Domestic sheep and bighorn sheep don’t mix. Or at least they shouldn’t, say most biologists. The tame sheep tend to infect their wild cousins with fatal pneumonia. In Idaho’s Payette National Forest, the Forest Service has even banned grazing in areas where flocks might encounter bighorns (see our story Sheep v. Sheep). Recent developments have […]
A woolly problem
Posted inGoat
Unprecedented poaching in California
According to officials at the California Department of Fish and Game, the illegal sale of wildlife and “wildlife parts” generates something like $100 million per year — and it’s going up, as hard economic times have forced the state to cut back on game wardens. Only 230 wardens regulate 159,000 square miles of land, including […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Rise up swinging
Northern Cheyenne boxer Duran “Junior” Caferro takes on challenges inside the ring and out
Posted inGoat
Is humanitarian aid really “littering”?
In summer, the southern Arizona desert is among the most merciless environments on earth. Temperatures spike at 120 degrees. Shade is scarce. Each year hundreds of undocumented migrants die trying to walk north from Mexico. The grisly accounts of survivors and the quickly-mummified evidence on the ground suggest that a cooked brain and water-starved sensory neurons […]
Posted inArticles
Urban Creeks 2.0
In San Francisco’s East Bay, activists try to reconnect impoverished communities with their local waterways.
Posted inGoat
Sunshine and water
The solar-electric generating systems in my area are “photo-voltaic.” When photons from the sun strike certain materials, they give off electrons, which are then channeled to the electric grid. There’s another way to generate electricity from sunshine: Concentrate the solar rays to heat a fluid that in turn boils water, resulting in steam […]
Posted inWotr
It’s time to reduce the West’s ATV carnage
At least 24 people have been killed in all-terrain-vehicle accidents in the West since mid-March, the onset of warm riding weather. A 9-year-old girl in Arizona was among them. So were a 10-year-old boy in California, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy in Utah, and 16-year-old girls in Wyoming and Arizona. One especially noticeable ATV wreck occurred […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Rebooting Urban Watersheds
Activists restore blighted Bay Area creeks — and impoverished communities
Posted inHeard Around the West
The love that shall not be named
Kelley Coffman-Lee is a vegan who likes tofu so much she wanted her license plate to proclaim it to the world: ILVTOFU. Not acceptable, reports the Denver Post; the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles bans “FU” altogether, even with “TO” placed in front of it, because “FU” so often refers to something entirely different from […]
Posted inGoat
Whoosh! Down it comes!
I spend a fair amount of time at the HCN office reading online news, and writing blogs like this one. It’s easy, when surrounded by abstractions, to feel a little bit cut off from what makes things work around here in Paonia. One quick antidote to that feeling is to go down to the river on my […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Visitors going and coming
On his way out of town, Nick Berling stopped into HCN‘s headquarters in Paonia, Colo. He had just quit his job on a local farm and was Boulder-bound — picking up the books again to study environmental engineering at the University of Colorado. Nick is an avid skier and an artist. While hunting for property […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Old trees, new ideas, and humility
Old Growth in a New World:A Pacific Northwest Icon ReexaminedThomas A. Spies and Sally L. Duncan, eds.344 pages, softcover, $32.00.Island Press, 2009. Many of this book’s 28 authors are the usual suspects — Jerry Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas, Tom Spies and other experts on the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. In Old Growth in […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Forestry from the inside
The Forester’s Log: Musings from the WoodsMary Stuever264 pages, softcover: $24.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Forester Mary Stuever started writing newspaper columns “to share my love for forests and my passion for my chosen profession.” It’s a profession that has changed dramatically during the last 25 years, and in her new collection, The Forester’s […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
California prepares for the next burn
Officials — and homeowners — start to accept the inevitability of wildfire
Posted inWotr
This wilderness bill is a homespun vision for the West
Growing up in Montana, we always heard about national forests as places of “multiple use.” When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, that meant everything from hiking and backpacking to hunting, grazing, selective logging, fishing and catching glimpses of wild animals. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, however, we saw more and […]
Posted inWotr
Why I say “no” to a regional wilderness bill
Wyoming folks are cantankerous souls, with independent notions about where they can go and what they ought to be able to do when they get there. We love wild country, but a lot of us also love our four-wheelers, snowmobiles and four-wheel drive pickups. We don’t have anything against drilling, logging or grazing on the […]
Posted inGoat
No entrance fees
OK, so the Park Service didn’t put out a press release about how they’ll start allowing certain firearms in parks. But thankfully, they put one out about a few fee-free weekends this summer. That’s right, you won’t pay to enter “America’s Best Idea” on these weekends: June 20-21, July 18-19 and August 15-16. U.S. Interior […]
Posted inGoat
Mixups over tribal IDs
From Walmart to the U.S.-Canadian border, Indians are encountering problems with their tribal IDs — partly due to new laws which went into effect June 1, partly due to bureaucratic glitches, and partly because of the ongoing failure of the U.S. government to treat Native Americans fairly. HCN reported on this problem in a story […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
States rev up ORV rules
Western legislation aims to curb off-roading problems