Gila Watch’s Susan Schock leads fight against Diamond Bar grazing allotment.
BuRec downsizes
Seven years after the Bureau of Reclamation promised to transform itself from dam builder to environmental water manager, the agency announced its first self-imposed overhaul. Under an order signed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the Bureau will move its headquarters from Denver back to Washington, D.C., streamline its management structure and cut 550 jobs, mostly…
Rancher fined for vandalism
A retired Escalante, Utah, rancher pleaded guilty to “enhancing” 21 Anasazi petroglyphs at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area with a pocket knife. Rancher McKay Bailey agreed to pay restoration costs and forfeit his 1990 Ford pickup for violating the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act. In exchange for his guilty plea, the government recommended a…
Legal fight is costly
The Oregon Natural Resources Council hopes to raise $100,000 to defend itself against a lawsuit concerning its activities in the Klamath Basin in south-central Oregon and northern California. The group, with an annual budget of $650,000, has already spent $25,000 on defense. Farmer Marion Palmer charges that ONRC and others have interfered with his water…
Judge chastises forest plan defendant
The Clinton administration’s Northwest forest plan received a blow March 21 when a federal judge ruled the plan was prepared in violation of a federal open-meetings law. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the administration failed to include public comment and took information from a limited circle of…
Oregon dam is in limbo
The future of partially completed Elk Creek Dam in southern Oregon remains murky. Federal judge James Burns recently decided that the Army Corps of Engineers has not adequately considered new studies which show the dam significantly impairing salmon runs. But instead of ordering the dam razed, or lifting an injunction against completing work, the judge…
New job for an owl lawyer
The architect of the legal strategy to protect the Northern spotted owl and its habitat in the Pacific Northwest is the new president of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. On March 7, Victor Sher, 39, became the sixth president of the public-interest environmental law firm that represents several hundred non-profit clients, including the Sierra…
Rainbows over Wyoming
Counter-culture types will be dropping out somewhere in Wyoming this July when the 22nd Rainbow Gathering convenes. From 10,000 to 25,000 people are expected to come from across the country to one of Wyoming’s five national forests. Rolling Stone magazine reports that last year’s gathering drew about 10,000 people to a national forest in Alabama.…
Utah utility takes aim at Colorado air
The U.S. Forest Service determined last summer that air pollution was reducing visibility and increasing degradation from acid rain in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area in northern Colorado’s Routt National Forest. It should come as no surprise, then, that Colorado forest officials, environmentalists and air-quality managers – not to mention the Environmental Protection Agency and…
Don’t bother them with facts
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A struggle for the last grass. The flier’s drawings were tiny – a deer, a fish, a wild turkey and a cow – but its message was brassy. “ATTENTION SPORTSMEN!! Regardless of your sport, if you enjoy being able to utilize public lands, your…
Free speech can be costly in New Mexico
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A struggle for the last grass. In southwest New Mexico, it’s a struggle to be green. In 1991, wolf advocate Pamela Brown tried to show her video, Wolf Teacher, at schools in Silver City and neighboring towns. It mixes cuddly scenes of wolves licking…
Lycra is as ‘authentic’ as denim
It has become commonplace to attack and ridicule the socio-economic changes that are taking place in the Rocky Mountain West. With disgust and caustic humor residents lash out at the new “cappuccino cowboys,” the brightly colored, lycra-clad mountain bikers, the 20-acre ranchettes, the trophy homes of newcomers, and the network surfers on the information highway.…
Dear friends
Odds and ends The Grand Canyon Community Library writes to say: “Our library burned to the ground on March 18. We are in dire need of donations if anyone has books they no longer need.” The library can be reached at P.O. Box 518, Grand Canyon, AZ 86023-0518. Subscribers Rick and Lindsay Silverman and son…
Justice for owls, and for communities
A recent newspaper story on the revised Clinton forest plan was illustrated with a picture of Larry Mason standing by his abandoned lumber mill in Forks, Wash. I met Larry when I went to talk with Peter Yu, the administration official responsible for the jobs portion of the Clinton plan. Yu, by mistake, or perhaps…
The Forest Service sells out
As the West’s economy shifts from traditional extractive industries to real estate and recreation, the region’s largest landowner is proving to be a big-time sucker. For decades the Forest Service has lost money on timber sales, and has leased valuable oil and gas reserves virtually for free. So it’s no surprise that the agency is…
Colorado told to stop stealing water
A special water master appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court handed Colorado a stunning defeat in February. He ruled that the state has stolen hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water from Kansas since 1949. Judge Arthur Littleworth’s decision concludes an eight-year legal battle over the Arkansas River, and will likely force Colorado farmers to…
Regional wilderness bill gets a hearing
Advocates of a wilderness bill covering 20 million acres in five states finally got a chance to make their case before a congressional subcommittee. The contentious dialogue April 12 at the first public hearing of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) pitted Western lawmakers against the bill’s sponsor, New York Rep. Carolyn Mulroney, D.…
Montana ghost towns are haunted by vandals
BOZEMAN, Mont. – If you want to upset John DeHaas, strip the doorknobs and wood from an abandoned building in a Montana ghost town. Then go a step further and sell them to tourists. The retired architecture professor might not call you a thief to your face, but if someone else does, he won’t object.…
Environmentalists strike out in Idaho
BOISE, Idaho – Environmentalists took a thrashing in the 1994 Idaho legislative session, which ended on April Fool’s Day. With conservative Republicans running the House and Senate, the legislature passed laws that enhanced industry at the expense of the environment. “When it suited them, the powers that be shut us out,” said Mexlinda Harm, lobbyist…
At Glacier: Keep off the grass, or else
GLACIER PARK, Mont. – Another bit of the Old West became history last month when Glacier National Park’s 12 law enforcement rangers hung up their six-shooters and strapped on semiautomatic handguns. The new handguns hold more bullets than the six-shooters, and with more and more criminals packing automatic weapons, rangers don’t want to be outgunned.…
A struggle for the last grass
SILVER CITY, N.M. – Black Canyon is a place that only a hard-core stream addict should be able to love, so barren are its edges, so sparse its grasses. Superficially, the canyon offers a park-like atmosphere in America’s first wilderness. The stream runs freely over its shallow bed, and a few 75- to 100-foot-tall cottonwoods…