Author: Photographer — Journalist

  • Wild Horses and Sustainability

    Sustainability: The ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level; or, Avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.

    Let’s, together right now, separate the confusion between ideologies, directly related toward sustainability of Americas Wild Horses! Due to these differences and among so much confusion on what exactly sustainability is, and what it is not – Oh yes, need we not forget and among all of the confusion these days, government employee ignorance compounded with their lies and outright corrupt behaviors – from Bureau of Land Management mostly, with Oversight from the Department of the Interior, overwhelms America’s Wild Horses on America’s Public Lands and Forestry Lands.

    The reality of their ignorance? Wild Horses Die! But not just die, but die throughout a morbid, abusive death at slaughter plants. The horse’s throats ripped out, or cut open by a knife, or beat in the head with a hammer until unconscious, then gutted when still alive. . .

    And yet, this information is not unknown to those government employees who support, or take part in stealing wild horses for slaughter, mostly by creating horse counts that are biologically impossible for mother nature to create naturally (bogus statistics and dishonest research shadow all of their efforts throughout their corruption). It does not matter how they smile when talking to the general public. The reality? They know nothing of horses in general, and know even less about Wild Horses – America’s Wild Horses.

    To write this one has to enter into a gloomy realm of darkness, which is the domain of falsified wild horse herd counts. We see firstly, the wild horse counts done by Bureau of Land Management employees to be, very often and as stated above, biological impossibilities. Exaggeration of a type where, in reality, abusive behavior and harm does come to the wild horses – through what we can term sociopathic behaviors. Yes, they know what happens to the horses when sent to slaughter, make no doubt they know, and simply do not give a damn what so ever.

    Also forgotten is the legal aspects of what they do, daily – corruption of falsification laws, corruption of laws that protect the public from government lies and fraud, and basically do not manage the wild horses at a level of knowledgeable professionalism at all. Corruption is exactly the name of their behavior – disgustingly, for nothing more than pocket change and special interests.

    The horses lose, and sustainable wild horse herds are obviously planned toward “Extinction” and within the coming decade, contrary to Law. And by the way, for no reason other than short-term monetary profits for all involved – most often from taxpayer money and corrupt subsidy programs or grants provided by our government.

    Sustainability Organization and Perspective

    Let’s just agree from the outset, there are so many different oriented perspectives within the matters of sustainability, one can become confused as to just why there exist so many. We have one Earth, with our unique environment that separates our planet from so many others within our solar system.

    Many of us also understand the simple facts of an All-Is-Connected mind set, and with this we can understand further, that simplicity can lead to such intricate detail, abound with such a complexity in process, that it becomes far easier to give up, rather than dwell within our landscape upon this planet for any amount of time; thereby, many people simply follow large special interest groups, rather than deduct for themselves the environmental circumstances that do exist.

    The problem here? Special interest groups (along with government agencies as well) that say they do the research — but in reality, do not. This situation equates to the worst type of ignorance. Most people will just agree with the information that sounds the best, comparable to comfort-food is comfort (false) facts, which in truth is nothing more than to participate within the ignorance, and have no idea about the realities, and often wonder why nothing has changed over the past decade.

    Understanding Sustainability and Nature

    Aldo Leopold understood this hierarchical organization of our overall environment, along with all of its complexity. He understood not just the natural systems existing throughout his time but the impact of humans on them, and severe potential destruction in the future inevitable.

    We can peruse his more significant writing of “Think Like a Mountain”, and realize that managing a species population on the mountain (i.e. ecological zones) requires a systematic approach, rather than guesswork, or narrow perceptions that include special interests, or even economic interests. Many of us agree, Leopold did not go far enough, and it is now up to us to go further.

    Only then we can also understand the complex nature of the subsystems he spoke of – i.e. deer, wolves, and hunters etc., and when manipulated for human purposes, (in this example by removing the wolves entirely – which we can define parallels with our nations Wild Horses, due to the blatant ignorance of hatred toward both species, that some human’s do maintain, falsely, as their perception of true sustainability or their brand of (fake) conservationism) would alter those corresponding ecological systems drastically, if not destroy them entirely.

