Items by Rocky Barker
Some are disappointed, but Rocky Barker thinks Ken Salazar is a good choice to head Interior.
The Interior secretary is the nation's top wildlife manager and federal landlord, managing 507 million acres, 600 dams and 68 percent of the nation's energy reserves.
Rocky Barker on the endless struggle over protecting the national forests’ roadless areas.
Rocky Barker thinks Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin has a good shot at winning the West for John McCain.
Rocky Barker remembers the Yellowstone fires of 1988, and warns that in today’s hotter, drier West, gigantic, uncontrollable blazes are going to become an everyday occurrence.
Rocky Barker says four Northwestern tribes stopped
fighting the federal government over dam-breaching on the Snake
River largely because they could read the political writing on the
walls.
Rocky Barker wants to bury the Marlboro Man, whose myth
did much to glamorize smoking, killing millions of people,
including his parents.
Rocky Barker warns us that the new West is a world of
inevitable, long-lasting and increasing forest fires.
Rocky Barker says wolves are protected by public sentiment
-- even in Idaho, where the governor wants to shoot one.
Newly appointed Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has a
chance to use his deal-making abilities to bring change to the way
Western public lands are managed
After Michele DeHart of the Fish Passage Center in
Portland, Ore., publicly supported a plan to protect salmon, angry
lawmakers led by Sen. Larry Craig yanked the center’s
funding
Sen. Larry Craig’s suggestion that New
Orleans’ 9th Ward be restored as a wetland may represent a
newfound respect for the power of nature and the limits of the
human ability to control it
The writer says fire and flood teach us about our weak
control of nature
A longtime consultant to the hydropower industry,
biologist Don Chapman, shook the Northwest this summer when he
declared that four dams on the Lower Snake River should be breached
to save the salmon
The writer says longtime industry biologist Don Chapman
shocked everyone when he came out against dams
Idaho is weathering the drought by taking a new,
scientific approach to managing water use among its
farmers
A judge has thrown out the Bush administration’s
salmon protection plan, setting the stage for dramatic changes to
the federal hydropower system
The writer says that once ranchers and environmentalists
found common ground, they started to cooperate to protect the wild
Owyhee
When Idaho salmon advocates challenged the state’s
farm-irrigation system, Norm Semanko held them off by taking a
couple of wilderness deals hostage
A compromise brewed by Republican Rep. Mike Simpson would
designate wilderness in the Boulder Mountains and White Cloud Peaks
of Idaho
Rocky Barker says hydropower-dam operators don’t
need the too-helpful hand of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig
In the Northwest, a legal decision resurrects the idea of
breaching four dams on the Snake River to save endangered
salmon
Rocky Barker says dam-breaching is back on the table in
the Northwest
Writer tells the government: Restore wolves to New
York
Writer hails the Bush administration for not giving
federal firefighters a blank check
Sometimes opponents have to work together to deal with
thorny issues, as environmentalists and ranchers are trying to do
in Idaho’s Owyhee County.
As Boise celebrates the opening of its Anne Frank Human
Rights Memorial, the late Bill Wassmuth is remembered as the
activist who helped lead the charge against Idaho's neo-Nazi
extremists.
In her own words, Margaret Soulen Hinson explains that
wolf predation is minimal compared to other animals that kill her
family's sheep.
Under pressure from ranchers, Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and
other conservatives, Rod Sando resigns from his position as
director of Idaho's Department of Fish and Game.
The Bonneville Power Administration has long provided the
Northwest -- especially its aluminum industry -- with some of the
cheapest public power, but drought, endangered salmon and the
deregulated electricity market may just change all that.
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