Will the new administration slow the gas boom, or speed it up?
Essays
Posted inWotr
Wherever you go, there you are
I lived alone in Paris for six months when I was 20. Technically, I had a roommate, an 80-year-old Frenchwoman who’d helped her father smuggle Jews out of the city during the Nazi occupation. She took in boarders to help pay the rent on her Latin Quarter apartment, and I was just one in a […]
Posted inWotr
Fire and ancient forests belong together
The first time I walked through the burned part of western Montana’s Lolo National Forest, smoke was still rising from its deep duff layer. It was a crisp bluebird October day in 2003, and I was leading a student monitoring team to document how the fire behaved as it raced through two different areas: the […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2009: Blood Quantum
The fine art of bureaucracy
Artists helped further a government agenda
Posted inWotr
Forest Service skips a chance to do things right
If you’re like me and can’t keep up with the Bush administration’s last-minute policy changes, you might have failed to notice a recent announcement by the U.S. Forest Service. In its rush to tie up loose ends, the Forest Service is hammering out new internal agency guidance documents, called “directives.” These directives guide the management […]
Posted inWotr
A tale of heartbreakin’ and asskickin’
He loved Silas. Then she kicked the tar out of him.
Posted inWotr
The wild we take for granted
Recently I was obligated to serve as a course official for a cross-country meet, which is a fancy way of saying that I got to spend a morning standing out in the drizzle on a golf course, waving young runners past. I was stationed at the end of a path that led through a grove […]
Posted inWotr
Hunting is the ultimate do-it-yourself experience
Garden-raised vegetables are probably the tastiest, and eating food raised from seeds you planted yourself always gives a deep sense of satisfaction. But nothing beats hunting for connecting you to the land. I came to this conclusion recently. Over most of my life, I equated hunting with killing, even though I was raised in Montana, […]
Posted inWotr
Obama picks a moderate
It’s not surprising that Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity and Jon Marvel of the Western Watersheds Project are disappointed in Barack Obama’s choice for Interior secretary, Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar. The two activists have tapped the federal courts for the last two decades in their efforts to stop overgrazing, logging and […]
Posted inWotr
The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
Posted inWotr
You better watch out, that’s for sure
I’m as sentimental about Christmas as the next guy, but after years of listening to the holiday carols and Christmas standards, I find some troubling messages embedded in those songs. At the heart of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for instance, is a small herd of really nasty reindeer. The song was written by an advertising […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
For the love of stuff
I don’t find most theistic versions of the afterlife compelling, but over the last few weeks I have become convinced that if there is a hell, it surely involves shopping for a car. After an epic quest, my wife and I finally decided on a 2-year-old Subaru, which will allow us to travel Wyoming’s wintry […]
Posted inWotr
This is the time to make land management make sense
The federal deficit is already gigantic, and it keeps getting bigger in order to stimulate the plummeting economy. But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. This is the perfect chance for the Obama administration to improve the way the federal lands are managed. Consider the big three land agencies: the Forest Service, the […]
Posted inWotr
Forest Service morale sinks to a new low
When Dave Iverson first came to the U.S. Forest Service’s regional office in Ogden, Utah, in 1980, he was drawn by a love for the outdoors and a desire to do good work on the public lands. But after spending almost three decades on planning and policy, he quit last year just shy of retirement. […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Change we could believe in
The federal deficit is already gigantic, and there’s serious talk of making it even bigger in order to stimulate the plummeting economy. But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. This is the perfect chance for the Obama administration to improve the way the federal lands are managed. At the moment, increased budgets for […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Trashing the earth, and the truth
This is the last time I will ever tell this story. For an environmental reporter, the past eight years have produced a jungle of topics to explore at will, but the lessons learned there could not have been more unpleasant. This is the story of one of those lessons. In April of 2004, Field and […]
Posted inArticles
A word in favor of rootlessness
The joys and perhaps necessary virtues of not settling down.
Posted inWotr
The perfect imperfect Christmas tree
I love going into the woods to cut my own Christmas tree. It’s not that I want to snub the Boy Scouts, who host a tree lot in town. I’ve spent a lot of time in those urbanized groves, searching for the perfect conical tree, and sampling hot chocolate. But a backcountry tree hunt is […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Methow Homecoming
Whenever I have few days to spare, I like to toss a sleeping bag and a fly rod and a few books into the back seat of my car and drive east, toward the mountains. It takes some time to shake free of the gravity of Seattle’s traffic, but once the strip malls start to […]