Overstaying their welcome? A hot springs near a town of 200 in southwestern New Mexico was a popular picnicking and swimming area for locals before a horde of unwelcome guests arrived. Now, campers, vans and tents colonize the area near Glenwood for weeks at a time and many of the town’s residents call it an […]
Overstaying their welcome?
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Politics and threats keep cows on public land
Facing political pressure and rumblings of violence, the Forest Service retreated in late April from a plan to cut cows from 650 down to 100 on the 227-square-mile Diamond Bar grazing allotment in New Mexico’s Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses. Instead, it reduced Kit and Sherry Laney’s herd to 450 through Feb. 28, 1996. Forage […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Critics attack a snow job in Utah
Even though Salt Lake City is nearing the end of a four-year, privately financed, $7 million quest to host the Winter Olympic Games for 2002, the subject has barely surfaced in Utah. Yet a decision is imminent: On June 16 the International Olympic Committee will select from four cities, and Salt Lake and Quebec appear […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Wolves born outside the park
After an international journey, nine weeks in a chain-link pen, a trek over Montana’s Beartooth Mountains and the loss of her mate, a female wolf brought to Yellowstone National Park in January delivered pups near Red Lodge, Mont. “All of a sudden I heard a whimper, kind of a squeal, and there they were,” ” […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Dear friends
Semi-special Since several recent issues have been labeled “special” because of their long planning time and extra pages, we were loath to call this edition on the Endangered Species Act a special issue too. But as the publication date approached, pages filled with yet more dimensions of the story. So we compromised: no extra pages […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Heard Around the West
The terms of the engagement are clearly expressed in the West’s local papers, especially in the Casper Star-Tribune. This small but extraordinary daily, which tries to cover all 97,000 square miles of Wyoming, gives enormous space to local news, and at times, fills two or three broadsheet pages with letters to the editor. If the […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Armed, crazy and lost in the Wild West
Back in December, I covered some Western militia meetings as part of a nationwide report on the militia movement. In the wake of recent events, those gatherings have taken on a more sinister glow. What struck me at the time was that every person I randomly interviewed was a recent transplant to the Northwest. It’s […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A war of ideologies, with endangered species as weapons
Big Bill Rose, my brother Tom’s redheaded boyhood friend, works for Union Pacific and lives in a mountain canyon west of Denver. Tom and I were visiting him some years ago, and the talk came around to Two Forks Dam. This proposed behemoth, since canceled, would have flooded the nearby canyons and mountain villages. Bill […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Five states squirm as bull trout declines
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. What’s spotted, lives in pristine habitat on national forests and could put some loggers out of work if protected under the Endangered Species Act? No, it’s not that feathered denizen of the ancient forests, the northern spotted owl. It’s a […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Interior wants to kill a success
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. Ask a rancher in the West which he’d rather see traveling down the dusty road to his spread, a rattlesnake or a biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the rancher might just choose the snake. Many Montana […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Soft-path approach to saving species
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. “Hank Fischer: least popular man in Montana,” shouts a 1978 headline in High Country News. The Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife earned that label by fighting the federal Animal Damage Control and its use of compound 1080 to […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A full-court press to save ecosystems
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. Boulder, Colo. – Jasper Carlton, head of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, sits at a table in his suburban townhome, intently sketching a map of the Selkirk ecosystem in northern Idaho. “I spent time in those mountains for weeks on end […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A tough law meets tough foes
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. In his classic 1940s essay, “Round River,” Aldo Leopold made the case for conserving biological diversity: “saving all the parts’ of the natural world. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote. That […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. VANCOUVER, Wash. – Environmentalists chanted, “Habitat, habitat, have to have the habitat.” Some carried stuffed animals and paper fish. A straggly line of loggers dressed in prison garb marched past them, wearing buttons proclaiming “Property Rights ESA Hostage.” Inside the […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Idaho injunction lifted
A federal judge recently dissolved an injunction that threatened to halt many activities on six Idaho national forests in order to protect endangered salmon. The injunction had prompted angry protests in the forest-dependent community of Salmon, Idaho, earlier this year (HCN, 2/20/95). But U.S. District Judge David Ezra said a biological opinion released March 1 […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Who killed the cows?
On the night of April 14, rancher Tom Kelly says someone sneaked onto his ranch near Deming, in southern New Mexico, emptied a water storage tank, removed bolts from the legs of a windmill and shot 13 cows and seven calves dead with a high-velocity rifle. Kelly says his opposition to Interior Secretary Babbitt’s rangeland […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
The heat is on
Forest Service officials are under intense political pressure to reverse a decision ordering most of a rancher’s cows from the 227-square-mile Diamond Bar allotment on the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wilderness areas near Silver City, N.M. (HCN, 5/2/94). The agency told ranchers Kit and Sherry Laney to move 90 percent of their 660-cow herd off […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Will the bill’s authors please stand?
A memo to Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., shows lobbyists wrote most of a bill scaling back the Endangered Species Act. The Feb. 28 memo from Gorton aide Julie Kays says in part: “The coalitions delivered your ESA (Endangered Species Act) bill to me on Friday” I know you are anxious to get the bill introduced. […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone
Dear HCN: Regarding “Sinful Las Vegas’ (HCN, 4/3/95), I would like to ask why the predictable, banal cliché that Las Vegas is “sin city” can’t be abandoned. What is here is legal and above board. Are you suggesting other cities where gambling and prostitution are illegal are “sinless’? Come on. Las Vegas has about 1 […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Nevada’s grassroots are healthy
Dear HCN, Congratulations to Jon Christensen for his April 3 comprehensive Great Basin special edition and thank you for devoting the resources and energy to this project. It will surely encourage more thoughtful communication among all parties about the myths and challenges we face here. While I was flattered by Jon’s article on me, the […]