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.
“A stream that flows smoothly with nothing stopping it would have very different biological chemical and geological processes than a stream that has cascading beaver dams and ponds,” said Adamchak. “Beaver activities also impact the surrounding landscape, because the animals forage for woody vegetation on land.”
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 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.
