The Insightful Sportsman: Thoughts on Fish, Wildlife and What Ails the Earth, by Ted Williams. Camden, Maine: Down East Books, 1996. 299 pages, $14.95 trade paper. “The hard thing about writing real conservation pieces is not finding material, but finding editors who dare to publish it consistently,” says Ted (Edward French) Williams in his preface […]
Outdoor writer aims to change his culture
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Venison is not an option
Mule deer don’t just wander through the Boulder, Colo., neighborhood where I live. They drop fawns in our backyards. They browse on almost everything. In Table Mesa, surrounded by open space, it’s a love-it-or-leave-it situation. Don’t like Odocoileus hemionus eating your garden? The solution is simple: move. Venison is not an option. When I moved […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Heard around the West
Virtual relationships? They’re all the rage. But over at the San Francisco regional office of the Forest Service, leaders of the forester team fret. In a nutshell, nobody talks shop face to face; the preferred method of communication is computer e-mail. So the team leaders sent a message – by e-mail, of course: On the […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
An unabashed green’s snapshot of Northwest forest activism
Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat, and Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign Kathie Durbin. Seattle, Washington: The Mountaineers Books, 1996. 303 pages, illus.; foreword by Charles Wilkinson. $24.95 hardcover. In 1993, Northwest environmentalists were fractured over President Clinton’s Northwest forest plan. While the plan seemed to save millions of acres of old-growth forests, Clinton wanted […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Oregon’s ranchers vote for survival
From the start, it was easy to see that the meeting on a bleary January 1994 day in Albuquerque, N.M., would go nowhere. The purpose was to look for a compromise, but four New Mexico environmentalists and ranchers spent most of the time hurling barbs at each other. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Gov. Bruce […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
‘Un-logging’ the national forests? It might just happen
Should conservation groups be able to buy federal timber just so they can leave it standing? Three environmental organizations recently posed that question in a formal petition to the Secretary of Agriculture, whose department oversees the Forest Service. Currently, the Forest Service designates only logging outfits as “responsible bidders’ on tree sales. But with their […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Lawns and pools close in on desert lab
Tumamoc Hill, Ariz. – When the Carnegie Institution established its desert laboratory on this stony, black basalt hill 94 years ago, some 12,000 residents lived in the small town of Tucson two miles to the east. Today Tucson has grown to almost half a million people, and Sunbelt sprawl threatens the future of one of […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
‘Good’ rancher goes berserk with an assault rifle
MEETEETSE, Wyo. – A rancher known here as a good steward of his land has been charged with illegally firing on a herd of elk with an assault rifle Jan. 16, leaving at least 10 animals either dead or crippled. Game wardens say they cannot recall another slaying of so many big game animals all […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Nuclear dump could waste the Colorado, foes say
WARD VALLEY, Calif. – Through the chill of winter and 120-degree heat in the summer, activists have camped for the past 16 months among the lizards, cacti and creosote of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: To stop California from building a low-level nuclear dump in this long, desolate valley. At times, this protest on a […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Wilderness has a new foe: snowmobiles
SEELEY LAKE, Mont.- The February drizzle has done little to dampen the spirits of the crowd here for the Snowmoblivious festival. Snowmobile aficionados from as far away as Washington and Colorado bounce along the shoulders of the main street and buzz through the woods on groomed trails. “We’re out with the whole family,” says one […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Dear friends
Heaven-o … Kissy lives! Stories here and elsewhere about a south Texas county that decided its employees should answer the phone with a spritely “HEAVEN-O” were tough on those who picked up the phone. It rang a lot. We were among those who called Kleberg County to see how the anti-HELLo greeting was going, and […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
What happens when two tree-huggers meet a tentful of hunters
Last November, I joined Nez Perce tribal biologist Timm Kaminski on one of his difficult “hunter education” trips into the southern Bitterroots on the Idaho-Montana border. His job: to walk into tents of heavily armed hunters and tell them about the possibility of wolves showing up in the woods. He has to ask hunters questions […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
The NRA’s powder may be getting damp
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If the Wildlife Legislative Fund of America uses sportsmen to advance a pro-development agenda at the expense of habitat, the National Rifle Association uses them to advance a pro-gun position. But hunters are apparently wising up, at least to the NRA, and that may […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
The WLFA: ‘Who are these guys?’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When Tony Jewett first heard that the late Mollie Beattie, at the time U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, was trying to ban hunting in the nation’s wildlife refuges, he became alarmed and outraged. The news came in a 1993 “alert” from the Wildlife […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Tough love for hunters
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Before coming to Outdoor Life, Stephen Byers worked for Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. Since his highly publicized resignation from Outdoor Life last summer, he’s been writing a novel and shopping “ever so selectively” for another top editorial slot. Byers talks about his days […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Hunters close ranks, and minds
In a few states it is still legal to attract bears with bait for the purpose of shooting them. I call it “garbaging for bears,” and, as an avid hunter, find it repulsive – basically assassination. But this is not an article about garbaging for bears. It is an article about the slow, painful maturation […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Alien invasions
The aliens have landed and they’re killing the natives. It may sound like the plot of a bad movie, but it’s real life: Alien species threaten the survival of native plants and animals across the country. In the report, America’s Least Wanted, The Nature Conservancy has named the 12 most threatening invaders of our nation’s […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Go native
Native plants are enjoying a new celebrity with Western gardeners, landscapers and conservationists. But just what makes a plant a native? Art Kruckeberg, a botanist at the University of Washington and a founder of the Washington Native Plant Society, says the short answer is this: Natives are plants that were here before European contact. The […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
The houses that HUD built
On the Tulalip Indian Reservation in Washington state, taxpayers’ money administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development built a 5,300-square-foot home for a couple making $92,000 a year. That mansion soon became a symbol of excess for a five-part Seattle Times series in December documenting tribal housing scandals. Because of deregulation of […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
This trip’s to the pits
It’s not exactly the Grand Canyon, but your next Arizona vacation could include the enormous crater of an open-pit copper mine. ASARCO Inc. ow offers bus tours of its Mission Mine near Tucson, hauling visitors to an overlook of the two-mile-long, 13’4-mile-wide hole deep enough to hide a 100-story building. Tourists can also see “the […]