing any doe hunts in the state’s “Northern Forest Zone,” an area encompassing all or part of 20 counties in the northern part of the Badger State. If passed, Senate Bill 965 would ban whitetail doe hunting in the Northwoods for the next four years.

The bill is a response to a disappointing hunting season in deer camps throughout northern Wisconsin last fall. According to the DNR, hunters tagged just over 28,000 whitetails in the Northern Forest Zone during the 2023 guns season. 10,305 of those were does—down a whopping 27.2 percent from the previous five seasons. The buck total also dropped, by nearly 15 percent, with hunters tagging 17,715 antlered deer.

In a Jan. 17 statement announcing the bill, co-sponsor Rep. Chaz Green, had this to say: “Deer hunting has been a tradition for generations in Northern Wisconsin. But those traditions have been thrown by the wayside because the population of deer has been decreasing for years. We want future generations to enjoy the tradition of hunting in Northern Wisconsin, and this bill is a good start to making that happen.”

Sen. Romaine Quinn, the bill primary co-sponsor, echoed Rep. Green’s thoughts. “This past month, we have heard from hundreds of constituents at multiple listening sessions about the poor deer season this year,” he said. “Although there are many issues we will continue to debate within the hunting community, there is a clear consensus that we must act now to save and improve our deer herd, and this bill is a critical first step.”

Well then. One would think that with this sort of proposed law, they knew a lot of stuff about how many hunters were in the bush, had testimony from DNR wildlife biologists, and on and on we could go.  Someone surely has researched this, right?

Lindsay Thomas Jr. is the Chief Communications Officer for the National Deer Association (NDA). He tells Field & Stream that it’s too early for NDA to take an official stance on the pending legislation.

“We have not had a chance to really dig into the biology side of the question or the nature of the problem in northern Wisconsin, but, in general, we prefer to see issues like this—deer management and deer biology—being handled by professional biologists at state wildlife agencies,” says Thomas. “If you ban doe hunting across an entire region, that removes any flexibility from a management standpoint whatsoever. What we want to know is: What does the [Wisconsin DNR] have to say about this. How would they manage it?”

Nobody knows the answers to those questions because the lawmakers want to “do something, now.” They always do, especially in election years.

Meanwhile, the wolf population is strong.  Hunting was so good that the rewilders managed to put a stop to wolf hunting after a three day season.

Yeah, so there’s that.

The Bureau of Land Management is planning a truly boneheaded move, angering some conservationists over the affects to herd populations and migration routes.  From Field & Stream.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released a draft plan outlining potential solar energy development in the West. The proposal is an update of the BLM’s 2012 Western Solar Plan. It adds five new states—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—to a list of 11 western states already earmarked for utility-scale solar development on BLM land.

“Our public lands are playing a critical role in the clean energy transition – and the progress the Bureau of Land Management is announcing today on several clean energy projects across the West represents our continued momentum in achieving those goals,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning in a press release issued on Jan. 17.

All told, the plan would “provide approximately 22 million acres of land open for solar application, giving maximum flexibility to reach the nation’s clean energy goals,” the BLM press release states.

Ponder that for a moment.  22 million acres.  That’s 34,375 square miles, the square root of which is 185.4.  Imagine a square parcel of land 185 miles by 185 miles.  This is an unbelievably large swath of land simply being turned over the commercial power generators to install solar panels.

Hunting and fishing conservation groups have given the proposal a lukewarm reception. “We recognize that public lands in the west provide important options to help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs,” said Jon Holst, Wildlife & Energy Senior Advisor for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in a press release. “Our public lands also contain critical unfragmented habitats for fish and wildlife populations that offer world class hunting and angling opportunities. We will be looking at the details of this draft plan to make sure that the interests of hunters and anglers are incorporated.”

In March 2023, a group of conservation organizations including the TRCP, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, The National Deer Association, and others had submitted a set of recommendations regarding the proposal. The organizations primarily asked the BLM to prioritize development in previously disturbed areas while avoiding areas with high recreational and resource values, among other suggestions.

Notice that they’re not giving this a resounding ‘no’ as I would, just a ‘please don’t do it wrong’.  But they will do it wrong simply by doing it at all.

