-It is better to conquer yourself than win a thousand battles.” “The Buddha. The Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico’s Carson Forest will hold three eight-day meditation retreats from August through September for environmental and social activists. Not for networking or strategizing, these retreats provide silence, meditation training and spiritual renewal for a limited number […]
Retreat
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Take a seat
By the beginning of the 1996 school year, the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Public Affairs will choose a professor to hold the Timothy E. Wirth Chair in Environmental and Community Development Policy. The chair honors the former Colorado senator who is currently undersecretary of state for global affairs, appointed by President Bill Clinton. […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Stirring things up on the Colorado River
As a media event, the Grand Canyon spring flood of “96 was a roaring success. On cue from the Today Show, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt turned a wheel, pushed a button, pulled a lever and opened the first of four jet tubes to send Lake Powell water downstream into the Grand Canyon. Whether the flood […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Forest Service Economics 101
It seemed an offer the Forest Service couldn’t refuse: The government gets the best price for its timber, and the buyer never cuts down any trees. Yet on March 21, the agency rejected an environmental group’s high bid of $28,875 for 275 acres of fire-damaged trees in the eastern Cascades of Washington near the Canadian […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Indian gaming still in legal muddle
States and tribes fighting over Indian gaming were looking to a U.S. Supreme Court case, Seminole Tribe vs. the State of Florida, to clarify the future of the contentious, $4-billion-a-year industry (HCN, 4/1/96). Instead, legal experts are hailing the March 27 ruling as a clear victory for states’ rights but an unclear directive for Indian […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Utah wilderness proposal rises and dies
The Utah wilderness bill is dead again, but not without a struggle. In mid-March, Alaska Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski sent the Utah delegation’s controversial plan opening 2 million acres of southern Utah to development on to the Senate as part of an omnibus parks bill. The bill linked wilderness designation of 1.2 million acres in […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
For further reading
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Princeton University Press, 1982. World Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Holt and Co., 1995 New Mexico Vegetation: Past, Present and Future, William A. […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Sid Goodloe
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “Allan Savory said it best when he said we’re grass farmers and not animal ranchers. But I would say that much more emphasis has been put on breeding animals than on proper care of the range. Ranchers are […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Dance with a cow, and the cow will lead
In 1985, in mid-career, I went back to college. I wanted to be a range conservationist. At the time, I thought I was the only student who wanted to study range management so I could later have an excuse to chase cows on government time. Silly me. Even at granola-crunching, holistically groovy Humboldt State in […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Heard around the West
In North Dakota, when they say extension agents have contacts in high places, they aren’t talking about the halls of North Dakota State University. They’re talking about heaven. Flood-prone Devils Lake, N.D., has inundated thousands of acres in recent years. When an uncharacteristically warm spell caused an anxiety outbreak among local residents last month, extension […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Can Southwest activism and money coexist?
They lobbied. They staged sit-ins. They crashed town hall meetings. They chained themselves to trees. They scrounged for pennies and sued every despoiler of public lands they could find. The guerrilla tactics of the Southwest’s disparate environmental activists have worked. They have contributed to an enormous decrease in logging in the region’s 11 national forests: […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Democrats gag on bitter budget pills
WASHINGTON – How strange have things gotten in negotiations over the 1996 budget? Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveiled an ambitious 1997 budget last month even though his department doesn’t have one for 1996. “This is surely the most unusual budget year in the history of our nation,” Babbitt said. He accused Republicans of “misuse and […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
A very large subdivision riles a very small town
BIG HORN, Wyo. – Residents of this unincorporated township stared bug-eyed at the lead story in the afternoon paper nearly two years ago. “700 homes planned for subdivision,” the 72-point headline read. Disbelief reigned; seven hundred homes could mean 2,100 people. Big Horn, which doesn’t even have paved streets, barely had 400 residents. But it […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
‘Two weeks of hell’ saves a stand of old-growth trees
Six years ago, Francis Eatherington fought to keep loggers out of a roadless area in western Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest. A seasonal employee for the Forest Service, she felt passionately about the area’s 1,000-year-old trees and the spotted owls and runs of salmon and steelhead they harbored. With the help of a lawsuit, she and […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Utah’s Burr Trail still leads to court
A tentative cease-fire over the management of southern Utah’s Burr Trail ended abruptly Feb. 13 when a Garfield County road crew bulldozed a hillside inside Capitol Reef National Park. Garfield County officials say it was “just something that had to be done” to maintain the “county-owned” road. But Terri Martin of the National Parks and […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Dear Friends
Hello, uh, fire department Pastures smudged with black ash, fast-rising billows of smoke visible from miles away, these are the signs that signal spring in this medium-altitude (5,600 feet) mountain valley. “Burning ditch” is an annual rite here, followed in more than a few instances by emergency calls to a town’s volunteer fire department (-Come […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Stephen Pyne
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “As I read the record, there were grasses everywhere in the Southwest linking all its different environments. Even ponderosa pine was more of a savanna than a forest. The grass provided the interstitial medium, and that’s what carried […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Experts line up on all sides of the tree-grass debate
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead If only Sid Goodloe had confined himself to his six or so square miles of private property. Then his would be a straightforward story about the rejuvenation of a piece of exhausted land. But Goodloe doesn’t stop at […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Raising a ranch from the dead
For almost four years I have been biting down on Sid Goodloe’s story as though it were a suspicious gold coin. I have also been telling bits and pieces of it to audiences, testing ideas I wasn’t ready to put on paper. Putting it on paper meant confronting the audacity and complexity of Goodloe’s story, […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Tribe fights salvage logging
Tribe fights salvage logging An Indian tribe has jumped into the legal fray surrounding the salvage-logging rider signed by President Clinton last summer. The Klamath Tribes of southern Oregon filed a lawsuit March 13 against the Forest Service, charging that the federal government has shirked its responsibility to preserve traditional hunting and fishing grounds. When […]