It seems that even footprints are "too much" in the minds of some.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/leaving-only-footsteps-think-again.html

So, a century ago nature had elbow room, huh?
Well, maybe we should quit giving tax exemptions and food stamps and welfare bucks to trash for having kids they dont want? Maybe we should be giving tax incentives to those who have no more than oje child, but that would hinder the growth of the dimocrap voting block.

How about free vouchers for abortions?

It sounds to me like we're in for a big push to close our public lands to all recreation.

Hunters on the other hand tend to shoot the moose they sneak up on reducing any opportunity to "leave them on edge".

Seriously though, some interesting tidbits in there, with better technology we can learn more about everyone's impact on wildlife. I like reading information that can help me wipe that smug smile off a righteous non-consumptive users face.

I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but I do hate finding piles of poop and paper near every decent camping spot. Just how hard is it to carry a garden trowel and bury it? I won't do it but some of the ultra greenies pack it out with them.

Agenda-driven it seems.


Perhaps they need to study the effect of "catch-and-release"


And this is just stupid.

It would be interesting to read the science behind the methods they use to divine what a moose is feeling or worrying about.

Also, this biologist, Harris, is largely a desert researcher and a bird biologist on top of it.

Very similar to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge having their bird biologist lead the brown bear study.

To my mind, that's like going to a gynocologist for a tooth ache. Smart people (PhDs generally aren't merely handed out for the asking), but get the correct discipline involved.

Honestly, I don't believe a word these people say.

Me neither.

Those nodding their heads the hardest will also be the ones who contribute to the TONS of garbage along the AT, or at the Everest base camps. Most of them are spoiled, entitled little hypocrites who've never learned that the rules apply to them too.

Does the wolf worry over the mooses anxiety when he howls in the darkness? Does the hawk change his path because the mouse hides in fear at a mere glimpse of his shadow?

These discussions always remind me of a quote from The Outermost House by Henry Beston. After serving in WWI Beston returned "spiritually shaken" and decided to spend a year living alone in a cabin on a remote part of Cape Cod, a much less crowded place in those days. He is considered by some the "spiritual father" of the modern environmental movement, but he is noticeably silent on the subject of hunting in his most famous work, despite describing encounters with hunters in the book. Personally I find it hard to believe he didn't harbor at least some ambivalence towards hunters.

"When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

Thanks for that Pitkin, glad I read through this topic now.

Geno

How did they arrive at the number 300? They're talking an extremely large area of land here. There's no possible way they could survey it all to get that number. Simply put, they have no idea how many wolverines are out there. They didn't find many so they assume that numbers have been dropping. Dropping from what? They don't know how many were there in 1990, 1980, or at any other time in the past.

How does the late spring snowpack help their survival? If the snow melts earlier, it should bring more prey animals out of hibernation sooner and should be increasing their feed, not decreasing it.

Regardless of what the study says, the implied conclusion is the normal knee-jerk response from the crowd who views the natural world as a place where humans are spectators. They want less and less human presence, until we reach a point where their is no human presence. IMO, less and less human interaction is a dead end for wildlife and wild places.

Hunters accept human presence as part of how we, the animals, and the landscapes evolved. Rather than stand around proclaiming humans need to leave this planet, hunters do something about it; what we call conservation. We put more animals on the landscape and we improve the landscape so it can sustain/grow more animals. The more animals on the landscape, the easier it is to tolerate the human presence; a presence that has existed since time began.

I struggle to understand why this is such a complicated solution to those who have this new religious view that humans are not part of the landscape. Make the landscapes more productive, do what you can to vest humans as important participants in the landscape, and you end up with a lot more animals and a system that can accommodate human activity.

Since that would require these folks to put up a few dollars for habitat, volunteer some hours to make a difference, redirect their litigation funds to habitat improvements, and for them to accept their new age religion as being doomed for failure, I'm not going to hold my breath.

A big +1. The reason they can't comprehend it is, they've gotten so far away from nature that they no longer recognize how it works or our place in it.

Locking humans out of most all the land on earth is the ultimate goal of the rewilding fascist. We are to be forced into mega cities and banned from even visiting the wilderness. Every wilderness designation , monument status and large predator introduction is a step in the plan.