Guardians is a proud supporter of the inaugural Healthy Public Lands Conference, which will be held June 1-3 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference will offer opportunities to learn more about the current state of public lands in the American West; better understand the laws, regulations, and policies that guide public lands management; and contribute to a collective vision for managing public lands that prioritizes healthy watersheds and ecosystems rather than livestock production.
A partial list of panel topics for the first two days of the conference include Indigenous perspectives on public lands and traditional ecological knowledge, recent science on the impacts of grazing to western ecosystems, the ongoing aridification or “great drying” of the interior West that is happening because of climate change, and the connection between public lands extremists and the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Keynote speakers and panelists are still being finalized, so stay tuned.
There will also be experiential learning, with the third day of the conference devoted to a field trip to a public lands grazing allotment. Attendees will learn how to quantitatively assess the health of public lands with active grazing allotments, how to report those findings to Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service staff, and how to best participate in federal land management decision-making.
Conference sponsors want this event to be available to everyone and are offering sliding scale registration rates. To learn more and to register, click here.
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