Suicide Casts a Shadow on Conservation Battle

[rumpel]

This article is very long and started on the front page. LA Times. The policies of the * administration is a catastrophy in all segments of society. I thought I will post it before it goes into archive, when it starts costing us money to read it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-carrizo20aug20,1,3289749.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&track=mostemailedlink

National monument official was distraught at shift she said favored grazing over grasslands.

By Julie Cart and Maria L. La Ganga, Times Staff Writers

CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — First she killed her dogs, shot them in the head with a .38-caliber revolver and covered the two bodies with a quilt. Then Marlene Braun leveled the blue steel muzzle three inches above her right ear and pulled the trigger.

"I can't face what appears to be required to continue to live in my world," the meticulous 46-year-old wrote in May in a suicide note. "Most of all, I cannot leave Carrizo, a place where I finally found a home and a place I love dearly."

snip

The plan advocated that ranchers' traditional 10-year grazing permits be phased out, replaced by "free use" permits, with the BLM deciding year to year if the plain's native plant species were healthy enough to withstand livestock. By early 2003, Braun had a version of the plan ready for review. The managing partners signed on, three advisory groups endorsed the plan and the BLM's state office approved a draft late that year.

Around the same time, Braun received a cautionary letter from Bob Benneweis, the former superintendent of Yosemite and a longtime member of a Carrizo advisory committee. Beware, he wrote, of the political heft of the area's longtime cattlemen.

snip

The day before her death, Braun forwarded the disciplinary memos to the partners along with a brief, bitter e-mail: "I will no longer be participating in this mess…. I will not take being treated like a whipping girl…. "

Braun e-mailed the BLM's Bakersfield office at 9:10 a.m. the day she shot herself. She wrote that she would not be coming to the office that day or any other, because she could not bear to.

[hlthe2b]

1. I read this last weekend.... It has haunted me ever since...

I can only pray that something positive comes from so much tragedy. I also hope Marlene Braun finds peace, surrounded by her loyal dogs...

So very sad...