By focusing on the controversy of the Clinton, Bush and Obama years, Hal Herring allows us to forget that Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in ’73 (HCN, 5/30/11). The Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Team worked through Jimmy Carter’s term. Ronald Reagan was in office when the Recovery Plan was signed. George H.W. […]
A long and studied road
Posted inGoat
Subsidized crop insurance: the next ag boondoggle?
Over the past few weeks, the House of Representatives has been hacking away at the budget for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The dollars cut and kept in these negotiations set a baseline for the spending in the 2012 Farm Bill debate, and since the farm bill is the primary way agriculture policy is determined […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Western papers drop D.C. reporters
The Washington, D.C., office of the Salt Lake Tribune‘s Thomas Burr and Matt Canham resembles most newsrooms. A few pieces of art cling haphazardly to the walls; piles of paper spill from one reporter’s cubicle. It feels busy, even if it’s not nearly as lively as it was a few years ago, when 14 correspondents […]
Posted inGoat
Reclaiming TSCA, One Chemical at a Time
In 1976, when the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) passed Congress and grandfathered-in some 60,000 untested chemicals, any regulatory hold the EPA could have had on manufacturers slipped quickly from their fingers. Simply by the sheer volume of substances already used in the United States, the agency fell far behind on reviewing the chemical inventory […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Spring-cleaning the acequia: A photo essay
On an April morning in northern New Mexico’s upper Pecos Valley, before the sun lit the packed dirt streets of El Cerrito, Ricardo Patricio Quintana walked the irrigation ditch. He began above the first compuerta, a scrap-wood gate that lets water into one family’s field. Every six feet, he scuffed a mark in the dry […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Not as bad as it seems
IDAHO Whiny, weak and what you might call wussy are adjectives that characterize too many people in Idaho today, complains the Idaho Mountain Express, and even some elected officials admit they’re living in fear. What fills folks with such anxiety? Wolves — which, according to one legislator, are loitering at the mailbox, holding innocent women […]
Posted inGoat
Here comes Huntsman
Updated 6-21-11 Courtesy Twitter and the Huffington Post, we’d already heard former Utah governor, ambassador to China, fluent Mandarin speaker, businessman, climate change moderate and Mormon extraordinaire Jon Huntsman Jr. was going to throw his hat in the Republican presidential ring. And on Tuesday he did just that. Slate has the story on how the […]
Posted inRange
Montana has West’s least-populated counties
Recently I had occasion to write about a proposed 65th county for Colorado, and observed that California, with seven times as many people and half again as much area, manages with a mere 58 counties. I also speculated that Iowa might be America’s leader in “counties per capita,” since it had 99 counties for about […]
Posted inWotr
Princess for a Day
Once a year, A Family for Every Child, an Oregon-based nonprofit that works to place foster children in permanent homes, hosts its Princess for a Day fundraiser. For $50, participants get pampered and primped, glittered and gifted with goody bags and gowns and an elegant tea followed by ice cream sundaes and a dance with […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Lucy the Desert Cat
Among my most sulfurous and vitriolic Rants–those far too profane to grace this page–are those inspired by my family’s housecat, Lucy. Those of you who follow these Rants know that I live in wild country, at high elevation, with terrible weather, and surrounded by a spate of voracious predators of every stripe. This is hardly […]
Posted inGoat
The pulse of the river
For a journalist, sitting through last week’s conference on the Colorado River, hosted by the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado, was a great way to take the river’s pulse — to get a sense of how the river’s water czars, academic wonks, scientists and other minders are thinking about the basin’s […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Fire fight: Forest Service explores chemical retardant hazards
What’s worse for the forest: wildfires or the chemicals dropped from planes to stop them? The U.S. Forest Service tackles this question in its 370-page study of fire-retardants’ ecological impacts, released May 13. It’s a dilemma: Retardants kill fish, contaminate aquifers and fertilize noxious weeds, but unchecked fires destroy homes, wreck some habitats, ruin views […]
Posted inRange
Peak and Ecological Flows in Oregon
As western states face proposals to divert and allocate the last available surface water – winter and wet season water – a debate is raging over how much of that water must be left instream to keep our rivers and their tributaries ecologically dynamic and alive. The recognition that rivers need “peak flows” is a […]
Posted inWotr
The revolution will be motorized
Growing threats of violence; increasing rage; calls to restore liberty by throwing off unjust and unconstitutional government rule. The voices of the angry are loud, and they’re likely coming soon to a BLM Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service office near you. The issue that inspires this fury is closing roads through public lands. […]
Posted inRange
Are Indians and Westerners halfway to a lost decade?
Last week I wrote about how this economic crisis will impact Indian Country through the loss of government-funded jobs. Indeed, readers reacted to my commentary with two basic responses. One group said it’s time for Native Americans to get off the dole; another asked why tribes aren’t solving this problem on their own? But Indian […]
Posted inRange
Where’s the conservation?
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House “Navigating the Future of the Colorado River,” a conference held at the University of Colorado Law School last week, was filled with folks who have spent decades studying the river, interpreting the Law of the River (as the Compact of 1922 and many subsequent agreements are called) and […]
Posted inGoat
Antelope as indicators
When the first winter storms buried northeast Montana last November, the thousands of pronghorn antelope that spent the summer around the state’s border with Alberta and Saskatchewan started making their way south. Normally, they move into the north side of the state’s Milk River valley and find enough sagebrush sticking out of the snow to […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
The Las Vegas effect
On a recent visit to Las Vegas, Nev., I strolled along the Strip, checking out the extravagant casino hotels and ogling tourists from around the world who had come to gamble and be entertained. Popular shows included hypnotist magicians, Cirque du Soleil’s spinning acrobats, and four tuxedoed white Australians singing classic Motown hits. Vegas is […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Staying afloat on the flood
Lisa Jones aptly addressed all the causes of the “Flood of Ill Health” that has afflicted us since the water came (HCN, 5/16/11). I say “us,” as I have been around so long that the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold made me an “adopted” member in 1995, the year of my retirement. I still […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
State trust lands at a glance
Among publicly owned lands, state trust lands are an anomaly. Granted at statehood by the federal government, they run in patchwork patterns across the West, from the red Utah desert to the dense forests of Oregon. Their arrangement on the landscape is utterly arbitrary — generally, two square-mile sections, numbered 16 and 36 in every […]