Dear Ed, You won’t, or probably you will, believe what’s currently happening in the West: Too many of us, a commercialized landscape “- all your worst predictions have come true. We’ve finally caught up with your predictions, your “good news.” Armed militias call the West their home – white-guy losers in Montana and Idaho who […]
Letter to Edward Abbey from Earth: A Review
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Farmers feel burned by clean air regs
Eastern Washington, with its rolling hills and mid-size cities, seems like a place where farmers and urbanites should easily coexist. But not in late summer, when farmers burn bluegrass fields to clear stubble and stimulate seed production. The conflict is most intense in Spokane, where clean air activists have long claimed that the clouds of […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Can cattle save the pygmy rabbit?
The idea is heresy to some and it sounds odd coming from a wildlife biologist, but Fred Dobler is insistent: Cattle grazing might save the pygmy rabbit. The shy, nocturnal cousin of the cottontail is an endangered species in Washington and exists on isolated chunks of sagebrush-shrub steppe in just one county. “Grazing might be […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Attempt at compromise leads to bloodbath
The Endangered Species Coalition, an umbrella group of over 100 organizations, just threw out one of its own. In mid-April, the Coalition booted the Environmental Defense Fund and severely reprimanded the Center for Marine Conservation and the World Wildlife Fund. Their offense? Some members of these groups had been holding secret meetings with industry leaders, […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Dear Friends
A confusing season We realize it’s spring when an April day combines snow flurries, afternoon rain and thunder, intermittent sun and evening temperatures in the twenties. And the next morning the grass grows even greener. On this town’s main street the look of the season is layered with the one constant: muddy boots, for this […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Erasing the Southwest’s grandest vista
It was Barry Lopez who said that one of the dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. Until the 1970s, when air pollution from California, Mexico and coal-fired power plants in the region began to limit visibility, the […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Heard Around the West
A new logic is unfolding in Montana: If too many quality-of-lifers find your state attractive, get really, really unattractive. The much-publicized stakeout of the Freemen and the arrest of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski have helped Montana step off its pedestal as the compulsory destination for those Americans who can lay claim to a laptop computer, […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Yellowstone’s wintertime blues
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A park boss goes to bat for the land. Summer visitors aren’t the only ones on the increase in Yellowstone: the number of tourists arriving to see Yellowstone’s ice-crusted trees, virginal snowfields and clouds of hot-spring steam are skyrocketing as well. Four winters ago, […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Noranda stirs up a swarm of opposition
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A park boss goes to bat for the land. While Crown Butte Mining Inc. already owns patented land within the Gallatin National Forest, it needs additional land for its mill and waste rock. That need has set into motion the National Environmental Policy Act, […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
A park boss goes to bat for the land
MAMMOTH, Wyo. – In late October, during the short lull between the traffic jams of summer and the snowmobile crowds of winter, the world’s oldest national park breathes a short sigh of relief. Only a few visitors climb the steaming mound of hot springs that looms above park headquarters here, and a herd of elk […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
About those buff bird-watchers
Dear HCN, While it was certainly entertaining to read that “naturalists’ go to the park to nap in the nude (Heard around the West, March 18) – and perhaps quite true – I can’t help but suspect that you meant “naturists’ instead. What characterizes most of the naturalists I know is not so much an […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Agencies help fossil collectors
Dear HCN, We appreciate the attention that High Country News recently gave to fossil ownership, but first, we need to point out that part of the nation’s fossil legacy also occurs on land administered by the Forest Service. The Forest Service has been managing fossil localities for years on a case-by-case basis, and began developing […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Dem bones are your bones
Dear HCN, The story “Who owns these bones?” (HCN, 3/4/96) addresses a timely and important issue prompted by recent introduction in Congress of the “Fossil Preservation Act” by Reps. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., and Joe Skeen, R-N.M. The proposed legislation requires clarification. Your article states that, under the new law, “commercial and amateur collectors would be […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
The dam complicates everything
Dear HCN, The jet tubes of Glen Canyon Dam have been opened, the dye dumped, the posturing of politicians and politician-scientists is over. As I write this, a bunch of real scientists are down in Grand Canyon poking, prodding and monitoring the Colorado, its beaches and residents to determine if this “flood” will restore a […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Last chance for wetlands
Is the marsh in your neighborhood in danger of being bulldozed for a strip mall? In fast-growing Washington state, where experts estimate 33 to 50 percent of wetlands has been lost, that scenario isn’t farfetched. But the Washington Wetland Network (WETNET), founded by the Seattle Audubon Society, can help. WETNET is composed of more than […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Gold medal watchdog
To ensure that “environmentally and socially responsible choices’ are exercised in the planning of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Ivan Weber has founded the Olympic Watch League (OWL). Weber is a member of the environmental advisory board to the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, but he warns that environmental issues are not […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Rendezvous at Cove-Mallard
The Cove-Mallard logging area in central Idaho, scene of protests and arrests, may attract 500 people for this year’s Earth First! Rendezvous, June 30 through July 7. The event marks the group’s fifth year of campaigning to save trees in the largest roadless area in the lower 48 states. Mike Roselle, one of Earth First!’s […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Malpractice as usual
Taxpayers are paying the price because Forest Service officials in California handed out timber contracts without adequate environmental reviews, according to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Business As Usual: A Case Study of Environmental and Fiscal Malpractice on the Eldorado National Forest describes how top managers weren’t penalized […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Christensen goes quarterly
In the maiden issue of Great Basin News, editor and publisher Jon Christensen lays out the mission: “We believe the time is right to bring the Great Basin together to understand itself, to relish its own iconoclastic visions, to ponder its own quirky fate. You might consider this a test of that idea.” Christensen, who […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Stop the flooding
The devastating floods that swamped Oregon early this year could be reduced in the future by restoring former wetlands and woodlands in the Willamette River floodplain. That’s the conclusion of a study commissioned by River Network, a Portland, Oregon-based conservation group. The 60-page study, written primarily by Kevin Coulton of Philip Williams & Associates, an […]