If this all sounds patently absurd (and it is), you have to dig a bit deeper into the issues of anthropogenic global warming, carbon neutral infrastructure, and the so-called “rewilding movement,” and how they are connected or otherwise at odds with each other.

Rewilding has its genesis in the UN.

Governments must deliver on a commitment to restore at least 1bn hectares (2.47bn acres) of land by 2030 and make a similar pledge for the oceans, according to the report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to launch the decade.

Humans are using about 1.6 times the resources that nature can sustainably renew every year and the UN said short-term economic gains are being prioritised over the health of the planet. The rallying cry calls on all parts of society to take action, including governments, businesses and citizens, to restore and rewild urban areas, grasslands, savannahs and marine areas.

For those of us who understand, this is simply absurd.  The heartland of America could supply the entire world with food in the absence of government control.  Nature can easily sustain humans, but if you detect a fealty of population control (or euphemistically called “population planning” by the UN), that isn’t by mistake.  The UN has for decades had a commitment to population control.  It’s all intentional and by design.

More specifically, an additional SDG to dampen population growth would promote funding for voluntary, rights-based family planning. This approach has a proven track record of success, not only in reducing births rapidly, but also in advancing the empowerment of women and spurring economic progress. No coercive “population control” measures are needed. Rather, wider awareness of the linkage between family size and ecological sustainability can help parents recognize the benefits of having fewer children.

So it is both a hatred for humans and desire for humans to retreat from the wilderness that is driving these philosophies.  But how is it all working out?  While painful and sometimes boring, I’ve been studying these movements for quite some time, and have cataloged dozens upon dozens of instances where there is paradox, disagreement, conflict, and direct contradiction between sides in this new world order they so desperately want to foist on humans.  So that you can understand how this plays out, I’ll list only three such conflicts between players and outcomes.

The first is related to California’s actions to try to save the Salmon.

The Klamath River Renewal Corporation began lowering water levels in Iron Gate Reservoir in northern California on Thursday. This “drawdown” is the first step in tearing down the 173-foot-tall Iron Gate Dam, one of four hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath River that are now being removed to benefit endangered salmon and other native fish species. It marks an important new phase in the Klamath River dam removal project, the largest of its kind in U.S. history.

“Witnessing the beginning of drawdown at Iron Gate was both a celebration of an important moment in the story of Klamath dam removal, and a source of pride for the exceptional work done by so many people to arrive at this day,” KRRC CEO Mark Branson said in a press release last week.

On the other hand, California has released beavers into the wild.

A family of seven beavers is thriving this December after spending their first two months exploring the wilderness of Plumas County. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s October beaver release marked the first time in seven decades that the department released beavers into the wild.

“The new family group of beavers join a single resident beaver in the valley with the ultimate objective of re-establishing a breeding population that will maintain the mountain meadow ecosystem, its processes, and the habitat it provides for numerous other species, state wildlife officials wrote.

These things multiply if you’ve never been around beavers, and one pond turns into three or four or five, and dams go up everywhere in sight.  Might that inhibit migration of fish, or river trout who need the flowing waters?

Humans have spent millions of dollars trying to replicate the benefits beavers create, wildlife officials said. Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership and the State Legislature backing up the re-population effort with funding, beaver restoration will help mitigate the impacts of wildfires, climate change, and drought, according to CDFW.

There’s that important issue of wildfires, but we’ll get to that momentarily.  But it isn’t all candy canes and pinks zebras flying over the moon.  Beavers have an ecological impact that runs contrary to the stated goals of the climate alarmists.

The preponderance of beavers, which can weigh as much as 45kg, follows a collapse in trapping and the warming of a landscape that once proved too bleak for occupation. Global heating has driven the shrubification of the Arctic tundra; the harsh winter is shorter, and there is more free-running water in the coldest months. Instead of felling trees for their dams, the beavers construct them from surrounding shrubs, creating deep ponds in which to build their lodges.

The new arrivals cause plenty of disruption. For some communities, the rivers and streams are the roads of the landscape, and the dams make effective roadblocks. As the structures multiply, more land is flooded and there can be less fresh water for drinking downstream. But there are other, less visible effects too. The animals are participants in a feedback loop: climate change opens the landscape to beavers, whose ponds drive further warming, which attracts even more paddle-tailed comrades.

