I am compelled to respond to “Harvesting Poison” (HCN, 9/29/03: Harvesting Poison), as the article misrepresents what I said in my interview with the author. I did not say that every time I go out I see people spraying too close to unprotected workers. What I said was that every time I go out I […]
Misquoted on pesticides
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Farmworker protection agency misrepresented
“Harvesting Poison,” (HCN, 9/29/03: Harvesting Poison) failed to mention or accurately report the efforts of the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) to protect farmworkers from pesticide exposure. WSDA places a high priority on farmworker protection. For more than a decade, WSDA’s Farmworker Education Program has provided Spanish-language pesticide safety training to agricultural workers and […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Federal report supports Klamath farmers
Farmers in the Klamath Basin found vindication in a National Research Council report, released Oct. 21, which says the solution to Klamath’s protracted water struggles lies not in irrigation shutoffs but in sweeping repairs to an out-of-balance landscape. In 2001, federal biologists reserved so much water for fish farmers nearly rioted. But there is no […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Activists raise a stink over outhouse
In the latest skirmish over a long-disputed dirt road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Elko county-rights activists are fuming over the Forest Service’s decision to clean a remote outhouse. The county and the Forest Service have clashed since 1995, when the agency closed a 1.5-mile stretch of South Canyon Road after most of it was […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Park expansion threatened
A ranch that promised to be an important addition to Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills is now for sale on the open market. The 5,555-acre Casey Ranch would increase the park’s land base by 20 percent, and add an 85-year-old homestead and a “buffalo jump” — a cliff from which American Indian […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
State picks up federal slack on perchlorate
In late September, outgoing California Gov. Gray Davis signed two bills into law to protect drinking water supplies from perchlorate, a toxic chemical used in rocket fuel and explosives (HCN, 4/28/03: Cold War toxin seeps into Western water). It could be 2008 before the federal Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate, […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Follow-up
Just say “no” to greenhouse gases. New Mexico has joined the growing number of states that have sued the Environmental Protection Agency for weakening the federal Clean Air Act (HCN, 10/27/03: West Coast states tackle global warming). So far, 13 states, 20 cities and 14 environmental or public health groups have decided to fight the […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Heard Around the West
UTAH It must be nerve-racking to teach school in Salt Lake City, where, at any time, a person can legally walk into a classroom with a gun concealed in clothing or tucked into a backpack. But that’s state law, so what’s a school district to do? One state legislator pooh-poohs potential problems, advising teachers and […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
The West loses a conservation elder
Perhaps all showdowns between environmentalists and industry appear to be clashes of mythic proportion, but the unfolding story of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge seems particularly so, a world-class drama whose players include migratory birds, caribou, polar bears, native Alaskans, eco-activists, oil executives and politicians. The outcome of this mythic tale is yet unscripted. But […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
A grizzly attack that was bound to happen
One of the most egotistical notions humans have is that we can “commune” with unpredictable wild animals. News headlines over the last couple of weeks have revealed the depth of our folly. During Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas nightclub act, a tiger turned on trainer Roy Horn. Doctors say Roy remains in serious condition. And […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Amid smoke and sprawl, some success
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” It has taken six years for public officials in and around San Diego to acquire 30,000 acres of private land for a regional endangered species preserve. It took one week for almost 80 percent of that preserve to go up […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Vernal pools fall to a shopping mall
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” The first test of San Diego’s Multiple Species Conservation Program came little more than a year after it was passed. Cousins MarketCenters Inc. wanted to build a 453,000 square-foot shopping center and an apartment complex just north of downtown, on […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Behind the scenes, pressure and doubt
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” The Center for Biological Diversity and its allies weren’t the only ones who found serious problems with the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Program. Inside the Fish and Wildlife Service, two biologists, who have since left the agency, harbored private […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
It’s ‘bombs away’ on New Mexico saltcedar
State begins an aerial assault on a water-sucking weed
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
‘Restoration Cowboy’ goes against the flow
Dave Rosgen is popularizing the complex field of river restoration
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
On a new national monument, has an agency been cowed?
Can cows coexist with rare plant communities in a national monument? That is what President Clinton asked the Bureau of Land Management to determine when he created the 52,947-acre Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in 2000. The monument, east of Ashland, Ore., is an ecological crossroads where three distinct bioregions – the Siskiyou Mountains, the Cascade Range […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
A revival on Hart Mountain
The antelope refuge looks better than it has in decades, but managers seem stuck in the past
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Freaky Fridays with the Bush administration
Officials deliver bad news on the environment when no one is listening
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Dear Friends
Radio Special Radio High Country News will return to the airwaves in mid-November for a special one-hour show called “Atomic Tales: Living in the Nuclear West.” The program will explore our region’s cradle-to-grave relationship with all things nuclear — a relationship that reaches from the dawn of the nuclear age to the burial of radioactive […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Conservation in an imperfect world
In the three decades since it was signed into law, the Endangered Species Act has had some remarkable successes: Wolves have made a comeback in the Northern Rockies; bald eagles have rebounded. But the ESA is an imperfect tool. The endangered species list is often likened to the hospital emergency room, and the comparison is […]