It’s been 15 years since the Bureau of Land Management wrote a management plan for the 1.3 million-acre Owyhee Resource Area in southwest Idaho, and the agency’s attempt to revise it isn’t sitting well with ranchers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts. BLM officials were caught off guard in November when several hundred critics showed up at […]
Uproar over Owyhee
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
The importance of prairie dogs
A report, Conserving Prairie Dog Ecosystems on the Northern Plains, defends one of nature’s best dinners. Published by the Predator Project in Bozeman, Mont., the 30-page booklet explains how prairie dogs create a unique environment that provides food and shelter to at least 158 other species, including the endangered black-footed ferret and the swift fox. […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Cut the fat out
Cut environmentally damaging subsidies and save $36 billion doing it, urges a report targeting 57 wasteful federal programs. The third annual Green Scissors describes how each program costs both taxpayers and the environment. Ending below-cost timber sales, the report says, could save $1 billion over five years. Twenty-five taxpayer and nonprofit groups contributed to the […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Copper mine rouses opposition
Flanked by massive cottonwoods and sycamores, Pinto Creek winds through the rugged mountains of central Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. Its narrow valley is a haven for an endangered hedgehog cactus, it contains scores of archaeological sites and it may soon become an open-pit copper mine. That prospect has roused local protest and national criticism, yet […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Still no deal for New World Mine
With great ceremony last August, President Bill Clinton announced he had saved Yellowstone by blocking a proposed gold mine that bordered the park (HCN, 9/2/96). Once the applause died down, critics who worried that the the deal was a ploy for re-election warned that the deal was not done: Clinton still had to secure $65 […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Paying 1 percent for place
In the ski town of Crested Butte, Colo., purchases of everything from a rack of lamb to rock-climbing hardware will now go toward buying a piece of paradise. Thanks to the efforts of a local sporting goods store, businesses this month began offering a 1 percent surcharge on all purchases for the acquisition of open […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Ski resort beefs up
The Forest Service won’t allow developers on Oregon’s Mount Hood to expand onto more public land. But the agency will allow 5,000 more skiers, six new chairlifts and a restaurant on the slopes. The Mount Hood Meadows ski area is a private business that operates on Forest Service land under a special-use permit. The developers, […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
It’s cows as usual in Oregon
Last fall, Oregon activists envisioned cattle fenced away from riverbanks, and streams tested for purity after a district court ruled that grazing was polluting water on the state’s Forest Service lands (HCN, 10/28/96). It hasn’t happened yet. Instead, state officials are scrambling to draw up “emergency” grazing rules so ranchers can turn out their cows […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Babbitt moves on mining reform
After four frustrating years of cajoling Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law that allows hard-rock mining on public lands, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has decided to see what he can do on his own. Recently he announced a task force that would investigate the ways the administration can prevent some of the environmental damages […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Trade treaty may protect Arizona river
The U.S. government must respond this month to a citizens’ petition accusing one of its Army bases of helping to dry up Arizona’s last free-flowing river, the San Pedro (HCN, 6/12/95). The river boasts North America’s largest surviving expanse of cottonwood and willow forest and serves as a migratory coridor for many birds. The petition […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
No nagging or preaching here
Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, Northwest Environment Watch, 1997. 86 pages, illus. $9.95 paperback. When was the last time you heard an environmentalist complain that we’re recycling too much? No street-corner shouter or mealymouthed apologist, John Ryan is the sober, credentialed research director of Seattle-based Northwest […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Heard around the West
When birds fall from the sky as thick as snowflakes and a stunned moose splays itself over the hood of a car, does this portend something … weird? First, the phenomenon of the falling web-footed grebes: 3,000 of them plummeted to the snow-covered fields of central Utah apparently believing they were dropping safely onto bodies […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Agency hopes fees will protect a crowded wilderness
Desolation Wilderness in eastern California is one of those places that doesn’t come close to living up to its name. Its beauty, some say, is only matched by its crowding. Thanks to its accessibility from San Francisco (three-and-a-half hours away), Sacramento (two hours away), and Lake Tahoe (just a few minutes away), the wilderness is […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Drug smuggler’s ranch falls into public lands
CLARK, Wyo. – Stewart Allen Bost had a dream, he told his drug ring buddies while smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into south Florida in 1986. He wanted to own a ranch in Wyoming. So after retiring from the drug trade, he bought a secluded riverfront spread here, then guarded it and his […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Ben Nighthorse Campbell: A U.S. senator who shoots from the hip
He improvises more than he calculates.
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Will an elusive cat evade federal listing?
When a southern Arizona rancher recently cornered a black-spotted beast the likes of which he’d never seen before, he shot it with his camera. Turns out he’d found a jaguar – the largest cat in the Western Hemisphere and an animal that’s been seen north of the Mexican border only a handful of times in […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Oregon governor says volunteers can save coho
Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, an avid fly fisherman, has landed $30 million to restore coho salmon populations and clean up the state’s degraded streams. In late February, leaders of the legislature and the timber industry announced they would each chip in $15 million for the programs. With that, the Democratic governor ended an intense period […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Activist who survived bomb leaves a legacy
Judi Bari listened to a special call-in show on Mendocino County public radio Feb. 21, and said afterward that it sounded like a funeral eulogy – her own. The Earth First! activist had hosted a weekly “Punch and Judi” public affairs show at the station for years. Now, dying from inoperable breast cancer that had […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Montana Legislature ‘swirlies’ to the right
HELENA, Mont. – Montana’s Republican-dominated Legislature has taken such a sharp turn to the right, its critics say, that it will take moderate Republican Gov. Marc Racicot to keep it from going off the deep end. A slew of bills have been introduced that would weaken environmental protection or make citizen redress more difficult. A […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Dear friends
Like a moth Idaho storyteller and folk singer Rosalie Sorrels sang at Paonia’s Paradise (movie) Theater last week, and thanks to two Stupid Band sound engineers from Montrose, Colo., her voice was clear and powerful. Yet the setting was as intimate as a cabaret, and the audience of 70 or so seemed entranced. Sorrels sings […]