Ron sent along this story from the Los Angeles Times.
Excerpt:
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.”
Braun had come to the Carrizo Plain three years earlier, after the U.S. Bureau of Land Management placed her in charge of the new national monument — 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred sites, embraced by low mountains, traversed by the San Andreas Fault and home to more threatened and endangered animals than any other spot in California.
Suicide is rarely an indication of an emotionally healthy person. As desperate as the planet’s state may be, Braun would have chosen well to devote her grief to saving another part of this beleaguered West.
But love for a landscape can be a fierce, all-encompassing thing.
And few people develop stronger love for a new landscape than the grunt-level managers hired to steward the place. As the Bush administration increasingly puts the screws to real conservation initiatives, lying about science and selling out our common heritage to its base of resource extractors, look for more despair among the people we charge with protecting the land.
This sucks.
