Articles

Hunting fascinates me, and I read everything I can about it. So I was taken aback to read recently that in my state of Washington, there are 16,000 fewer hunters than there were five years ago. Another story focused on the failure of our justice system to curb rampant poaching, and I began to wonder […]

Westerners celebrated two birthdays worth noting toward the end of summer, but most paid attention to only one, the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. The other was the 50th anniversary of the start of construction of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in Colorado, which eventually moved a lot of water from the Colorado River Basin to […]

Congress still hasn’t figured out how to pay for wildfires. Choked by partisan bickering and entrenched refusals to compromise, the 113th Congress has passed the fewest pieces of legislation of any Congress in the past two decades — just 108 significant laws, compared to nearly 170 per session from 1995 to 2010. One of the […]

Some interests potentially inconvenienced by the Endangered Species Act are so terrified of the law that it often succeeds best when threatened but not invoked. So it may be with ongoing efforts to save the greater sage grouse. In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gave states, private landowners, the Forest Service and the […]