Physics suggested this would happen. Beaver ponds are new bodies of water that cover bare permafrost. Because the water is warm – relatively speaking – it thaws the hard ground, which duly releases methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

But there is more.

But beaver ponds, because they lack oxygen, are a hot spot for bacteria that can generate mercury-containing neurotoxins.

It probably makes no sense to ask California if they considered mercury-containing neurotoxins when they introduced beavers into the bush again.

The second example is from wildfires.  There is no end to the claim that beavers can mitigate wildfires due to moistening the earth.  A Google search produces dozens of such articles.  But as I’ve observed on these pages before, I recently visited Groton Plantation for a deer hunting trip.  It’s some of the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen – healthy, with abundant wildlife everywhere, and simply breathtaking in its splendor.

One way they keep it like that is by burning one quarter of the land every year.  With a 20,000 acre plantation, that’s five thousand acres they burn each year.  It manages to burn out the dead fall and trash shrubs, and causes a reintroduction of new tree and foliage growth for the animals.  Within days of a burn, there are green sprouts everywhere.

This isn’t uncommon knowledge among us Southerners.

Using new tools to revive an old communal tradition, they set fire to wiregrasses and forest debris with a drip torch, corralling embers with leaf blowers.

Wimberley, 65, gathers groups across eight North Carolina counties to starve future wildfires by lighting leaf litter ablaze. The burns clear space for longleaf pine, a tree species whose seeds won’t sprout on undergrowth blocking bare soil. Since 2016, the fourth-generation burner has fueled a burgeoning movement to formalize these volunteer ranks.

Prescribed burn associations are proving key to conservationists’ efforts to restore a longleaf pine range forming the backbone of forest ecology in the American Southeast. Volunteer teams, many working private land where participants reside or make a living, are filling service and knowledge gaps one blaze at a time.

Prescribed fire, the intentional burning replicating natural fires crucial for forest health, requires more hands than experts can supply. In North Carolina, the practice sometimes ends with a barbecue.

“Southerners like coming together and doing things and helping each other and having some food,” Wimberley said. “Fire is not something you do by yourself.”

More than 100 associations exist throughout 18 states …

But then, Southerners aren’t Californians, and we know better than to do most of the things they do, at least until we ger overrun by them with their soiled nest ideas brought with them.

This – controlled burns, or managed burns, or prescribed burns – is good science, and doesn’t kill the old growth forest.  It helps it by destroying the dead fall and trash.  The mountain bikers want Pisgah to be rocky, wild, unkept, and untouched by man, except for them, of course.  That approach has led to so much dead fall, brush, and forest trash that you can’t even walk in Pisgah without stepping in nearly a foot of forest trash.  I hunted there recently too.  There are no deer left in Pisgah.  Pisgah is rotting, decaying and will soon be dead.

We fight fires all over America, but that stops the natural process of lightning strikes burning the forest for us.  So while the claim is that beavers help mankind stop forest fires, mankind is interfering with the natural process of fires.  When this occurs for long enough, the dead fall and forest trash is so deep that the fire burns intensely enough to kill the old growth.  The exactly opposite happens from what was intended by fighting these fires.  California does it all of the time.

The third example is the installation of solar power.  Returning to the example cited earlier in this article, this is a massive investment into solar energy, and will consume a large swath of land.  These massive solar projects have caused desert death where they have been tried before.

Massive solar development projects in Southern California have strained local water availability, threatening desert ecosystems and angering residents who have been impacted by the strain on the water supply, according to an Inside Climate News report.

The small communities around Desert Center, California, depend on naturally-occurring underground water reserves, known as groundwater aquifers, but the water-intensive development process for large solar projects has caused groundwater levels to fall, according to Inside Climate News. Crucial local water wells have dried up and land beneath homes has sagged as a result of development activity, while desert ecosystems have been damaged as well, according to Inside Climate News.

