Stewart Udall and his brother, Mo, were conservation icons in the 1950s and ‘60s, but their sons – Rep. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Rep. Mark Udall of Colorado – face a harder fight in today’s Congress, where Democrats are the minority and conservation has become controversial.

Also in this issue: The Bush administration’s new salmon plan treats dams as a natural part of the landscape, and sees a recovery plan as more important than actual species recovery.

The conservation hall of fame is too small

Just as sports fans have their legends of the game — their Babe Ruths, Michael Jordans and Jack Nicklauses — so, too, do conservationists. Our legends aren’t household names; my daughter had never heard of Aldo Leopold until her high school science teacher put A Sand County Almanac on her optional reading list last week.…

by Paul Larmer

The Udall bloodline is consistent

Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington.” Throw a stick around the West’s public offices and institutions, and the odds are decent you’ll hit a member of the extended Udall clan. Joining Mark Udall and Tom Udall in Congress is their second cousin,…

by Florence Williams

Udall patriarch laments startling changes

Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington.” Stewart Udall lives in a comfortable adobe house near downtown Santa Fe, N.M. Now 84 years old, he’s earned the distinguished looks of a Western sage, with his beaked nose, strong face, long hair. Each evening…

by Ray Ring

University gets smart about food

In May 2003, two environmental studies graduate students at the University of Montana in Missoula teamed up with the university?s Dining Services, a $2.5 million-per-year business, to start the Farm to College program. Since then, the efforts of Crissie McMullan and Shelly Conner have made large-scale local food purchasing a reality: The university has bought…

by Brianna Randall

Follow-up

Former workers at a nuclear bomb factory may soon get a cold shoulder from the U.S. Department of Energy. In 1993, Congress created the Former Worker Medical Screening Program to notify and test nuke workers who might be at risk for health problems (HCN, 11/24/03: Cold war workers seek compensation). But the screening program for…

by Laura Paskus

Calendar

Visit Albuquerque for RangeNet?s conference, Envisioning Wild Landscapes: Momentum for Change, on Nov. 11-13. The conference will include discussions concerning grazing issues on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands; keynote speakers are U.S. Reps. Ra?l Grijalva, D-N.M., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., who recently introduced the Voluntary Grazing Buyout Act in Congress. Billy Stern…

by Staff

Wandering into wolf territory

The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently.…

by Michelle Nijhuis

Wolves are welcome in one Western state

Oregon may soon be the first Western state to independently welcome back wolves following their near eradication and reintroduction in the Lower 48. In September, a citizen panel of ranchers, hunters, wildlife activists and others presented the state Fish and Wildlife Commission with a blueprint that would allow eight or more wolf packs to move…

by Michael Milstein

Citizens wary of their nuclear neighbor

Rather than excavating a Cold War-era landfill just outside Albuquerque, Sandia National Laboratories wants to leave the nuclear waste in the ground and “monitor” it indefinitely — and the state of New Mexico has agreed that’s a good idea. From 1959 until 1988, Sandia used the site, now known as the Mixed Waste Landfill, to…

by Lissa James

Wolf pack wiped out for ‘surplus killing’

During the night of June 29, the nine wolves in the Cook pack took part in what biologists call a “surplus killing” north of McCall. They killed 70 sheep, far more than they could eat. In all, the pack — Idaho’s largest — reportedly killed more than 190 sheep the past two summers. The U.S.…

by Zachary Smith

Trout wriggles into a sagebrush rebellion

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raised the stakes in a conflict between environmentalists and Elko County, Nev., in June, when it proposed critical habitat for the endangered bull trout along the Jarbidge River. The agency proposed designating 131 miles of streams in Idaho and Nevada as critical habitat — which sets aside land essential…

by Dan Wilcock

Racetrack

This election day, Arizonans will decide who can vote in future elections — and what they’ll have to bring with them to the polls. Proposition 200, or the Arizona Tax Payer and Citizen Protection Act initiative, would prevent noncitizens from voting, require all voters to present identification at the polls, and also require state and…

by Laura Paskus

History repeats itself

Tony Davis’ article, “A Thirst for Growth,” once again reminds me that history does repeat itself if we don’t heed the warnings left by our predecessors (HCN, 8/30/04: A Thirst for Growth). I think back on family trips to Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon in the late 1960s. At the time, the big unanswered question,…

by Dan Neher

Once again, science gets soaked

In your story about the predicament facing the San Pedro River, Mark Anderson, whom the Bush administration has chosen as chief of the U.S. Geological Survey office responsible for San Pedro River studies, states that “pumping in the Sierra Vista area … is probably not yet imperiling the river” (HCN, 8/30/04: A Thirst for Growth).…

by Robin Silver

Squirrels not victims of conspiracy

The article “Squirrels and scopes in the line of fire” misleads the reader on several points (HCN, 8/30/04: Squirrels and scopes in the line of fire). The 850 trees removed from around the Mount Graham International Observatory were dead, killed in the last several years by a spruce bark beetle infestation. They were removed as…

by Jack Cohen

Klamath farmers stand in the way of progress

Tim Holt’s column on the Klamath Basin makes some excellent points, but misses two of the keys (HCN, 9/13/04: Failure of leadership, not a lack of water, dooms the Klamath). Any rational person familiar with the situation understands that demand reduction is key to rebalancing water in the basin. Gross overallocation of water by the…

by Rich McIntyre

Hunting: It’s not about the gun

I killed my first deer on an October morning, two days after my 14th birthday. I was hunting on my grandmother’s ranch in south-central Colorado, and I can still see that deer, ghost-gray in the dawn, its form more like smoke than animal. I remember how my chest was tight and my arms and legs…

by Tom Reed

Dear Friends

CONGRATULATIONS Betsy and Ed Marston, HCN’s longtime editor-publisher team, are grandparents. On Sept. 18, in New York City, the Marston’s daughter, Wendy, gave birth to a 7-pound, 9-ounce baby girl, Maude Rose Marston Lehmann. Maude is bound to be one above-average kid; Wendy is a freelance writer and editor, and her husband, Ben Lehmann, works…

by Greg Hanscom for the staff

So much for sticking to the center

Return with us now to those thrilling days of not quite four years ago, when George W. Bush was taking office and almost every mainstream, establishment, veteran political observer — yea, even including your humble agent here — predicted that his presidency would not stray too far from the ideological center. So much for the…

by Jon Margolis

Heard Around the West

MONTANA For 30 years, says biologist Charles Jonkel, he’s tried to educate people about grizzlies and black bears. He started an International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Mont., 28 years ago to spread the word that ethical standards were needed for making films about the animals. Nonetheless, he says, thrill-seeking has gained ever-wider prominence, with…

by Betsy Marston