"The reason we're gathered here,” says Allison Jones, director of the Wild Utah Project, a conservation group based in Salt Lake City, “is because representatives like Mike Noel have undue influence in the Legislature on some key public land issues that the majority of the residents of Utah, many of which live in the Wasatch Front, don't feel the same way on."
Read More"The decision to not list was very much based on those plan revisions, 99 of them, to protect sage grouse, because the bar was set high enough and promises were made. If you undo all that, of course they are going to revisit the listing decision. That's opening a can of worms," said biologist Allison Jones, executive director for the Wild Utah Project.
Read MoreAllison Jones, director of the Wild Utah Project, said governors should have consulted with more legal experts and scientists before sending a joint letter in which they claimed science does not show the animals have lived north of Interstate 40. That highway runs through New Mexico and Arizona.
Read MoreLastly, public opinion surveys have repeatedly shown that most Utahns, even in rural Utah, would be fine with wolves returning. We should not stand in their way.
Read MoreLast summer, the grazing permittee unexpectedly asked the Forest Service for permission to allow him to put up to 160 grazing cow/calf pairs inside the allotment for a "few days," and the Forest Service said fine. The permittee proceeded to lock more than a 100 grazing cow pairs inside the exclosure for an extended period, with the predictable result that all the vegetation so carefully studied was eaten down to stubble, the springs trampled and fouled and the ground plastered with cow-pies.
Read MoreJones, of Wild Utah Project, said the small group of sage grouse near the mine site is the only population that far south. “If there’s another group, we don’t know about them,” she said. “That makes these special. They have shown an ability to expand from the larger group.”
Read MoreStreamed live on Sep 29, 2015
Last week's decision by the U.S. Department of Interior not to list the greater sage grouse as an endangered species sparked debate among both environmental groups and government officials.
