The management of wild horses on Montana’s Pryor Mountain’s Wild Horse Range is caught between the love Americans have for the animal and the concern some environmentalists have for the impact it has on the land.
Tribes and a university improve ties
Northwest Indian tribes have an ally in Washington State University, a supporter of Native American studies since 1970. Last November, 10 tribes and the university set up an advisory board to cooperate on education and research issues, such as saving Pacific Northwest salmon, formerly a critical part of many tribal cultures. The agreement creates “a…
Backyard birds
A new report by the Colorado Division of Wildlife helps backyard birders care for what they’re watching. For instance, cleaning feeders with soap and rinsing with a dilute bleach solution followed by plain water can help prevent the spread of diseases like avian pox and salmonellosis. And if you take a few months off from…
Club 20
Club 20, a regional chamber of commerce for Colorado’s Western Slope, will hold its 46th annual meeting March 6-7 in Grand Junction. Guest speakers and panelists include Rep. Scott McInnis, R, Louisiana-Pacific CEO Mark Suwyn, HCN publisher Ed Marston, and Rick O’Donnell, executive director of the Center for the New West. Panel discussions will address…
The Wayward West
The Canada lynx has gotten its due. After years of resisting, on Feb. 12 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed, under pressure from conservation groups and an order from a federal judge, to list the lynx as a protected species in the lower 48 states (HCN, 11/24/97). Conser-vationists have long argued that logging and…
1998 Southwest Earth Studies Program
College students are invited to apply to the 1998 Southwest Earth Studies Program at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. The eight-week summer program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is “a research program into the nature of research itself,” using the problem of acid mine drainage in the nearby San Juan Mountains to investigate…
Shooting down high-tech hunting
-Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do,” said Aldo Leopold in his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac. But even the far-seeing Leopold might not have anticipated hunting 1990s style: Hunters locate game with airplanes and two-way radios, track animals before dawn with infrared night-vision goggles, aim with electronically illuminated…
Forest Stewardship Council
Since 1993, the Forest Stewardship Council has been promoting earth-friendly forest products. The Council’s logo is a “green” label for furniture, guitars, hardwood floors and other products that have been produced with care for communities and the environment. From March 11-13, the Forest Stewardship Council will make its debut in the Rockies, touring Boise, Salt…
Let’s not blame each other
Dear HCN, As an activist and a writer, I am dismayed by the acrimony being flung by enviros toward enviros around the West regarding the recent decision by Judge Downes in the wolf reintroduction case. The editorial in The New York Times by Thomas McNamee, as well as pieces appearing in High County News, raise…
‘Ghost roads’ haunt forests
In his announcement of the Forest Service’s 18-month road-building moratorium on Jan. 22, Chief Mike Dombeck admitted that there are over 60,000 miles of unmapped “ghost roads’ in national forests (HCN, 2/2/98). This was no news to members of the Bozeman, Mont.-based Predator Project, whose Roads Scholars program has been documenting these roads in the…
Mineral Policy Center’s response to David Rockland
Dear HCN, David Rockland invokes a rather confusing logic in his essay “Is our love of the West destroying Chile?” (HCN, 1/19/98). Just because Americans wish to protect their local communities from the environmental impacts of bad mining does not imply, as Rockland asserts, they wish to “export environmental problems’ to other countries. Nor are…
Motorheads lose one
Environmental groups have put the squeeze on off-road vehicle enthusiasts in eastern Idaho’s Targhee National Forest. On Jan. 15, the Forest Service abandoned its policy of allowing snowmobiles, motorbikes or cars access to every part of the forest, on or off road. The decision is a part of the agency’s Targhee Travel Plan, which includes…
Feds ready to get WIPPed
Twenty-three years after the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., was first proposed, the controversial $2.5 billion underground storage facility is scheduled to open this spring. The Department of Energy formally approved the project on Jan. 23, and the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to certify it in May. Department of Energy officials…
Green jeans in Eugene
Land Air Water (LAW), the University of Oregon law student group, invites people to climb trees with the Ruckus Camp, learn about land trusts and listen to environmental leaders such as David Brower and Winona LaDuke. All this is happening in Eugene, Ore., March 5-8 at the 16th annual Public Interest Law Conference: Activists and…
Protecting raptors
Rock climbers are not the only acrobats that frequent cliffs. Raptors such as peregrine falcons nest and roost on lofty rocks and can be scared away from their chicks by careless climbers. Nationwide, nearly 60 crags have temporary climbing restrictions to protect these birds, but in many cases, raptors and climbers can coexist peacefully, says…
Colorado BLM going wild?
