Timber targets on Northwestern national forests fell again in the latest attempt to fine-tune the Northwest Forest Plan (HCN, 11/23/98). “Now we have four years’ experience in implementing the Forest Plan,” says Forest Service spokeswoman Patty Burel. “We’re finding some things need adjusting.” The reductions, announced in December, drop the timber targets on eight national […]
Timber takes a hit
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Heard around the West
We’re supposed to be getting fitter in America, but could it be we’re just getting fatter? In Seattle, Wash., the answer seems to be yes. Officials running the Puget Sound ferry recently reduced the seating capacity from 250 to 230 after finding that the bottoms of passengers had sprawled. The average width of a rear […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Giving voice to a Lakota history
It is hard to convey just how good this book is; it’s possibly the best book yet about the famous battle of the Little Bighorn. In Lakota Noon, Gregory F. Michno has gathered approximately 60 Indian narratives and produced a detailed reconstruction of the fighting. Individual warriors tell their stories through a chronological timeline of […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Beware Alaskans bearing gifts
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oh, impressed, are you, that Bill Clinton wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy more land for the public domain? Well, consider this: So does Don Young. No, the crotchety, conservative chairman of the House Resources Committee has not turned green, or at least not very green. The bill […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Affluent effluent stinks, too
BIG SKY, Mont. – For years, this posh resort community of 2,500 people leaked partially treated sewage into the pristine waters of the Gallatin River, the blue-ribbon trout stream in Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It. In 1991 alone, an estimated 47 million gallons of effluent seeped illegally into the groundwater that feeds […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
A question of photography ethics
It’s been said that a fed bear is a dead bear. So it was ironic when National Wildlife, the glossy, bimonthly publication of the National Wildlife Federation, illustrated portions of an article on efforts to save grizzlies with three photos of grizzly bears that allegedly had been lured into the photographer’s backyard with birdseed. The […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Dear friends
Goodbye, Linda For a decade, Associate Publisher Linda Bacigalupi – often called Linda B, for obvious reasons – has been the administrative heart of High Country News, ensuring that we operated in ways that were orderly, efficient and, most of all, humane. Nonprofits tend to chew up their staffs, and Linda did her best to […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘The concept is simple’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Earl McKinney, a retired BLM range conservationist, was an early participant in the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group. He is based in Carson City, Nev. “Riparian areas are super simple to recover. All you have to do is let them regrow a little bit. […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘I will try anything’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Rose Strickland is a member of the Public Lands Committee of the Sierra Club and co-author of How Not to be Cowed – Livestock Grazing on the Public Lands: An Owner’s Manual. She is not an official member of the Trout Creek Mountain Working […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘I was mocked and set up’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kathleen (Kathi) Simpson Myron, an artist from Canby, Ore., joined the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group members in 1988 as a representative of Oregon Trout. She left the group in 1994. “I got along fine until I became what they called a pushy broad […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
The ranch restored: An overworked land comes back to life
Note: in three sidebar articles accompanying this feature story, environmentalist Kathleen Simpson Myron, environmentalist Rose Strickland, and retired BLM range conservationist Earl McKinney give their perspectives in their own words. McDERMITT, Nev. – The Trout Creek Mountains of southeastern Oregon will never rank among America’s most magnificent peaks. Although beautiful in their way, the Trout […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Is there a market for tiny trees?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Flagstaff isn’t the first place to try its hand at manipulating forests. One southwestern Colorado county has already learned some hard lessons about restoration’s bottom line. Like the forests around Flagstaff, the ponderosa pine forests in Montezuma County, Colo., show the effects of fire […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘We need to get this stuff on the table’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Brett KenCairn is the coordinator of the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust this fall, he was the executive director of the Rogue Institute for Ecology and Economy in Ashland, Ore., and a board member of the Applegate Partnership, a […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘It’s really a sales program’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Henry Carey is the executive director of the Forest Trust, a nonprofit community forestry group based in Santa Fe, N.M.“The Forest Service is trying to get political support for a thinning program, but the fire problem is no more huge than it was 10 […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Flagstaff searches for its forests’ future
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It was June of 1996, and temperatures had already cracked the 100-degree mark all over the Southwest. The brief winter rains were a dim memory, the sky was cloudless, and ponderosa pine forests near this northern Arizona town were choked with dry underbrush and spindly trees. Forest Service firefighters geared up for […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Working the land back to health
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s two feature stories. The two major stories here open long after crushing environmental defeats occurred. The magnificent ponderosa pine forests around Flagstaff, Ariz., were heavily logged during the past century, and the cut-over land has now sprouted into fire-prone thickets. To the west and north, the once-healthy grasslands […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
More on mail pollution
Dear HCN, The following is a note I sent to Al and Betty Schneider upon reading of their efforts to get control of junk mail in my first issue of a new subscription to High Country News (a newspaper I’ve wanted to get for years but have just now gotten as a gift subscription). Al […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Enlibra is just window dressing
Dear HCN, James Souby’s letter in the Dec. 21 edition concerning the Western Governors’ Association “Enlibra” program is contradictory. On the one hand, Souby lauds the Oregon Salmon Plan as a “good example” of “environmental management strategies that incorporate balance and stewardship” while on the other he asserts “skepticism” that Enlibra-style “solutions’ would work “where […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Don’t give up
Dear HCN, As an eighth-grade science teacher, I empathize with “Asta Bowen’s discouragement (HCN, 1/18/99). At times, just one negative interaction with a student or parent can cast a pall over your whole day and cause you to wonder about your choice of occupation. Ours is a profession where the results often do not surface […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Pogo was right
Dear HCN, I found it ironic that three of the four folks opposing sprawl that Tony Davis chose to highlight in his sidebars in the Desert Sprawl article are, in fact, “sprawlers’ themselves. Whether they moved to the Catalina Foothills in 1946, watched the east side of Tucson expand from their home in the Tucson […]