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Moving Conservation to the Landscape Scale

Parks, like Yellowstone National Park, and wildlife reserves, are the traditional models for conserving large tracts of land. But as the effects of climate change and development encroaches, it’s now clear that even large, protected tracts aren’t protection enough to help preserve biodiversity. As Nature pointed out in a recent editorial:
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Thank a National Forest Roadless Area

The next time you turn on the tap, chances are the water came from a local National Forest. National Forests provide drinking water for about 60 million Americans nationwide and about 15 percent of the nation’s freshwater runoff. This clean water is worth an estimated net value of $27 billion annually. And the cleanest of this water comes from watersheds free of roads and development.
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Hunting and the Land Ethic

I spent a dozen purple dusks and gilded dawns last December hunkered down in the hoarfrost in coulees, hiding in the rabbitbrush and sage during a late-season Colorado elk hunt. In an area with too many elk and not enough wolves, hunting cow elk provides a powerful conservation tool, because of its effectiveness in thinning herds.
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A Global Pandemic of Tree Plantations

Like a scene out of a Mel Brooks movie, plantation forests have risen from the graves of old-growth forests. If you don’t believe me, visit an old-growth forest and then contrast that with a tree plantation to see, feel, and smell the difference.
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Human Impacts on Natural Systems

As a conservation biologist, I study the ecological effects of wolves on food webs, focusing on their primary prey (elk) and the foods their prey eat (aspens). My work takes place in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, which has many bears in it. Doing wolf research provides essential lessons about the web of life and coexisting with bears.
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Going Postal on Junk Mail to Save Rainforests

Have you gotten that uncontrollable urge to send junk mail back to where it came from? We all have some inkling of protest as we sift through the endless stream of junk mail that arrives in our mailbox every day. Marketing distributors of junk mail have become a consumer pipeline transporting forests to their inevitable resting place at the local refuse dump. The good news is you can stop the madness, but it takes some determination, and maybe save the rainforests with it.
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Large Carnivores and Continental Conservation

It’s not exactly safe to be a wolf in Colorado. If you cross paths with the wrong human, you could end up dead. Indeed, for one year those of us working on the High Lonesome Ranch, a privately-owned, mixed-use property managed for conservation, referred to these peripatetic members of the dog family, who were naturally returning to this landscape after being extirpated 80 years earlier, as "visitors from the north." That phrase was our code to protect the wolves.
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A Moment in Climate History: Al Gore brushes aside the climate-skeptic movement

Excerpt from Randy Olson's blog, The Benshi Given the sad, flaccid atmosphere lingering around the Cancun climate talks this week (Andy Revkin tells about how the Japanese, who once upon a time hosted the Kyoto meeting that started things, are now the biggest party poopers) it seems like a bad time to talk critically of Al Gore’s effort, but this stuff is important so I ask you to keep your mind open.

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