The devastating grass and brush fueled wildfires in Los Angeles we are all witnessing may be just a glimpse of the upcoming summer in the western United States, unless we start doing something new and cost-effective. Funding and doing more of what hasn’t worked is a guarantee for failure.
And as horrific as the LA fires are, the damages and costs will continue well after the fires are suppressed. UCLA’s new study of toxic wildfire smoke showed…
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The unfortunate thing about Mr. Simpson’s claims is that there is much non-factual misinformation. If you have talked with Simpson he told you he’s certain of all this. Well, in fact he’s not. There is no chance, none of placing wild horses in the Palisades and Eaton areas of Los Angeles. Any claim that wild horses would benefit this situation are ‘PANTS ON FIRE’ lies. Federal government agencies have removed over 64,000 wild horses from public lands. These are sequestered in corrals and holding to benefit the cattle ranchers who back Mr. Simpson and his untenable ideas. The Bureau of Land Management Instruction Memo (IM 2022-035 of 21Apr22) does not contain a mechanism to move the sequestered animals into the management of the Wild Horse Fire Brigade. Mr. Simpson claims correctly that his plan deconflicts the desires of the wealthy cattle ranchers who use America’s public lands through the BLM grazing lease program. The problem is that the existence of the conflict in the first place is manufactured by a combination of bad government policies. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 gives western cattlemen the opportunity to obtain use of public lands at roughly 200 percent below the market cost. Additionally it permits the holder of a grazing lease to encumber the public lands with a private mortgage using the land as collateral. The pricing for the grazing lease is set at $1.35 per acre per month. With the costs of removing wild horses, warehousing them for a lifetime and administration of the various programs the Federal government operates this circus at a substantial loss. More important to the constituents of California is that the data generated by the US Bureau of Land Management shows that cattle are responsible for degrading the environmental conditions of the range. Today over 50 percent of western public lands fail to meet the Bureau’s rangeland standards. So, for those of you in Rio Linda, while the aspirations of the Wild Horse Fire Brigade are admirable, the facts do not line up with the advertising and the climb to success is unatainable.