Great Old Blog

Great Old Blog, indeed! Ronni, Broads Executive Director, joined the staff in 2002. Her humor, energy, and passion for wild lands keep Broads moving toward “Broader” protections of our public land.

Broads is dedicated to bringing the “elder” voice to the debates surrounding public wild lands policy.

We’re hoping you (whether female or male, old or young) will discover your own passions for the land through Ronni’s words in this Great Old Blog.

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• Let Wildlife Services Pick on the Critters that Really Need Removal May 16, 2012 America's war on wildlife is finally getting some media attention. At the behest , mainly, of farmers and ranchers the now ironically named agency Wildlife Services has been trapping, poisoning, shooting and otherwise destroying the public's wildlife sinc...
• That Dusty Ol' Dust April 12, 2012 I live in a beautiful spot, at 7300 ft., between the Pinon-Juniper zone and the Ponderosa zone just north of Mancos CO. When I moved here almost 10 years ago the area was in the throes of a pine-bark beetle infestation and the Pinones were dying by the hu...
• Who are the real "Environmental Extremists?" February 6, 2012 Lately it seems that those who question Big Oil (Alberta tar sands and the XL Pipeline) or Big Coal (mountaintop removal mining) are labeled environmental extremists or radical environmentalists.  The notion that "business as usual" for the fossil fuel in...
• Time to recognize some limits October 14, 2011 H.R. 1581 is a proposal by Republican lawmakers  that would release millions of acres of protected public lands to the vagaries of local management (read exploitation?), potentially opening them to timber harvests, oil and gas development, motorized recre...
• DC Is Schizophrenic Toward Wilderness Protection September 7, 2011 >>Associate Director Rose Chilcoat<< On the one hand, President Obama designated September as National Wilderness Month; a time to celebrate our nation’s system of wild protected public lands that Congress has laboriously reviewed and desig...
• H.B. 1581-A bad idea at an even worse time August 9, 2011 The latest nightmare legislation cooked up by the Tea Party types on Capitol Hill is H.B. 1581, The Wilderness and Roadless Release Act of 2011, which would open America's last remaining wild places to mineral extraction, petroleum drilling and mining (th...
• July 11 is World Population Day. Celebrate? July 7, 2011 As we approach World Population Day it behooves us to reflect upon the planet we'll leave to our grandchildren, and to those of the Musk Ox, Dung Beetle, Giant Sequoia and all the rest of the beings with whom we share it. Our profligate use, and waste, of...
• Reality Check on Huge Western Fires June 12, 2011 The Wallow fire currently raging in eastern Arizona has brought out the anti-science crowd once again. Cries of  "There should have been more logging and grazing" from the anti-wolf/pro livestock contingent ignore the science of the situation. Ponderosa f...
• Babbitt Leads the Call to End Congressional Attack on Environment June 8, 2011 There seems to be a real anti-wilderness-protection sentiment wafting around DC these days, but  with venerable former Interior Secretary and wilderness champion Bruce Babbitt  leading the charge, it's crucial that we all  tell our Congressional delegatio...
• The "What-Were-They-Thinking?" Department May 19, 2011 At last, some great news on the "What-were-they-thinking" front! In Colorado, a bill has just been defeated that would have exponentially increased the problems created by unmanaged OHV use. HB-1264 was a statewide mandate that would allow OHVs to driv...
• Salazar's Wildlands Order is Not a Land Grab April 22, 2011 "Federal land grab!"? Nothing could be further from the truth. It really gets under our skin when the Tea Party and this new breed of constitutionalist insist that Interior Secretary Salazar's Wildlands Order creates de-facto wilderness. Ever since 2002, ...