    Ignorant human involvement within nature, can devastate our planet, make no doubt as those of us in the field see it daily now – even more so than nuclear bombs, and far more dangerous than our perception of nuclear war, which would probably never happen – Perception compounded with commercialized manipulation is quite extraordinary at times, is it not? Ignorance can be far worse than any war, and profoundly justice never accomplished to fix the corruption.

    This develops into an awkward situation, that when set in motion cause significant changes to our overall environment. And human’s, well, we simply want to ignore what has developed, despite the destruction, and move on to our self-indulgence or special interests – in this case hunting for deer, or Elk, or the commercial and industrialized cattle production of beef (even though we see a 34% to 36% amount of beef products thrown-away (i.e. USDA Statistics 2000 to 2016) wasted or thrown out for non-sales at markets yearly, and the hell with any other wildlife. . . A corrupt industry in total, similar to many others that use our natural resources or ecological systems, to produce their saleable products, in such mass commodities. . .

    Within this discussion a profound economic sustainability ideology does exist; but, up to this point in history, time has shown this particular wayward ideology very destructive, indeed.

    We can go to other circumstances, especially within the cattle industry, which provides us with   reasoning as to why so much ignorant-styled hatred toward wolves and wild horses does exist. A good example is how our government, to be precise the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), portrays our nation’s Public Lands mass and acreage, as all of it being pristine, or useable.

    This is an untruth. There exist small areas, or ecological systems that are useable, but mostly shared by many species. It is this sharing of these lands, by a diversity of species (Yellowstone for example and proven by much of the research over the past four-decades, that shows this very well indeed; or, the Great Plains, that shows us diversity up to three-decades ago, then the devastation and destruction, by cattle mostly) that provided the enhancement of the overall ecological system to work beneficially.

    Research also shows that the amounts of Public Lands is exaggerated (covered in my previous writings). This becomes devastating when we see cattle ranchers fight over Public Lands and Forestry Lands, to place their cattle upon (cattle destroys ecological systems and overall environmental habitats, robustly proven over decades of research), and since government agencies acreage-counts exaggerated (also proven by sound research, with so many conflicting statistics between USDA/Forestry as well as BLM or USGS for that matter, among others), then the fight for useable Public Lands / Forestry Lands, and land mass itself, becomes of paramount significance to us all, especially within a sustainability context.

    These useable ecologically healthy land-masses, that also include diversity in wildlife and vegetation, are called “Islands”, for research purposes. This distinguishes unusable land-mass from useable, or over-used land-mass in a real-time data gathering sequence of attributes and study. Using this methodology, we can now distinguish the false representation of land-mass, with a truer perspective of how we treat and use our functional land-mass – and I must say it is not a pretty picture what so ever. – John Cox, Cascade Journal

    Now we can begin to see how Leopold, in “Marshland Elegy” and the way he used, or constructed his multiscale critique of his Wolf Policy, in “Thinking Like A Mountain,” is so important, but still did not go far enough to protect sound Ecological Zones from economic reasoning, or disastrous mind-sets, from several very destructive commercialized situations (cattle, oil, mining, pipelines, exploratory drilling for gas, et al.).

    One can also make a good point in the fact of negative sustainability, especially within the economic standard of false ideology of the term sustainability and within the aforementioned industries. Frankly, one can replace their economic ideology, or perceptions, of sustainability with more unstable principles of conduct, or negative virtues of reality – which dictate using the lands aggressively to sustain the current population, until unuseful, then leave it for the future generations to deal with the overall burden, and on their time, not ours.

    None the less, we deal with ignorance. Why do I say this? Because we can reflect back into a past that remains abundant with information. This information shows us, beyond any doubt at all, whether it be hierarchical models, or simply multiscale models, that prove humans pay attention to only short-term profits (i.e. short-term land use, or aggressive ecological devastation and then move onward to another healthy ecological-zone (Island) to devastate short-term) . . .

