Items by Jon Christensen
A look back at how range science misled land managers.
Los Angeles is an unlikely model of urban sustainability for the West and the world.
The recession has afforded a unique opportunity for land trusts to protect more of the West’s private open land through direct acquisitions and, increasingly, conservation easements.
Jon Christensen accompanies scientists trying to measure the opacity and “blueness” of Lake Tahoe.
A review of Neil M. Maher's book, "Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement," which reminds us that to succeed, an environmental policy must reckon compromise.
Both sides of the contentious debate over a proposed Idaho
wilderness bill invoke Howard Zahniser, father of the Wilderness
Act -- and both sides have a point.
The writers urge support for conservation easements and
their tax breaks as a way to protect private land from
development
The writers watch Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launch
initiatives over the head of California’s state
legislators
The writer says it’s up to locals to keep sage
grouse alive
New Senate minority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., brings to
Capitol Hill the lessons learned from a hardscrabble Nevada
childhood
The writer profiles the Democrats’ new minority
leader, Sen. Harry Reid, a quintessential Westerner
Studies by Montana’s Andrew Hansen and
Colorado’s Rick Knight offer some of the first scientific
evidence that preserving ranch lands provides important benefits to
surrounding ecosystems
Carl Palmer hopes to make his Adobe Ranch in California an
economic success to prove that open space can be financially as
well as environmentally valuable
As private lands become the new frontier in the
West’s wild real estate frenzy, ranchers are turning to land
trusts in places like Gunnison, Colo., to find out how to hold on
to their land and keep it open and undeveloped
The Sagebrush Rebellion smolders when the BLM impounds and
tries to auction off cattle owned by ranchers Ben Colvin and Jack
Vogt for refusing to pay for grazing allotments.
Residents of Nevada's Amargosa Valley, not far from Yucca
Mountain, seem to be mostly ambivalent over the prospect of the
high-level nuclear waste dump opening.
The unexpected power shift in the U.S. Senate raises
environmentalists' hopes that the high-level nuclear waste dump
proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which once seemed
unstoppable, may not be a "done deal" after all.
Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Arizona native,
rancher and environmentalist, lectures on cooperation and community
in the West at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., and gets
a surprising ovation.
The fire-loving weed cheatgrass is taking over the Great
Basin's overgrazed sagebrush steppes, and BLM scientists are
struggling to find a way to eradicate the non-native weeds and
restore the land before it all goes up in flames.
In the wake of the huge fires that swept across the Great
Basin in August 1999, the BLM is seeking ways to restore the
sagebrush landscape and to control the fire-prone cheatgrass that
now infests it.
Citing a climate of threatening, "irresponsible
fed-bashing" that made it almost impossible for her to do her job,
supervisor Gloria Flora resigns from her job overseeing Nevada's
Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
What was slated to be a big, vigorous wise-use protest,
during which sagebrush rebels would open up an old Forest Service
road into Nevada's Jarbidge Wilderness, sputters to a halt with
fewer than 50 attendees.
Nevada is the fastest-growing state and its politics
reflect a lively, complex reality.
Democrat Harry Reid brings a reputation for integrity, a
record of environmentalism, and the toughness he kept from his
hardscrabble Western upbringing into a challenging race for a third
term as a U.S. Senator from Nevada.
Washoe Tribal Chairman Brian Wallace gains assurances from
President Clinton at the forum on Lake Tahoe that the Washoe
Indians have rights to Lake Tahoe land.
Bernardine Suitum, 80, sues Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
over her desire to develop a lot she owns in Incline Village,
Nev.
A small but determined group protests Las Vegas' plan to
take more water from Lake Mead and the Colorado River, saying the
city's growth is already out of control and a potential
public-health disaster looms if the water is contamined.
Back in 1997, President Clinton and Vice President Gore came to
Lake Tahoe for a summit on the lake's environment and
development.
The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency was created in 1969 to
protect and restore Lake Tahoe.
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