The Bureau of Land Management has announced that an additional 167,000 acres of public land in western Colorado are eligible for wilderness status. When the BLM’s roadless lands were first surveyed in 1980, 800,000 acres in western Colorado were given protection as potential wilderness areas. The new acreage may now be added to these existing…
Learning sustainable technology
They’re not the Bureau of Reclamation, but they will teach you how to build a dam. A very small dam, that is. Solar Energy International (SEI) will offer courses in water, wind and solar power during its 1998 Renewable Energy Education Program. Over the past 16 years the Carbondale, Colo., nonprofit has established renewable energy…
Dear Friends
Old and Older Aspen Although Aspen has become mythic as a place where great wealth collides with glamour and fame (and occasionally with trees), beneath the hoopla there beats the heart of a small Western town. That town was on display Jan. 31, when Aspen honored its own: environmentalist Joy Caudill, architect Sam Caudill, ski…
Navajo president forced to resign
Window Rock, Ariz. – Facing up to 50 criminal charges, Navajo President Albert Hale resigned from office Feb. 19. “I could fight this,” he said, “but I don’t want to subject my people, especially my mother and children, to this.” By resigning, Hale avoided prosecution for misusing tribal money. During his parting address to people…
A conservation first for Arizona
SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Ariz. – Travelers often gasp when they reach the crest of Forest Road 58 in the Patagonia Mountains and see the San Rafael Valley spreading below to Mexico. The valley, where the musical Oklahoma was filmed years ago, is a wide bowl of grassland and gentle ridges, one of the most unbroken…
The Grand Canyon struggles with reality
TUSAYAN, Ariz. – Just south of Grand Canyon National Park, this hamlet of 1,600 people is a model for what federal planners don’t want near a national treasure. The main street takes millions of visitors a year past an Imax Theater opposite an RV park, Babbitt’s General Store, motels and fast-food restaurants that tourists overwhelm…
Heard around the West
Apre-ski style in Aspen, Colo., can lurch widely, from rhinestone cowboys and “meppies” – mountain preppies – to gold-toned glitterati and “grunge puppies,” reports the Aspen Times, but what do (presumably) ordinary people on the street really find to be fashion faux pas? Some examples: “Those goofy, furry little boots. What’s up with that?” “Plastic…
A Nevada power plant earns itself a lawsuit
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – South of Las Vegas, Nev., the Mohave Generating Station remains the last coal-fired power plant in the Southwest to resist installing pollution controls. Now, the plant, one of the largest sulfur dioxide polluters in the West and a significant polluter of the Grand Canyon, sits in the crosshairs of the federal…
Waste to snake through West
Nuclear waste may be coming soon through rural Western communities. As early as June, the U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship five loads of nuclear waste through Concord, Calif., to a federal storage facility near Idaho Falls in eastern Idaho. The waste, spent nuclear fuel rods from Asia, is a legacy of the Eisenhower…
Into the canyon: Fear and heat on foot
On the southeast rim of the Grand Canyon, at the South Kaibab trailhead, wind blows hard and cool at 4:20 a.m., even in July. I walk past the yellow sign with the fretting boy sitting on a rock under the sun. The sign reads, “Heat Kills!” A bus left five of us here moments ago,…
The power politics of dam removal
PORT ANGELES, Wash. – Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., startled critics and supporters alike last fall when he announced he favors removing one of two hydroelectric dams on Olympic National Park’s Elwha River. At that time, Gorton, the Senate’s most outspoken opponent of dam removal, pledged his support in the form of a trade: He wanted…
Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
Note: two sidebar articles, titled “A difference of opinion over numbers” and “For some, horse meat ain’t all bad,” accompany this feature story. BRITTON SPRINGS, Wyo. – From the top of the ridge we can hear the helicopter droning behind pastel desert hills, and see the distant slopes of the Pryor Mountains just across the…
A difference of opinion over numbers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. People have been bickering about how many wild horses live in Nevada ever since 1992, when horse lover Michael Blake, author of Dances With Wolves, conducted a census there. His observers found only 8,324 — less than one quarter of the BLM figure. Agency…
For some, horse meat ain’t all bad
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Although most Americans would never think of chowing down on a horse, their distaste is not shared by the French, the Belgians, or many other continental Europeans. Not to mention the Japanese. The reasons for such varying tastes were analyzed by Marvin Harris in…