High Country News November 10, 2003
Feature
San Diego’s Habitat Triage
San Diego, Calif., adopted its groundbreaking Multiple Species Conservation Program to protect wildlife habitat while allowing for continued community growth – but critics say endangered wildlife is the loser in the deal
Editor's Note
Conservation in an imperfect world
San Diego’s Multiple Species Conservation Program is a groundbreaking attempt to protect wildlife habitat, but some say it is still not enough to save the imperiled wildlife of Southern California
Dear Friends
Dear Friends
HCN Radio Special on "Atomic Tales: Living in the Nuclear West"; visitors; corrections
News
Freaky Fridays with the Bush administration
Critics say it’s not a coincidence that the Bush administration announces bad environmental news – like the recent rollback of mine-tailings limits – late on Friday afternoons, when media coverage is sparse
Follow-up
New Mexico joins states suing the Environmental Protection Agency for weakening the Clean Air Act; new cleanup schedule for Hanford Nuclear Reservation; court says wastewater from coalbed methane drilling is industrial waste; and Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt be
A revival on Hart Mountain
Oregon’s Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge is thriving these days, but refuge managers are courting controversy by trying to get permission to shoot coyotes from airplanes
On a new national monument, has an agency been cowed?
When President Clinton established Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument three years ago, he told the BLM to study grazing impacts, but now funding for the study has been cut, while grazing continues unabated
‘Restoration Cowboy’ goes against the flow
Dave Rosgen has become a popular and influential guru in the field of river restoration and management, but some say his teaching oversimplifies a complex subject
It’s ‘bombs away’ on New Mexico saltcedar
The state of New Mexico is beginning an aerial herbicide assault on the exotic shrub saltcedar, or tamarisk, but some fear spraying Arsenal along the Rio Grande could harm native cottonwoods
State picks up federal slack on perchlorate
Outgoing California Gov. Gray Davis signs two bills into law to protect drinking water from perchlorate contamination
Park expansion threatened
In South Dakota, Wind Cave National Park has been trying to purchase the neighboring Casey Ranch, but approval of the sale has stalled in Congress, and now the ranch is for sale on the open market
Activists raise a stink over outhouse
In Nevada, the county-rights activists of the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade clash with the Forest Service over the cleanup of an outhouse on the closed South Canyon Road
Federal report supports Klamath farmers
The National Research Council issues a report saying that irrigation shutoffs alone won’t save endangered salmon in the Klamath River Basin of Oregon and California
Book Reviews
Mucking around San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary by John Hart pairs beautiful photos with an intriguing history of the pollution -- and the reclamation -- of the bay area
Calendar
Bee kind, please redesign
The Pollinator Conservation Handbook offers advice about what ordinary citizens can do to help save declining native pollinator insects, like bees and butterflies
Agriculture’s wild side
In Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches, Daniel Imhoff discusses what’s wrong with industrialized agriculture and offers suggestions on how to fix it.
Essays
A grizzly attack that was bound to happen
Timothy Treadwell was killed by an Alaskan grizzly because the self-proclaimed bear expert treated wild animals without proper respect, as if they were children
The West loses a conservation elder
Mardy Murie, who died in October at the age of 101, is remembered as the grande dame of conservation, one of the people who helped inspire the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Heard Around the West
Heard Around the West
Concealed weapons in Utah schools; fun with Dick Cheney outdoors; "mouse-to-mouse resuscitation" in Colorado; stress and burnout among wolves; and bear mugs women in Montana
Related Stories
Vernal pools fall to a shopping mall
A shopping center and apartment complex destroyed over 60 of the vernal pools necessary to endangered San Diego fairy shrimp, and despite the Multiple Species Conservation Program, only one of the pools was saved
Amid smoke and sprawl, some success
It’s too early to know the impact wildfires have had on the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge and the Crestridge wildlife preserve, two of the successes of the Multiple Species Conservation Program
Behind the scenes, pressure and doubt
Two former Fish and Wildlife Service biologists had early doubts about San Diego’s Multiple Species Conservation Program, criticizing the limits of the program’s science and its inability to protect a population of endangered willowy monardella
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