Moose management in Canada is unique compared to other wildlife management. The primary driver of most species'decline in Canada is habitat loss and fragmentation. Yet moose enjoy the new browse that springs up after an area has been disturbed, so it's long been thought they benefit from industrial activities like clearcutting. Because moose are widely hunted, provinces and territories are charged with managing their habitat, ensuring healthy populations and granting tags to hunters.

Although Canada hasn't assessed moose as at risk nationally, reports are increasing of their worrisome decline in many provinces. Governments cite myriad factors, include disease, climate change, parasites and habitat alteration.

"The population is, in my opinion, heading toward a crisis and if the decline isn't stopped it could create a situation from which it may take decades to recover," retired Ontario moose biologist Alan Bisset writes of his province. "If it gets low enough, predation and unregulated hunting could keep it from growing at all, or worse, result in local extinction."

Since governments control the hunt, decreasing the number of seasonal hunting tags seems like a straightforward way to reduce at least one pressure moose populations face. Yet Bisset's proposal to reduce moose tags also reveals a social dynamic that complicates management, as he recognizes this will likely incur backlash from hunters. "Moose are being managed by hunting interests for hunting interests with little apparent concern for the future of the herd or the interests of other Ontario residents," he writes.

Of course, many responsible hunters support strong management and protection measures. The conservation movement was initiated by hunters to ensure sufficient habitat for preferred game species. But some are also deeply invested in their right to hunt and view hunting limitations as an inherent threat.

In fact, the right to hunt belongs to Indigenous Peoples, and they've been among the loudest voices calling for change recently. Many consider moose a cultural keystone species. This summer, the Tsilhqot'in Nation in B.C. issued a news release, "condemning the B.C. government's destructive moose harvest allocation for the Chilcotin Region in recent days and expressing its opposition, in the strongest terms, to B.C.'s drastic escalation of Limited Entry Hunts (LEH) for moose in Tsilhqot'in territory."

Moose decline also played a significant role in the landmark legal case between Blueberry River First Nations and the Province of B.C. in 2021, and its precedent-setting ruling. Blueberry River community members argued that moose and caribou - which they rely on for sustenance - became increasingly scarce at their usual hunting grounds in the territory in conjunction with high levels of cumulative industrial disturbance approved by the province, and that this reflected the province's failure to uphold their treaty right to hunt.

The case brought moose habitat needs, and the impacts of industrial activity on them, into sharper focus. Research reveals that moose rely on forests for parts of their life cycle, and that clearings and roads increase hunter access, sightlines and success rates. As Bisset observes regarding Ontario, "In essence, the numbers of tags have never regulated the kill over most of the province. The kill depended on how many moose were vulnerable and exposed to gunfire or arrows." Scientists called as witnesses for Blueberry River First Nations in B.C. testified that large-scale forest change was having negative repercussions for moose populations.

After reviewing the evidence, the judge ruled in favour of Blueberry River, explaining: "While the Province relies on the 'early seral forage'created after logging to say that such disturbances benefit moose, they do not acknowledge the limiting factor created by a lack of effective winter habitat/old forest. I conclude the evidence establishes that the moose declines are the result of anthropogenic [human-caused] disturbances, including industrial development impacts upon habitat."

The Blueberry River ruling set legal precedents and made clear that new governance and decision-making systems are needed to manage lands and waters in ways that uphold treaty rights and ensure wildlife abundance.

It's time for governments to provide better management and protection for moose populations and the habitat they depend on, including stricter hunting restrictions. This won't make everyone happy, but it will provide food security for Indigenous Peoples, benefit other wildlife and ensure healthy moose populations.

This is the speech given by Chris Hedges outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. on Saturday October 8 at a rally that called on the U.S. to revoke its extradition request for Julian Assange.

Merrick Garland and those who work in the Department of Justice are the puppets, not the puppet masters. They are the facade, the fiction, that the longstanding persecution of Julian Assange has something to do with justice. Like the High Court in London, they carry out an elaborate judicial pantomime. They debate arcane legal nuances to distract from the Dickensian farce where a man who has not committed a crime, who is not a U.S. citizen, can be extradited under the Espionage Act and sentenced to life in prison for the most courageous and consequential journalism of our generation.

The engine driving the lynching of Julian is not here on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is in Langley, Virginia, located at a complex we will never be allowed to surround - the Central Intelligence Agency. It is driven by a secretive inner state, one where we do not count in the mad pursuit of empire and ruthless exploitation. Because the machine of this modern leviathan was exposed by Julian and WikiLeaks, the machine demands revenge.

The United States has undergone a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion. It is no longer a functioning democracy. The real centers of power, in the corporate, military, and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and rampant corruption, here and around the globe, were laid bare in troves of leaked documents.

We cannot fight on behalf of Julian unless we are clear about whom we are fighting against. It is far worse than a corrupt judiciary. The global billionaire class, who have orchestrated a social inequality rivaled by pharaonic Egypt, has internally seized all of the levers of power and made us the most spied upon, monitored, watched, and photographed population in human history. When the government watches you 24-hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Julian was long a target, of course, but when WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions, and even cars, he - and journalism itself - was condemned to crucifixion. The object is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that might hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion, and replace it with the cant fed to the mob.

I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent on the outer reaches of empire in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I am acutely aware of the savagery of empire, how the brutal tools of repression are first tested on those Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth." Wholesale surveillance. Torture. Coups. Black sites. Black propaganda. Militarized police. Militarized drones. Assassinations. Wars. Once perfected on people of color overseas, these tools migrate back to the homeland. By hollowing out our country from the inside through deindustrialization, austerity, deregulation, wage stagnation, the abolition of unions, massive expenditures on war and intelligence, a refusal to address the climate emergency, and a virtual tax boycott for the richest individuals and corporations, these predators intend to keep us in bondage, victims of a corporate neo-feudalism. And they have perfected their instruments of Orwellian control. The tyranny imposed on others is imposed on us.

From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including that of U.S. citizens, activities exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA is a rogue and unaccountable paramilitary organization with its own armed units and drone program, death squads, and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared.

The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus to kidnap, torture, and assassinate targets around the globe, which is why, since it had already set up a system of 24-hour video surveillance of Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, it quite naturally discussed kidnapping and assassinating him. That is its business. Senator Frank Church - after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee - defined the CIA's "covert activity" as "a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists."

All despotisms mask state persecution with sham court proceedings. The show trials and troikas in Stalin's Soviet Union. The raving Nazi judges in fascist Germany. The Denunciation rallies in Mao's China. State crime is cloaked in a faux legality, a judicial farce.

If Julian is extradited and sentenced and, given the Lubyanka-like proclivities of the Eastern District of Virginia, this is a near certainty, it means that those of us who have published classified material, as I did when I worked for The New York Times, will become criminals. It means that an iron curtain will be pulled down to mask abuses of power. It means that the state, which, through Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, anti-terrorism laws, and the Espionage Act that have created our homegrown version of Stalin's Article 58, can imprison anyone anywhere in the world who dares commit the crime of telling the truth.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight against powerful subterranean forces that, in demanding Julian's extradition and life imprisonment, have declared war on journalism.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to dismantle the wholesale Stasi-like state surveillance erected across the West.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to overthrow - and let me repeat that word for the benefit of those in the FBI and Homeland Security who have come here to monitor us - overthrow the corporate state and create a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that will cherish, rather than persecute, the best among us.

You can see my interview with Julian's father, John Shipton, here.

(c) 2022 Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is "America: The Farewell Tour" (2019).