OPINION: An Open Letter to President Biden

Dear Mr. President:

My name is William E. Simpson II. I live in the Soda Mountain wilderness area on the Oregon-California border. Unlike most wild horse advocates and city-people heading up wild horse advocacy non-profits, I literally live among some of America’s free-roaming native species wild horses, which I have been closely studying for the past seven years.

As such, I hope to offer a more fully-informed opinion regarding a more enlightened wild horse management paradigm.

The revelations from the first five years of my research have been condensed into my published study, “Impact Of Wild Horses On Wilderness Landscape And Wildfire”.

Clearly, coronavirus and related issues are front and center for obvious reasons. However, our Country is plagued by unprecedented annual catastrophic wildfire, that is taking lives, incinerating homes, forests, wildlife and polluting our air and accelerating climate change.

Theoretical and empirical science have proved that these unnatural wildfires have evolved as a result of flawed natural resource management policies that are heavily influenced by greed and ego rather than intelligence and the best, recent science.

Wild horses in America are a critical keystone native-species herbivore that have evolved in North America and reduce catastrophic wildfire at no cost to American taxpayers.

The Scientific Reason For The Evolution Of Catastrophic Wildfire
We have a seriously depleted native-species herbivory (depleted populations of deer, elk and native-species wild horses) in western states. In past decades, these large-herbivores had maintained annual grasses and brush via their symbiotic grazing, which in western states, on an annual-basis, reduced wildfire fuels (grass and brush) in the amount of about 3-million tons/year.

Grasses and brush (not trees) are the key fuels that kindle and carry wildfire to other heavy fuels and homes according to a majority of California Fire (CAL-FIRE) wildfire forensic reports.

Depleted native-species megafauna in North America is at the core of America’s catastrophic wildfire problem. Matters are made worse when monetary interests related to public lands livestock grazing interests take precedence over any sound ecologically-based wildlife management paradigm. The BLM is systematically and recklessly, replacing naturally-evolved North American keystone species wild horses with invasive-species livestock on public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is also incentivizing this mismanagement of native-species American wild horses by offering and paying exorbitant sums of taxpayer’s money to willing ranchers to hold native-species wild horses, which are *wildlife, off-range. Now even more ranchers want to be part of that destructive and costly game.

As an example; The BLM paid one ranching family (Drummond family) $24-million in taxpayer monies to hold native-species American wild horses off-range! Holding these keystone species herbivores in confinement where they cannot perform their critical evolutionary roles in North American wilderness areas is a crime against nature, and is costing American taxpayers dearly in money and natural resources that are devastated by such mismanagement.

And as a part of this greedy, willfully ignorant management, the BLM is currently depleting remaining native-species American wild horse populations on publicly-owned wilderness and forest areas, thereby reducing herd sizes to down to populations that are no longer viable genetically. And doing so at a time when we need more symbiotic native-species herbivores (wild horses) grazing wildfire prone wilderness areas, not less.

There is a common-sense scientifically-supported Plan to accomplish wildfire reduction and save wild horses. That Plan also saves taxpayers more than $100-Million annually, and is affectionately called; ’Wild Horse Fire Brigade’.

How Climate Change Affects Wildfire
When annual grass and brush fuels become excessive and ubiquitous across the landscape as a result of depleted native species herbivore populations, as is the case now, these prodigious super-hot burning fuels are then subjected to a warmer climate.
The warmer climate allows these excessive fuels to dry sooner, and stay dry longer, making them prime for ignition by acts of man and nature. These super-hot burning grasses and brush are what fuel wildfires into the realm of super-hot, fast-burning catastrophic wildfires that are destroying thousands of homes, taking lives, and devastating our western forests, incinerating everything in their path.

According to Science Magazine:

By altering the quantity and distribution of fuel supplies, large herbivores can shape the frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution of fires across a landscape. There are even unique interactions among large herbivore populations that can influence fire regimes.

The Department of Interior (DOI), Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been less than kind to our environment and our natural resources, especially native species American wild horses. Part of that cruelty stems from ignorance as to the actual behavioral ecology of native-species American wild horses; this I can attest to, and prove in a court of law.

By this letter, I am requesting that you consider and enact via Executive Order, the Draft Outline for a legislative bill linked here.

American taxpayer’s public lands and critical natural resources, including wild horses, must be honestly managed under the rules of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA).

 The Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA required(s) that: “… wild horses and burros shall be considered comparably with other resource values in the formulations of land use plans” 43 CFR Sec. 4700.0-6



Under the Policy, those land use plans “shall be sufficiently detailed to identify and resolve significant land use conflicts with special status species without deferring conflict resolution to implementation-level planning…”