May 2008

After months of negotiations and several extensions of the 2002 legislation, Congress passed a new Farm Bill, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008. The level of support?318 for and 106 against in the House of Representatives, and 81 for and 15 against in the Senate?is significant, in that there appears to be in each chamber sufficient votes to override a veto promised by the Administration, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

The new legislation includes increases for nutrition programs and an additional $4 billion for conservation. Most of the increase for...

Leaders of the nation's top hunting and other wildlife conservation organizations celebrated the visionary leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt at the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) on May 15, and they laid the groundwork for a plan to carry conservation efforts forward in the 21st century, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.

Together with the Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the organizations reflected on Roosevelt's 1908...

Three very different books of the past several months took a willow switch to the reporting of American history. Only one of those is the subject of this review. The others were Shadow Divers (2004, author R. Kurston) and Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (2004, author R. Hack), both highly recommended and a little unsettling. History is history, but it may not be what we're told of it.

The third book, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic, kept my eyebrows at high arch for much of its 448 pages. It is a work of history...

On May 14, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that he accepted the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The decision was made after months of delay and only following a court order.

Under ESA, a species is threatened when it is at risk of becoming endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or most of its range.

In January 2007, the FWS proposed a listing of polar bears as threatened. By law...

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) was established by Congress in 1984. Since then, NFWF has administered more than $600 million for more than 10,000 grants. Throughout that period, it relied primarily on its partners and grantees to establish conservation priorities. During the past two years, NFWF has embarked on a strategic initiative that will revolutionize grant selection and administration for the organization and its future grantees, according to the Wildlife Management Institute. Instead of accepting hundreds of grant applications each year, covering a myriad of...