Locals complain that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the corporations driving the developments in California’s Colorado Desert have not allowed them to provide sufficient input in the decision-making process for the developments, according to Inside Climate News. Despite the BLM’s assurances that “renewable energy development on BLM-managed public lands will continue to help communities across the country be part of the climate solution, while creating jobs and boosting local economies,” residents say that they have not reaped much benefit from the solar projects while the strain on their groundwater supply has intensified, according to Inside Climate News.

The BLM is deaf to the complaints because they are part of the religious following of a world without a carbon footprint.  But it’s not just the herd migration routes in jeopardy.  It’s the actual space where the solar farms are built that suffer as a result of this religious commitment.

More common solar panels are failing all across America, don’t really help the environment, have been an epic failure, and pollute the environment in ways that are just recently being understood.

Solar panels often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. “Approximately 90% of most PV modules are made up of glass,” notes San Jose State environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney. “However, this glass often cannot be recycled as float glass due to impurities. Common problematic impurities in glass include plastics, lead, cadmium and antimony.”

Researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) undertook a study for U.S. solar-owning utilities to plan for end-of-life and concluded that solar panel “disposal in “regular landfills [is] not recommended in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil” and so “disposal is potentially a major issue.”

But that’s exactly what California is doing.

California has been a pioneer in pushing for rooftop solar power, building up the largest solar market in the U.S. More than 20 years and 1.3 million rooftops later, the bill is coming due.

Many are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium.

Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and chief executive of Recycle PV Solar, says that only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled, according to estimates drawn from International Renewable Energy Agency data on decommissioned panels and from industry leaders.

The looming challenge over how to handle truckloads of waste, some of it contaminated, illustrates how cutting-edge environmental policy can create unforeseen problems down the road.

“The industry is supposed to be green,” Vanderhoof said. “But in reality, it’s all about the money.”

It’s always the money, and wealth transfer drives all of this.

Where rewilding has been attempted before it had disastrous consequences.

It is known as the Dutch Serengeti, a bold project to rewild a vast tract of land east of Amsterdam. But a unique nature reserve where red deer, horses and cattle roam free on low-lying marsh reclaimed from the sea has been savaged by an official report after thousands of animals starved.

In a blow to the rewilding vision of renowned ecologists, a special committee has criticised the authorities for allowing populations of large herbivores to rise unchecked at Oostvaardersplassen, causing trees to die and wild bird populations to decline.

It follows growing anger in the Netherlands over the slaughter of more than half Oostvaardersplassen’s red deer, Konik horses and Heck cattle because they were starving. After a run of mild winters, the three species numbered 5,230 on the fenced 5,000-hectare reserve. Following a harsher winter, the population is now just 1,850. Around 90% of the dead animals were shot by the Dutch state forestry organisation, which manages the reserve, before they could die of starvation.

For two months, protesters have tossed bales of hay over fences to feed surviving animals as the Dutch Olympic gold medal-winning equestrian Anky van Grunsven joined celebrity illusionist Hans Klok in condemning the “animal abuse” on the reserve. Ecologists and rangers received death threats from the rising clamour on social media. Protesters compared “OVP” to Auschwitz.

Oostvaardersplassen was only created in 1968 when an inland sea was drained for two new cities. An industrial zone turned into a marshy haven as it lay undeveloped during the 1970s. Dutch ecologist Frans Vera devised the innovative use of wild-living cattle and horses to mimic the grazing of extinct herbivores such as aurochs, and Oostvaardersplassen became an internationally renowned rewilding reserve, celebrated in a 2013 Dutch film called The New Wilderness.

But in a drastic “reset”, a special committee convened by the provincial government this week called for a halt to the rewilding principle of allowing “natural processes” to determine herbivore populations. Instead, large herbivore numbers should be capped at 1,500 to stop winter fatalities, the committee said, with new forest and marsh areas created for additional “shelter” for the animals.

We do exactly the same thing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was a particular hard winter several years ago, and folks began throwing hay over into the herds of Elk who had come down from Yellowstone for the winter.  Now, the Elk don’t go back up into Yellowstone because they can get food in Jackson Hole from the idiots who began to do it in the first place.

It’s almost as if the state DNR’s trust in the wildlife biologists is warranted, yes?  After all, they study herd populations and health their entire careers, and control issuance of tags to hunters to cull the herd to keep it at healthy levels or slightly increase it.  And state by state, they do a magnificent job of it.

