The Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an Anchorage-based nonprofit, is alert to wildlife protection issues throughout its enormous state. Since its start 20 years ago as part of Greenpeace Alaska, the alliance has voiced the opinions of the state’s non-hunters in its quarterly, The Spirit. “Protecting wildlife and their habitat is the bottom line for us. We […]
Alaska Wildlife Alliance
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Aspen Center for Environmental Studies
The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies hosts a summer of naturalist-guided programs for kids and adults. Participants can choose from activities such as exploring beaver ponds at sunset or riding a gondola to the summit of Aspen mountain. Call 970/925-5756 or visit the Web site at http://www.aspen.com/aces. This article appeared in the print edition of […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Wisdom of the West: Designing our Future Together
The Wisdom of the West: Designing our Future Together, a conference in Wenatchee, Wash., sponsored by the Planning Association of Washington and others, and to be held July 29-31, invites those interested in Western planning to participate in dozens of programs such as “Ethics for the everyday planner & commissioner” and “Stream corridor management – […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks
Winter recreation is a hot topic at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks as well as at the five-mile John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway that connects them. To involve the public in an upcoming environmental impact statement, open houses have begun in Idaho, with more meetings set for Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota and Washington, […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Utah Wilderness Coalition
The Utah Wilderness Coalition of 155 conservation groups is taking its show on the road. Open houses explaining its re-inventory of potential wilderness on Bureau of Land Management lands will be held in Ogden, July 1, and Salt Lake City, July 8, both at 7 p.m. Later meetings are scheduled for San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Motorizing Montana’s trails
The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Forest Service give motorized trail projects the go-ahead without scrutiny, according to The Montana State Trails Program: Motorizing Montana’s National Forest Trails, a 13-page report by the Predator Project in Bozeman. Widening trails significantly damages habitat, but agencies dismiss it as “repair and maintenance,” […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
But trouble the Mountaineers
Mount Rainier National Park bypassed public discussion and sprang a surprise fee on backcountry visitors recently, drawing a protest letter from the Mountaineers, the Seattle-based conservation group. The Mountaineers says the new hierarchy of fees is too steep, especially for short visits. Two visitors might pay $10 to enter the park, $20 to camp in […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Fees please visitors
Land-management agencies call new user fees an “unqualified success’ and they’re asking Congress to make them permanent. During its first season on more than 200 sites around the country, the fee program raised $53.5 million. Before the trial fees got under way, public correspondence ran about 2-to-1 against, saying they discouraged low-income and local users […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Lonely Art
In a crumbling, long-abandoned building in the desert of eastern Utah, anonymous artists have created one of the world’s loneliest art exhibits. “Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal,” is scrawled ominously above a gutted upholstered chair inside a small building called the White Buffalo Bar. Cowboy boots, stuck upside down on […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Restoring the Roaring Fork
The Roaring Fork River Valley in western Colorado has a friend – a nonprofit conservancy created to protect the river and its tributaries. From its headwaters at Independence Pass at 12,900 feet, the Roaring Fork flows 45 miles northwest through the booming town of Aspen on its way to the Colorado River. The conservancy, founded […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Forest blowdown causes storm
The Forest Service is preparing to log nearly 3,000 acres of an October spruce and fir blowdown in Colorado’s Routt National Forest (HCN, 11/24/97). The risk of wildfire and the potential for a spruce beetle outbreak in the blowdown make the North Fork salvage sale an “emergency situation,” the regional forester says – one that […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Judge disciplines L-P
Judge disciplines L-P At a criminal trial last month in Denver, a federal judge fined the Louisiana-Pacific Corp. a record $37 million for breaking environmental laws at its Olathe, Colo., waferboard plant and for selling a product whose quality didn’t meet the company’s claims. The fine is the latest chapter in the plant’s stormy history. […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Trees and children win
How much are 30,000 acres of forest worth? Washington conservation groups and the state’s Department of Natural Resources are about to find out. On April 8, the two sides settled a trio of lawsuits over the Loomis State Forest in north-central Washington by agreeing to let the conservation groups pay to remove a chunk of […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Rancher stonewalls an agency
The condition of a grazing allotment in southern Wyoming is at the center of a dispute between the National Wildlife Federation and the Bureau of Land Management. The wildlife group’s attorney, Tom Lustig, is protesting the agency’s temporary extension of a grazing permit to rancher Wright Dickenson. Lustig says the impact of 1,000 cows on […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
More internal fire at the Forest Service
NEW MEXICO More internal fire at the Forest Service The list of resignations in the Forest Service’s Southwest region is growing (HCN, 3/30/98). Renee Galeano-Popp, a career agency biologist, stepped down from her position at Lincoln National Forest in late April, saying in a letter to the incoming regional forester that “the Forest Service has […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
The Wayward West
In early June, GOP leaders in the House promised to end logging subsidies for the timber industry, agreeing with the Clinton administration that “road credits’ should die. Soon after, the Forest Service, for the second time in its history, posted a number for what its road-building program really lost last year: $88 million. Jet-boat enthusiasts […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Tribe seeks its key peak
Tohono O’odham Indians have long gazed up at the soaring tower of Baboquivari Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., with mingled reverence and consternation. They have never accepted a 1917 boundary survey that placed the east side of the tribe’s most sacred mountain on federal land, outside their main reservation. Now, the tribe hopes the dispute […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
It rhymes with scourge
I was out weeding my native plants garden when a houseguest chided me about the ethnic cleansing that seemed to be happening there. Targets were dandelions, salsifies, thistles, chicories, henbit and donkeytail spurge, which try to crowd out naturalized grasses and bee-balm, penstemon and Jacob’s ladder. I have the satisfaction of knowing that what I […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
In the Sonoran Desert, a lesson already learned
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Twenty years ago, cattle roamed the open range near here, and the only sound during the night, besides coyotes, was a car bumping over a cattleguard on north Scottsdale Road. The metal strips hummed like a stroked guitar in the stillness of a desert night. Now the cattleguard is gone, and the […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Heard around the West
Maybe it had to happen. The “green glow” emanating from cool corporations in the laid-back Northwest has faded, reports the Los Angeles Times, with just the merest hint of gloating. There’s gigantic Microsoft, targeted by the Justice Department for monopolizing computer software, and Starbucks, assailed for cruelty to songbirds for removing shade trees from coffee […]