Nearly 400 West Coast forest activists who gathered in Ashland, Ore., last month were faced with a sobering civics lesson: Their foes in Congress and statehouses throughout the West had captured the populist high ground. The fourth Western Ancient Forest Conference, sponsored by the Ashland-based environmental group Headwaters, is an annual gathering of the forest […]
Forest activists retrench and grope for support
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Freed wolves roam up to 20 miles a day
Note: this article is a sidebar to a news article titled “From freedom to FedEx: Wolf B13 killed.” Fourteen remaining Canadian wolves released last month into a central Idaho wilderness are giving U.S. Fish and Wildlife trackers a run for their money. Two wolves have left Idaho and headed north into Montana. One was about […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
From freedom to FedEx: Wolf B13 killed
SALMON, Idaho – Just nine days after her release into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, a Canadian wolf found her way out of central Idaho’s maze of steep snow-covered mountains. Sixty air miles from where she had been set free, the wolf trotted straight into Gene Hussey’s cattle herd about 25 miles south […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Salmon campaign fractures over how to include people
SALMON, Idaho – Environmentalists ignited a firestorm in central Idaho by requesting a blanket injunction on all logging, mining and grazing on six national forests to protect endangered salmon habitat. U.S. District Judge Daniel Ezra of Honolulu, filling in for a sick Idaho judge, granted the injunction on Jan. 12, lighting the fuse. Within a […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Apaches send a signal to nuclear industry
Four years ago, Mescalero Apache Rufina Laws says, she dreamed of iridescent water streaming out of a mountain onto a meadow. It was radioactive, killing all it touched. That nightmare propelled Laws to wage a one-woman fight against a plan for a nuclear-waste storage site on the New Mexico reservation. Just about everyone, from public […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Dear Friends
Now playing at the Cheyenne Opera HCN poetry editor Chip Rawlins recently traveled from his home in the small town of Boulder, Wyo., to the Wyoming Capitol to take a peek at his tax dollars at work. To his amazement, Chip found himself watching an opera he thinks was called The Merchants of Menace. He […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Environmentalists and feds try to save Idaho’s rivers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry. You can’t have a healthy river without water. But it used to be state policy to choke off the Middle Snake at Milner Dam and divert all of its flow into irrigation canals. Some life […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
River purity is a new goal for all sorts offarmers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry. On a clear evening in the Magic Valley of southern Idaho, Don Campbell heads down a hill to check on his catfish. They’re enclosed in a group of raceways below his house overlooking the Snake […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
ARCO, Idaho – They stand like giant tombstones in a graveyard. Hundreds of black cottonwood trees – all dead or just barely hanging on – line the dry cobblestones of the Big Lost River. Charlie Traughber cusses state water authorities as he points out decaying groves of cottonwoods across the Big Lost River Valley. “Gawd, […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Taxpayers and the grizzly are getting gored
Dear HCN: Why is the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee supporting delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear? (HCN, 1/23/95). After 35 years of research on this population and the expenditure of several million dollars, there still is no reasonable population estimate for the Yellowstone grizzly or a scientifically defensible measure of what constitutes a recovered population. […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Really teed off
Dear HCN, I’ve had a bellyful of Ed Marston’s sappy romanticizing about the Western rancher (HCN, 12/26/94). I’m from a ranching family – my great-grandmother came out West in a covered wagon in 1846, and my grandfather homesteaded a ranch in Arizona in 1913 – and the way you Easterners buy into this “rugged individual” […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Why can’t both sides move a little toward each other?
Dear HCN, I enjoyed Ed Marston’s editorial in the Dec. 26 High Country News. I’m a (gasp) federal-land rancher in (gasp) Catron County, N.M., and write a weekly editorial in the Courier, which often bashes (gasp) enviro-preservationists. I’ve been active in working on the Catron County Land Plan in relation to water. I’ve watched each […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
A biased HCN board?
Dear HCN, I noticed that you now have at least three ranchers on your board of directors – Farwell Smith, Diane Peavey and Doc Hatfield. At least two out of the three are well known and outspoken advocates of public-lands grazing. Isn’t this just like the National Cancer Association having a couple of tobacco farmers […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Wolves gain support
The wolf is welcome in Colorado, say 70 percent of the respondents in a recent statewide survey. The study polled 1,452 residents and found that a majority on both sides of the Rockies support the reintroduction of the gray wolf. The results on the Western Slope surprised researchers, who had expected the region’s livestock industry […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Ranchers backed
Ranchers are struggling land stewards in the eyes of New Mexicans, a new poll has found. A University of New Mexico telephone poll found that only 33 percent of the respondents thought cows damage the environment, although 49 percent said environmental preservation should be the top priority of public-land management. Eighty percent contended that maintaining […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
It takes a thief
An eel-like parasite that devastated the lake trout population of the Great Lakes may one day swim in Yellowstone Lake. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it may consider introducing sterile sea lampreys to control invasive lake trout discovered there last summer (HCN, 9/19/94). “At at this point we’re not ruling out any proposals,” […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Idaho salmon suit angers locals
Setting off a firestorm of local protest in Idaho, a federal judge ruled Jan. 9 that the Forest Service should temporarily halt mining, grazing, logging and road-building activities on six national forests. U.S. District Judge David Ezra said that the agency had to stop all ongoing activities until it consulted with federal biologists about effects […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Race alarms public; methane project doesn’t
A much-hyped race through Utah’s canyon country has attracted record public comment – and exposed how difficult it is to get the public involved in managing public lands. “It’s frustrating,” says Dennis Willis, a recreation staffer in the Price, Utah, office of the Bureau of Land Management, which is doing an environmental assessment of the […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Behemoth sturgeon struggle to survive
At the turn of the century, horses were sometimes needed to haul 20-foot white sturgeon from Idaho’s Snake River. Today, fish behemoths like that are found only in historical photo archives, although nine-foot-long lunkers are known to survive. The story of the demise of America’s largest freshwater fish reads much like that of the Snake […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
New governor accepts nuclear waste
BOISE, Idaho – New Idaho Gov. Philip E. Batt broke with tradition Jan. 12 and agreed to accept a total of 11 railroad-borne casks of nuclear waste from the U.S. Navy during the next six weeks. In return, the Navy has promised to find a geologic repository outside Idaho “as quickly as practical” and transfer […]