11/22/13

Man camps, oil field roads spell doom for Harding, Butte Counties

Once, it was a spur of the migration route that intersected the bison hunting ranges of the Pawnee and Comanche near Raton Pass in southern Colorado with the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers in the northern ancestral grounds of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa.
Harding County has an ordinance addressing man camps in place. One fear is that TransCanada, which heads the construction of the pipeline, will want to put a haul road in through Harding County, as they had previously suggested doing in Hoover. [Kaylee Tschetter, Black Hills Pioneer]
After the Lakota acquired the descendants of Spanish equus, herstory evolved very quickly in relative time.

Now, Hoover Road is just another trail of tears decimated by CAFOs, ruin, and carelessness adjacent to a US85 buckling under the weight of oil field traffic.








From Steve Newborn at WUSF and NPR:
Wildlife corridors, which connect wildlife habitats, have been proposed for states as different as California and New Jersey. There's even a transnational one planned to stretch from Yukon to Yellowstone. But do they really help to heal fragmented landscapes? "All the study that's been done so far has been typically at very small scales, and only looking at very short-term animal movement," says Paul Beier, a conservation biologist at Northern Arizona University. "What's yet to be known is whether the longer corridors — on the scale of miles — will, over the long term, promote gene flow and allow things like animals to recolonize areas," he says.
Even after recent rains the continental volume of dead grasses between Hoover and Santa Fe is explosively dry: goddess have mercy on us for we know not what we do.

Rewild the West.

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