“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert, published the first Monday of each month. Almost ten years ago, after my wife Eryn’s difficult and dangerous 22-hour labor, our first daughter, Hannah Virginia, made her reluctant entrance and began an unbroken run […]
Blogs
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Montana’s roadkill bill
I remember when a doe collided with my mom’s tank-like 1973 Chrysler Newport, an earwax gold car we eventually dubbed the “the deer slayer.” Mom trudged to a neighbor’s and called my dad, who came out to dispatch the unfortunate animal, and take it home to eat. It became a family joke to tease Dad […]
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15 years of Mexican gray wolves: celebrate or sob?
Friday, March 29 will be the 15th anniversary of the day U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staffers braved a blizzard to release the first group of captive bred Mexican gray wolves – also called “lobos” – into the wild. The wolves had been waiting in pens in the Apache National Forest in Arizona, the first […]
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Help the economy: Start a fire.
Now that wildfire season is (already) upon us, some old-timer will surely start reminiscing about the days when “work fires” were common; when, on hot summer days, locals set forest fires in the hope that they and their buddies would get jobs on the federally-funded fire crews. A few dozen acres of brush gone up […]
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A second century of greatness
Earlier this week President Obama used authority granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate five new national monuments. Delaware earned its first national park unit, celebrating the state’s inaugural role in ratifying the U.S. Constitution. Maryland’s Underground Railroad National Monument pays tribute to famous conductor Harriet Tubman. Nature and culture are now protected […]
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Snow not falling on cedars
I remember the moment when, drinking strong coffee under a tin roof pattering with the relentless southeast Alaska rain, I first cut yellow-cedar with a chisel. A clean curl of cream-colored, sharp-scented wood peeled from the big beam. My patient teacher, whose whole house was built from the stuff, just grinned through his bushy beard […]
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Good news for people who love bad news
In 2008, Canadian researchers made a scary prediction: In our warming world, boreal forests would stop absorbing excess carbon and start contributing to climate change as soon as 2020. What would cause this switch? The mountain pine beetles that have been eating their way though tens of millions of acres of alpine forests, leaving swaths […]
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Much ado about mud
Until recently, the phrase “flash flood” conjured in my mind a racing blue wall of water, or a canyon running red as blood with sediment – a deadly natural force that smells simply and cleanly of earth and rain. But a trip with friends down the San Juan River in southeastern Utah set me straight […]
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Sovereignty and the Skywalk
At the Grand Canyon Skywalk, tourists can pay about $90 to shuffle along a horseshoe of glass that extends over the rim’s edge, wearing special booties to avoid scratching the surface as they peer 4,000 vertical feet down at the Colorado River. For such a snazzy feat of engineering, you would expect an equally fancy […]
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Uncertain science in CA’s Bay Delta
In 2009, a reporter for CBS’s 60 Minutes asked the then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a hard question about California’s water. The state had been battling over the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta for decades, and, with the Governator’s encouragement, work was progressing on the new Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The plan was supposed to […]
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Dangerous talk from the Capitol
Idaho’s Rep. Mike Simpson, a Republican, asked a critical question Tuesday. It’s one rarely asked, let alone, answered. The question: Does more government money work? Specifically, Simpson, the chairman of the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, was asking if recent increased funding for the Indian Health Service has made a […]
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USFS vs. your ability to sue them
In 2001, a week before George W. Bush took the oath of office, the Forest Service dropped a bombshell. It released the 1,800 page Sierra Nevada Framework, a plan for how to manage 11.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada forests to protect the California spotted owl, reduce wildfires and protect habitat. Unlike previous plans, which […]
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Towards a greater Canyonlands
This week the U.S. Senate is wading through nearly 100 budget amendments tacked onto the federal spending bill. This continuing resolution—which would prevent a government shutdown and fund federal agencies through the rest of the year—includes some unrelated, politically-charged measures which, while ultimately non-binding, give an interesting peek into political agendas. According to aides, GOP […]
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The enviros’ new money man
On Monday, Congressman Steve Lynch, a Democrat seeking his party’s support to run for the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by our new Secretary of State, John Kerry, received a menacing letter. “Because climate change is such a serious issue,” it read, “we are asking you, Congressman Lynch, today to do one of two things by high […]
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An upside to the gun-buying frenzy
The last five years have been quite nice for the firearm industry. Gun and ammunition makers had a bonanza in 2009, thanks to fears that a newly-elected President Obama would sent out jackbooted, United Nations thugs in black helicopters to steal their guns (and maybe build bike paths, too!). It didn’t happen, of course. Yet […]
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The West’s best critter-cams
In the usual Monday-morning email deluge, one message caught my eye: “Live Webcam Captures Peregrine Falcons Laying Eggs.” The advertised falcon was in Maine, not around here, but who can resist peeking at a rare bird on her nest? It’s sort of like looking in somebody’s windows, except in a non-creepy way that won’t get […]
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To kill or not to kill?
Recently, it seems people on both sides of the pond have horse slaughter on the brain. In Europe, the discovery of horsemeat in Ikea’s purportedly all-beef meatballs has countries pointing fingers at each other, trying pin the blame for mislabeled meat on someone else. Ultimately, the issue seems to boil down to different degrees of […]
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Uranium ban rethink?
When I read that mining companies are pressuring the Navajo Nation to let them mine uranium on Diné land I thought: What gall. After all, the Navajos banned uranium mining on the reservation back in 2005, and for good reason. From World War II until the mid-1980s, the federally-subsidized uranium industry pulled some 4 million […]
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Forests test-drive collaboration
It was a big deal when the Forest Service introduced its new planning rule in 2012. The rule dictates how the nation’s 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands write their individual plans, which in turn regulate nearly every aspect of how these public lands are managed: where logging and grazing occur, what’s set aside […]
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Are tree-sitters felons?
Recently, civil disobedience has been making a comeback. From 2011’s scruffy Occupy movement to the Sierra Club’s coat-and-tie White House protest of the Keystone XL pipeline last month, risking arrest to make a statement hasn’t been this high profile in a long time. In Oregon, environmentalists have a long history of getting arrested and putting […]