    Thereby, the problem in real time, becomes that of these same driving variables of destruction, and in a system of economic gain, can and does undermine these ecological systems, and sadly, within an ignorant context, wildlife species driven toward extinction; which, overall contributes to the system’s ability to not continue to provide those outputs, and actually undermine those dynamics that function at a much larger scale.

    Sustainability and Positive Approach

    Here is where we can take Aldo Leopold’s reasoning to a protohierarchy theory. This is where it gets interesting, as one does not want to aspire toward a juggling-act. We find that politics eventually takes over any type of superficial context based upon falsehoods or self-oriented special interests. We see a lot of this within horse advocacy groups (and government agencies alike, as currently neither is that far apart in the matters of bogus information and spreading it to the public at large), where analysis based upon false-hoods, or corruption taken as a truth, becomes simply yet another superficial layer that can essentially be tossed upon the already immense garbage-pile of other ignorance portrayed as reality.

    So we can dig-up truth, despite so much garbage, through quality process dynamics, for example:

    • Systems embedded within one another, given the smaller sub-systems are expected to change quicker than the larger systems that they are composed, to maintain the space-time relationship complex all the while sustaining the dynamics of the entirety, or the whole system as being dynamic, enhancing both the ecological system as well as the diversity of species that contribute; 

     

    • All observation as well as research, be confined with information from these sub-systems only, assumptive toward the aggressive dynamic that enhance, rather than hinder, the complex of the relationships favoring sustainability and longevity of the overall dynamic in its entirety. No appeals are made toward any other perspective of ideological enhancement of what sustainability is or is not; whereas, special interests remain uninvolved and prohibited.

     

    Within the two points made here, from experience many of us can perceive an infinite amount of systems that can be used, where sound and quality research is provided, then becomes a priority toward management, despite what level the system or ecological zone for that matter. Here we can provide the human elements with natural elements judiciously and without special interests or government intrusive and wayward corruption having the ability to take over and destroy further, these lands (or Islands) upon which the taxpayers and public, i.e. American’s Own. We can also expect more from the laws that already exist, yet ignored by those government entities that are, indeed, paid to uphold those same laws they ignore.

    The situation here is to have the ability to develop models that arrange many dynamics, that can come together, that actually drive this system into positive areas of understanding; whereas, this allows those involved to parse problems onto the systems, and systems onto problematic areas, or zones, in helpful ways – when compared to the current, and destructive, economic ideologies of fake or false sustainability perceptions – and those that attempt to work within those false perceptions, which equate to no change or no positive situations to develop toward land-mass or ecological-zone improvements. . .

  • Extinction is Human Caused — It is not a Natural-Occurrence of our times as ignorance dictates

    Research and Article by John Cox, Cascade Mountains

    Species extinction facts

    122,090 Number of species gone extinct So far this year 1

    This is not a natural occurrence, as the broken systems of game management, oil production, agriculture, and cattle industry would like all of the American taxpayers to believe. No

    “Here are some quick “species extinction… facts”… and it’s not encouraging reading. Species are becoming extinct faster now than at any point in modern history.

    Top 5 facts about species gone extinct

    Species are disappearing

    We don’t know exactly how many species go extinct every year but it could be 100,000 – about 1 every 5 minutes.

    …And fast !

    The current rate of extinction is up to 10,000 times higher than the average historical extinction rates. We, the humans, are almost wholly responsible for this increase.

    It’s getting worse

    The worsening and loss of biodiversity are projected to continue, and even accelerate. Direct human activity and climate change is the cause of this – for example through the destruction of forests and coral reefs.

    Possible mass extinction

    There is a wide belief that a “mass extinction” is underway. Some predict that half of all living species could be gone within 100 years.

    Who are they?

