In the remote mountain valley where I live in northern Washington, people are talking about two members of a local family who have been indicted by the federal government and charged with killing as many as five endangered gray wolves. A third member of the family is charged with conspiracy to smuggle a wolf pelt […]
Living the news, publishing every week
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Cruising the ocean, counting seabirds
The lone-flier screams, resistlessly urges the heart to the whale-way over the stretch of the seas.–“The Seafarer,” an Old English poem, author unknown At 120 feet wide and 951 feet long, the MS Golden Princess is nearly as big as an aircraft carrier. At 109,000 gross tons, she weighs more than one. She has 15 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Surfing on a shark
OREGON In the derring-do department, Doug Niblack certainly stands out: The surfer found himself standing on the back of a great white shark and lived to tell the tale. Niblack, who was surfing off the Oregon coast near Seaside, north of Portland, was paddling some 50 yards from shore when his board hit something that […]
Posted inGoat
Will Valles Caldera become a national park?
Around 3,000 elk, the second largest herd in New Mexico, spent the summer munching on Valles Caldera National Preserve grasslands before migrating to nearby Bandelier National Monument for the winter. A menagerie of other wildlife also stake claim to the collapsed volcano’s mountain forests: black bear, mountain lion, bobcat and 60 species of birds. A […]
Posted inWotr
At last, Yellowstone bison catch a break
Bison live to wander, but bison with the audacity to wander beyond the invisible northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park have long been chased back into the park, sent to the slaughterhouse or simply killed outright. Recently, Montana has been trying some new approaches, and this is a very good thing for North America’s only […]
Posted inRange
How coal is already congesting Washington’s railways
By Eric de Place, Sightline.org This post is part of the research project: The Dirt on Coal Washington’s rail system is congested in places. Adding dozens of coal trains each day, without also big new capacity improvements, could cripple the system with gridlock. All that is common knowledge. Less well-known is this: coal shipments are […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Washington’s Hanford Reservation and nuclear plant may lie on faults
Updated 11/7/11 “You’re going to see some really cool geology,” Brian Sherrod says, running his finger across the screen of his laptop in the cab of his pickup. Sherrod, a U.S. Geological Survey paleoseismologist with a salt-and-pepper mustache, tents his hands and interlocks his fingers, illustrating how seismic forces created the craggy hillsides and deep […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Why so defeatist?
“Getting weeds out of the national parks is an endless war that can never be won, but many Park Service employees are willing — and happy — warriors (HCN, 10/17/11, “Among the processes of place”).” This strikes me as rather biased. It is possible to remove invasive plants from many areas, or to keep them […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Unloved survivors
Rightfully enthralled with the Northwest’s magnificent cathedral-like old-growth forests, most people seem unaware of the existence of ancient species like the diminutive shrub Kalmiopsis leachiana (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). It inhabits an ancient hardscrabble wilderness home with other survivors of climate change, ice age and millennia. To me, the primordial genetic code […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
“Pristine” is in the eye of the beholder
Nice essay (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). I guess my only gripe with it is how “pristine wilderness” is defined. If pristine means that there has been no human influence, then there is no such thing, and hasn’t been for hundreds or thousands of years. But personally, I’ve always thought that pristine wilderness […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
It’s a perilous profession
Wildland settings make for terrible places to get injured (HCN, 10/17/11, “The golden hour”). Unfortunately, injuries often lead to death, as time becomes the killer. Nobody is to blame for this, and changing a pretty damn good system — that which is used by the U.S. Forest Service — will do no good, and could […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Clinging to wilderness, pristine or not
Yes, indigenous peoples in many regions, including Puget Sound, altered the landscape (HCN, 9/19/11, “The mirage of the pristine”). Pristine? Maybe not, but that is no reason to reject conservation. The reason I cling to scraps of wilderness, however fictional that term may be, is that they are irreplaceable. I spend a considerable amount of […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
A press of pessimists
A very timely article (HCN, 10/17/11, “Obama jam”). The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study this week showing unrelenting negative coverage of President Obama by the press. Though the context is the political race, the data is culled from thousands of sources mostly dealing with the day-to-day business of the […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
A truly burning problem
There’s a danger in praising journalism simply because it agrees with one’s preconceived notions, but I’ll take that risk. Your fire coverage in the Oct. 17 issue was terrific (HCN, 10/17/11, “A burning problem”). It’s such an important story. The graphic of state-by-state comparisons was particularly useful. I’ve been so preoccupied with New Mexico, especially […]
Posted inGoat
‘Wilderness Lite’ wins the day
One of the last decades’ most scintillating (that is, in the headachey confusing sense evoked by scintillating scotoma) enviro-legal ping-pong matches may finally be drawing to a close. On Friday, a three-judge panel at the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver effectively reinstated the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned new road […]
Posted inWotr
Elouise Cobell, rest in peace
updated Oct. 26, 2011 It is the rare person who gets to be enshrined in the pantheon of heroes. I remember the Herblock cartoon that came out the day after Dwight Eisenhower died. It showed acres of white crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, with the caption: “Pass the word, it’s Ike.” Across Indian Country this […]
Posted inGoat
The hazards of nonhazardous coal ash
The morning of December 22, 2008, is etched into my journalistic memory. I was visiting my family back East and, with little to do other than surf the Interwebs, I had decided to join a new microblogging site called Twitter. I started following a number of environmental journalists and soon noticed that my feed was […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Obama message control blocks journalists covering the environment
The conversation should have been easy: An interview about renewable energy on public lands with a federal official I know and trust, the rare bureaucrat who can spin administrative drudgery into a good yarn. But I soon sensed I was wasting my time. For there was another person on the line, too, one whose job […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Taking scissors to a dam
CALIFORNIA Everybody agrees: The 47-year-old, silt-choked Matilija Dam in Southern California needs to come down. Since 1998, Ventura County officials have discussed all the ways this might happen, though nothing ever has. Apparently fed up, unknown monkey-wrenchers recently spray-painted a giant scissors and a dotted line indicating where to cut on the face of the […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Pipeline of political posturing
Letters are flying as congressional lawmakers look to send a persuasive final word to the State Department on the Keystone XL Pipeline project in its final hour of debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., spoke for the first time against the project in an Oct. 5 missive, but 22 House Democrats signed a letter […]