“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 […]
Why so defeatist?
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Times are tough all over
It’s a crying shame how rich people are being treated these days. You hear a lot about their sufferings daily, especially if you read The Wall Street Journal. If black sharecroppers hadn’t invented the blues down there on the Mississippi Delta a hundred years or so ago, hedge-fund managers and bank CEOs would be coming […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Life as a fire lookout
Once upon a time, I had a pretty sweet gig at the Wall Street Journal, editing stories about sports, wine, theater, pop music, photography, painting and opera. Every month or so, I reviewed a novel or profiled a jazz musician. The daily “Leisure & Arts” page was a quiet, civilized little backwater, largely untouched by […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado ski town zombification
In the last two months, I have been to three different “ski towns” in Western Colorado: Crested Butte, Vail, and Aspen. Each visit was my first and I approached the towns not with delusions of community-rich grandeur but with half-formed preconceptions based on my experiences in Montana’s resort communities, which tend to embrace the summer with […]
Posted inWotr
The foul air outside my window
I think it’s fair to say that most of the Washington, D.C., politicians attacking clean-air safeguards don’t have the same view out their front windows as the families in my small community of 300 people. We look out on four polluting smokestacks, a small mountain of coal ash, and seeping wastewater ponds. All are part […]
Posted inRange
Rhetoric around wolves clouds reality
If you only believed what you read in the papers, blogs or bumper stickers, you might think that hunters in the northern Rockies are revving up for a war on wolves. But when you look at hard numbers, the picture is quite different. Biologists have taught us that looks can be deceiving and unquestioned prejudices […]
Posted inGoat
Tea Party goes local
Pam Stout’s first brush with fame came in the spring of 2010 when, after appearing in a New York Times story about the rise of the Tea Party, David Letterman invited her on his show to explain the movement. “I know nothing about the Tea Party,” he said at the outset of the interview. Stout went […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Lack of medical care on the firelines endangers firefighters
When the three young firefighters first appeared at the Dutch Creek trailhead in California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest, veteran crew boss Tim Bailey felt uneasy. Their green protective chaps were a little too clean, and their chainsaws looked practically unused. But despite their apparent inexperience, the tree-felling crew from Washington’s Olympic National Park was gung-ho, recalls […]