    Within the next 15 to 40 years it is likely that the following animals will become extinct: polar bear, chimpanzee, elephant, snow leopard, tiger, mountain gorilla, orangutan, giant panda, rhino, and the koala bear. Unfortunately, these are just a few of many…”

    What is Extinction

    1. An endangered species is one whose numbers are so small that it is at risk of extinction.
    2. A species is defined as endangered or threatened when it is suffers from these factors: damage to its habitat for recreational, or entertainment purposes; disease or predation of the species; and hazards to the continued life of the species.
    3. A species is declared extinct after many years of not being spotted. Because it takes so long to define an entire species as extinct, it is probable that there are many species already gone that we are unaware of.
    4. Rangers are on the frontlines of conservation to protect some of the world’s most endangered species like tigers, elephants and rhinos. Send thank-you cards to those who protect endangered species. Sign up for Wildlife Cards!
    5. Extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the “background” rate, with dozens going extinct every day.
    6. As many as 30 to 50 percent of all species are possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.
    7. 99% of currently threatened species are at risk from human activities, primarily those driving habitat loss, introduction of exotic species, and global warming
    8. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) protects registered endangered species by removing them from the “take” list, which makes it unlawful for a person to shoot, harm, capture, trap, or attempt any such actions to the species.
    9. Ultimately, the ESA strives to recover species from the endangered list by restoring their ecological health until they no longer need protection.
    10. The World Wildlife Organization focuses on saving certain species that help sustain other species. They protect wildlife such as pandas, whales, rhinos, marine turtles, primates, polar bears, and big cats.
    11. Freshwater ecosystems are home to more than 100,000 known species of plants and animals, and are now one of the most endangered habitats in the world as a result of human development, pollution, and climate change.

    Understanding Extinction

    Just to illustrate the degree of biodiversity loss we’re facing, let’s take you through one scientific analysis… The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.*

    These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year.

    If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true – i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** – then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.

    But if the upper estimate of species numbers is true – that there are 100 million different species co-existing with us on our planet – then between 10,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct each year.

    Unlike the mass extinction events of geological history, the current extinction challenge is one for which a single species – ours – appears to be almost wholly responsible.

    This is often referred to as the 6th extinction crisis, after the 5 known extinction waves in geological history. So without arguing about who’s right or wrong; Or, what the exact numbers are. There can be little debate that there is, in fact, a very serious biodiversity crisis.

    Conclusion

    We are at a point in history where the Human-Species should start to question, and demand good science, good research based on non-negotiable and well refenced facts (no personal agendas, political agendas, nor special interests need apply here, as it is uncooperative corporations as well as government agencies that remain causing these problems). . .

    Rather than follow corrupt empires of special interests, and profound agendas with no Environmental Assessments, or disregard the laws put into place to protect our environmental landscapes and wildlife ecology, strengthen the laws in place, and regulate and manage our interests with diversity and “all is connected on this earth of ours” mind-sets.

    We must get along! How simple of a resolution is this? We must stop assuming corrupt corporations, commercialized non-profits, and government agencies are worthy of respect, when they indeed are not what so ever! Corruption is corrupt, and those that follow the corruption are just as bad as the corrupt.

    Our environmental as well as our wildlife management systems are broken – entirely!

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    1. http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destruction_of_ecosystems/species_extinction_facts
    2. https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-endangered-species
    3. Wildscreen Arkive. “Endangered species.” Wildscreen. Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    4. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Program. “Listing a Species as Threatened or Endangered: Section 4 of the Endangered Species Act” 2015. Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    5. Engber, Daniel. “When can you say an animal is extinct?” Slate Magazine, 2005. Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    6. Center for Biological Diversity. “The Extinction Crisis.” Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    7. Center for Biological Diversity. “The Extinction Crisis.” Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    8. Center for Biological Diversity. “The Extinction Crisis” Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    9. Davison, Steven G. “Alteration Of Wildlife Habitat As A Prohibited Taking Under The Endangered Species Act.” The Florida State University College of Law. Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    10. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service . “Endangered Species Consultation Handbook.” 1998. Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    11. World Wildlife Fund. “About Us.” Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    12. World Wildlife Fund. “Habitats: Freshwaters.” Web Accessed March 20, 2015.
    13. WHAT YOU CAN DO — http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/what_you_can_do/