Last week, I was thrilled to find four sets of wolf tracks carved in the snow in our back pasture. Two nights previously, wolves killed a neighbor’s black Lab within 200 yards of the owner’s house. I feel bad about that dog. We have Labrador retrievers, too. When I let them out in the morning, […]
Idaho seems set on killing wolves
Posted inWotr
Oregon’s academic food fight in the cafeteria of ideas
It isn’t often an academic dean gets up in public and apologizes for participating in an effort to suppress the work of a graduate student. But that’s exactly what Oregon State University College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser recently did. “I profoundly regret the negative debate that recent events have generated,” he wrote in a […]
Posted inWotr
What price New Mexico’s sky?
When I moved back to New Mexico this summer, I did my best to contain my enthusiasm for a long-awaited homecoming. In short, I tried to avoid tangling memory with reality. New Mexico is often easier to love in the abstract. Despite its often idealized history — full of noble American Indians, a stern Georgia […]
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Is Brokeback Mountain about the West? Sort of
The movie Brokeback Mountain moved slowly through film festivals, winning raves, then on to limited release, and now it’s up for a pile of Oscars and is making wannabe Westerners think twice about wearing that Stetson. In Salt Lake City, theater-owner Larry Miller ramped up the rhetoric by canceling a showing at one of his […]
Posted inWotr
Hunters could free Yellowstone bison
You may have seen news photos of the massive, shaggy beasts that are a national totem, standing more or less complacently while hunters approach. Easy as one, two, three, the animals come crashing down. It’s an outrageous sight, but strangely acceptable — the first hunting of Yellowstone National Park bison in 15 years. The last […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Slaughter in Serene: The Columbia Coal Strike Reader
Slaughter in Serene: The Columbine Coal Strike Reader Lowell May and Richard Myers, ed. 196 pages, softcover: $19.05 Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center, 2005. workersbreadandroses.org, 303-433-1852 Coal mining has played a major role in the histories of most Western states, including Colorado. Slaughter in Serene tells the story of striking miners in the late […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures
John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison, ed. 272 pages, hardcover: $29.95 University of New Mexico Press, 2005. This new collection of essays, John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures, manages to break fresh ground in discussing the great naturalist. Historic photographs, sketches and excerpts from letters brighten the sometimes-scholarly essays, […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
The Colorado Plateau II: Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Research
The Colorado Plateau II: Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Research Charles van Riper III and David J. Mattson, eds. 352 pages, hardcover: $35 University of Arizona Press, 2005. Every two years, scientists gather to discuss the history, biology and geology of the vast Colorado Plateau, which sprawls across the Four Corners area. This book presents their […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Urban planning — with a wild touch
Feeling overwhelmed by pell-mell developments that consume the landscape of your community? Two new books suggest a remedy — a variety of innovative planning methods, illustrated with plenty of maps, diagrams and photos. Typical subdivisions are shaped around the “human context” — roads and schools, zoning, and the marketability of the lots and houses — […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Seeking peace in nuclear times
In Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir, former U.S. Marine Leonard Bird offers a personal account of nuclear war. His story shifts between Japan — the only place atomic bombs have been used in combat — to the pockmarked Nevada deserts that for 40 years were ground zero for the U.S. nuclear test program. Nearly […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Colorado State unveils organic ag program
Regarding the sidebar article entitled “Universities lag on organics” (HCN, 12/26/05: Universities lag on organics): I am a professor of soil science at Colorado State University, and, of course, it’s true that organic agriculture research is limited at land-grant universities, primarily due to funding limitations. But we are putting together a new interdisciplinary program in […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Washington state makes progress on organics
The article on organic agriculture clearly lays out the challenges and opportunities in this area (HCN, 12/26/05: A New Green Revolution). Although our universities are lagging behind growers and consumers, as pointed out by a sidebar, Washington State University is poised to offer an undergraduate degree in Organic Agriculture Systems as early as 2006. The […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Fair trade reduces illegal immigration
Over the years, HCN has published a number of articles on the issue of illegal immigration. There is a simple fix for this problem that would probably cost much less and be more effective than the current border protection or the proposed Berlin Wall on the Mexico-U.S. border (HCN, 10/31/05: Homeland security gets to bypass […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Forest Service needs more budget, not just volunteers
Michelle Burkhart points out that staff shortages in the national forests mean that citizens often step in to pick up the slack (HCN, 12/26/05: Where have all the rangers gone?). This is certainly true on Colorado’s Roosevelt National Forest (“co-managed” as one unit with the Arapaho National Forest and the Pawnee National Grassland, thus spreading […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Why are all the rangers deskbound?
Regarding the article “Where have all the rangers gone?” (HCN, 12/26/05: Where have all the rangers gone?): During my nearly 30-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, it was very disturbing to observe many dedicated professional wildland managers being forced to change from a situation where nearly all were in the field, managing the forest […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Lawmakers chop up renewable-energy fund
As the demand for renewable energy becomes palpable across the West, lawmakers have taken a bold step: They’ve slashed the U.S. Department of Energy’s budget for renewable energy programs and directed funding toward such projects in their own districts. In mid-November, Congress cut about $160 million from the Energy Department’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Judge orders litigating enviros to pony up
A federal judge is forcing environmentalists to back their challenge of a logging project with cold, hard cash. In November, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ordered a halt to logging on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, outside of Butte, after three environmental groups appealed the judge’s earlier decision to allow the 2,600-acre timber harvest. Then, on […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
First fatal wolf attack recorded in North America?
Conservationists have long assuaged the public’s fear of wolves by saying that there have been no documented instances of a healthy wild wolf killing a human being in North America. Until now, that is. On Nov. 8, a search party found the partially consumed body of 22-year-old Kenton Joel Carnegie in the woods of northern […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Congressional group plans for oil’s decline
Within the next 20 years, worldwide oil production will likely peak and no longer meet demand (HCN, 12/12/05: Final Energy Frontier). Now, some members of Congress are saying we need to prepare for life after that point. “We are going to peak, and we should be planning for it, and we’re not,” says Rep. Tom […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
The Latest Bounce
Pete McCloskey, the 78-year-old former Republican Congressman who helped write the 1974 Endangered Species Act, does not take kindly to having his handiwork messed with. So he’s rented a house in the district of Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., and is planning to run — as a Republican — against the anti-environmental crusader this November (HCN, […]