If all of this sounds massively inconsistent and chaotic, it’s because it is, and the root of the problem is discussed by philosopher Eric Katz.

There are many different varieties of rewilding, but the basic model often involves the reintroduction of a keystone species, like beavers or wolves, into an ecosystem to create a self-sustaining, autonomous natural system. Autonomy is the crucial idea here. After the re-introduction of whatever plants or animals are necessary for the functioning of the ecosystem, humans permit the system to develop on its own without management and intervention.  Rewilding is an environmental policy that seeks to expand the autonomy of nonhumans in the natural system. It wants to create a robust wild ecosystem—hence the label “rewilding.”  For its advocates, this means a natural environment that exists largely independently of humans and human activity within the ecosystem.

Where is the double paradox?  First, rewilding projects endeavour to create spaces in which nature can develop freely without human interference, but inevitably pursue this ideal through human interference in nature. Second, the very idea of rewilding, creating a “wilderness”, is ultimately a human construct, only intelligible through human concepts. Thus, far from creating a space for the autonomous development of nature, rewilding involves humans physically and epistemologically engaged with the management of nature. Try as we might, we are human beings, with human bodies and minds.  We inevitably impose ourselves on nature, moulding its physical processes and determining its meaning. As the great American philosopher William James wrote in his second lecture on Pragmatism, “the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything”.

Besides, while I am a Christian and my world and life view are consistent with this understanding, most of the rewilding advocates are not and thus the human is just another animal.  In that construct, it’s not clear why we’re not just another animal exercising our dominion over other herds as a male lion would when he kills the offspring of the female lions to send them into estrus again.  Beavers don’t care when they cause mercury toxins, lions don’t care when they cull their own herd, and reintroduced wolves don’t care when they kill the mountain lions which now cannot be hunted (Colorado), or where hunting has been curtailed (Idaho), because “rewilding” includes mountain lions too.  Never mind that pets will perish, with it being unsafe to even leave your home for wolves and lions.

You see, even if you disagree with my world and life view, at least I’m consistent and don’t rock with the tide.  The problem with mother Gaia (one of whose worshipers advises the Pope) is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch.  She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator.  So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why.

So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.

Source.

Man has killed off much of the Earth’s existing wildlife, and some scientists argue that human activity has set off the world’s sixth mass extinction event. New research now shows global animal populations are declining more rapidly than earlier believed.

[ … ]

Animal populations disappear all the time to make way for new species, but the new study highlights the extent of “real” biodiversity loss as the species with declining populations far outnumber those with increasing numbers, says research co-author Daniel Pincheira-Donoso. “The issue with this mass extinction in particular is that it is happening too quickly,” he tells TIME. “Species do not have enough time to evolve to take [over] those [other] species. So we lose and lose and lose, and we don’t see our turnover.”

Whew!  Sounds terrible. But maybe somebody didn’t get the memo.

A nationwide bird hunt soon could be underway. Knewz.com has learned a federal agency wants to eliminate one kind of owl to save two other ones.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is holding public meetings online on a plan to kill more than 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years.

We need to let nature take its course and get out of the way.  But maybe not.  Maybe we really are god and worthy of managing everything.

There’s a movement to give nature the same rights as humans.  But maybe we need to help it along instead of just standing back.  We need to “rewild” the planet.  After all, the climate is erupting into a cataclysmic catastrophe and we must do something.  Bill Gates says so.

That means things like starting new wolf populations.  But in Massachusetts deer are ruining the environment.  If there are less humans like Bill Gates wants, that shouldn’t be a problem for the farmers because there will be fewer people to have to feed. But what of that whole issue of carbon footprint?  Deer harvests are down in WV and all over the country, and bear harvests are down in Pennsylvania.

We want to rewild the planet – but wait, there’s too many deer!  We need to introduce more wolves – but wait, they have a carbon footprint too and after all so do bears and we haven’t killed enough of them!

Oh, oh, oh, it’s so confusing to worship Gaia.  She is a confused god, hasn’t spoken infallibly, doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and her worshipers are equally confused.

Or … you could just worship the Lord of all creation who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and gave man dominion over all of them.