[APWG] war on weeds & cheatgrass article

[Craig Dremann]

Dear Bob and All,

I completely agree with your use of the word "war" in connection with
the word "weeds", and I ghave a talk at the Bureau of Land Management
2003 "War on Weeds" meeting in Monterey, CA on that subject.

What I suggested at my talk, is that no war on weeds can ever be won,
and I used the flora that has regrown at Ground Zero at the Trinity
site, the first atomic bomb that was detonated point-blank above the
desert, as an example, at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/juicy.gossip.fifteen.html.

If you read that AP article on the four governors and the cheatgrass at
http://www.lvrj.com/news/8961792.html, they are blaming a recent grazing
court decision won by the environmentalists, for all the cheatgrass
infestations they have in their states !

The governors can talk all they want, but they don't have any money to
do anything about the cheatgrass.

The cheatgrass mostly infests federal lands in the western States, and I
didn't see any efforts of the four governors to ask Congress to start
giving BLM a sufficient annual budget to start converting the cheatgrass
areas back to native grasses, or any estimate what the necessary amount
of money is going to be.

The ecosystems of the 200 million acres of BLM land in the arid west,
are extremely degraded, with a lot of empty places for cheatgrass to get
established where the native grasses have been wiped out, based from my
1997 survey at 
http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html.

I've estimated that it would cost about twenty billion dollars per year,
for the next 20 years at least, to get those BLM ecosystems rebuilt and
to convert the cheatgrass areas.  

That only totals $2,000 per acre for the 200 million acres, which is a
really good price for ecological restoration!

Furthermore, the cheatgrass AP article talks about the nearly one
million pounds of seeds that BLM already sows out there annually, but
fails to mention that over 50% of those seeds are perennial exotics,
that permanently damage the ecosystems, perhaps worse than fires,
because once sown in an area, the native species cannot get
re-established.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333