Items by Pat Ford
Cheering the return of salmon to the Elwha River after the dam came down
Woody Guthrie's long history of writing about dams and hydropower.
Pat Ford reminds us that sockeye salmon face enormous hurdles – especially if they’re trying to return to Redfish Lake.
A eulogy for conservationist Jim Thrash, who died in the
Canyon Creek fire.
A guide to federal agencies involved in salmon
issues.
Agencies will try to find a way around new salmon
ruling.
An influential congressman's proposal to create the nation's first all-wilderness national forest in central Idaho has the Forest Service scrambling.
I want to tell you about a fish, a place named for it, and a recent weekend there that I will not forget.
The big hydroelectric dams stand as symbols of the crossroads now confronting the Pacific Northwest's salmon and steelhead. A century ago these wild fish numbered some 16 million. Now their annual count is dropping below 1 million.
The Columbia Basin's eight mainstem dams account for nearly all of the Northwest's annual salmon slaughter, and could be modified.
Three Northwest forest researchers conclude that converting old-growth to young forests won't slow down global warming. Their results may help settle one question in the Northwest's intense debate over its remaining ancient forests.
A former timber sale planner says "it's all talk."
For a variety of reasons, Idaho is the first Western state to seriously attempt to control nonpoint source water pollution.
Conservationists haven't yet figured out how to blow the whistle on McClure without also appearing to be attacking Andrus.
The Idaho National Energy Lab is the biggest blind spot in Idaho politics. Politicians who rail against the evils of big government while pulling every string for INEL projects are faithfully reflecting those who elect them.
Statewide, conservation and outdoor issues played a key role only in the race won by Rep. Richard Stallings.
A combination of technological change and free market ideology has led the nation to abandon not just railroad and bus lines but its long-held commitment to universal transportation and communication. The article describes the Balkanization process and its consequences for the rural West.
In theory, wild, beautiful and lightly populated Idaho should be bursting with national parks. In
fact, its ranching, logging and mining roots have kept it totally free of parks.
Lest you think that the entire West succumbed to the hypnotic beat of boom, boom, boom, here is
an account of how the conservative state of Idaho behaved conservatively -- resisting the lure of a coal-fired power plant that was to carry the state to the land of milk and honey.
The McClure-Andrus package is obviously superior, statewide, to McClure's 1984 proposal. But the transformation of public perceptions that we require has not occurred. Now the exigencies of substantially improving or fighting this legislation will dominate our time.
The Idaho Conservation League joins a battle to regain access to a part of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.
Idaho's John Peavey proves that a legislator can win major fights against the West's power triangle -- big business, utilities and the farm-ranch establishment.
Ten years after the collapse of the Teton Dam, irrigators and city officials in eastern Idaho are beginning a campaign to rebuild it.
The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls is preparing for its first major nuclear weapons project.
The Northwest's energy surplus is the latest battleground in the decades-long trench warfare between salmon and steelhead advocates and the Bonneville Power Administration.
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