CLEARWATER NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho – Forest Service ranger Art Bourassa pulls off to the side of the road and looks up at a raw and broken hillside. Some might assume it’s the freshly scalped victim of a strip-mining operation. Not this time. Torrential November rains washed out this section of forest in northern Idaho. At […]
Wildlife
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hunting: Get used to it
Let me state right off and as unapologetically as possible that I am a member of the “hook-and-bullet” press – a field editor of the venerable Outdoor Life magazine, which along with its sister publication, Field & Stream, are America’s original conservation magazines. Both have been in business since before the turn of the century, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Agency chooses death
Killing is the method most frequently used by the federal government to control livestock predators such as coyotes, lions and bears, according to a recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Although guidelines for Animal Damage Control staff require them to consider non-lethal methods of control first, federal investigators found […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Bird Brains
-If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” * Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, c. 1880s Like coyotes, some members of the crow family have long been considered vermin. Scruffy crows steal crops; ravens rip into garbage; magpies and jays steal eggs and nestlings from “innocent” […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands
(Note: this article accompanies another feature story in this issue, Utah hearings misfire.) When Utah’s congressional delegation announced almost a year ago that it would introduce a bill designating BLM wilderness, environmentalists in the state were shocked. They knew they faced a potentially disastrous alignment of political planets: Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
How to influence Congress on just dollars a day
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands. Ray Wheeler, who has a history of determination that includes hiking nearly all the way across Utah, climbed on a jet in Salt Lake City last July 12, bound for the nation’s halls of power. […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A few modest principles to help us manage Utah’s public lands
It wasn’t every day that I got to speak at a chamber of commerce meeting, so I tried to be careful. But I must have shown a bit too much green or too many urban mannerisms, and one member of the audience came rushing over almost before I’d stopped talking. In seconds we were going […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A monumental clash of values over Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands. Utah’s proposed BLM wilderness areas feature heart-stopping scenery: big rivers booming in sheer-walled canyons thousands of feet deep; labyrinthine canyon systems etched into colorful sedimentary rock formations; forested plateaus ringed by 1,000-foot high cliff walls; […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Move to repeal logging rider gathers speed
Since it became law four months ago, the salvage logging rider has proved a mixed blessing for the timber industry, an embarrassment to the administration and a rallying point for environmentalists. Often called the worst environmental legislation to emerge from the 104th Congress, the salvage law could soon become a litmus test for President Clinton […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Hobbled federal wolf program attracts friends and money
With a little help from their friends, another batch of Canadian wolves will be released in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho this winter, despite congressional budget action designed to halt the project in its tracks. Environmental groups have pledged $40,000 so far, enough money to find and identify about 30 appropriate wolves in British […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Environmentalists say agency uses them as scapegoats
For hundreds of years, rural Hispanics have gathered firewood from the forests of northern New Mexico. After all, it was once their land, given to them in Spanish land grants as far back as the late 17th century. Even after the Forest Service took control of the land grants in the early 1900s, local families […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Utah hearings misfire
Unidentified speaker: What I would like to do is have a political (poll) … and just let everybody express what they can’t express because of time limits; so until that red light goes off, (inaudible) make noise and … The crowd, chanting: 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, – Official transcript, Salt Lake City Wilderness Hearing, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A 4 million acre difference
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Utah hearings misfire. 1. The Book Cliffs: BLM and adjoining state and Indian reservation lands comprise a natural area of over 1 million acres spanning the Tavaputs Plateau and mile-deep Desolation and Gray canyons. It is one of the largest blocks of unprotected […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
The delegation’s bill gets shellacked
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Utah hearings misfire. In a Christmas gift to Utah environmentalists, Rep. James V. Hansen, R-Utah, unceremoniously yanked the Utah delegation’s wilderness bill off the House floor Dec. 14. Hansen said he pulled the bill because there wasn’t enough time to properly debate it. […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
`Goddamn goshawks’
Last summer, loggers discovered a nest with two rare goshawk fledglings on the Headquarters timber sale, west of Laramie, Wyo. With permission from the Forest Service they cut trees within yards of the nest, causing the adults to abandon the nest and the fledglings to die. Environmentalists blasted the agency and loggers for failing to […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Hunger striker to head East
The so-called “logging without laws’ salvage rider signed by President Clinton last July has catalyzed many people to commit acts of civil disobedience. But one person has mounted an unusual protest in front of the federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon. Tim Ream, 33, set up a tent on the courthouse steps Oct. 3 and has […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Thundering against Thunderbolt
When the U.S. Forest Service set aside a steep and damaged portion of the Boise National Forest for a timber sale called Thunderbolt early this fall, environmentalists in Idaho filed one of the first lawsuits against a salvage sale. Now the 13 million board feet has sold for $1 million, and the Sierra Club Legal […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Logging opponents lose – again
In Moscow, Idaho, you can tell it’s fall when Cove/Mallard timbersale protesters start showing up for trial. In the last four years more than 100 people have argued their cases before a variety of magistrates and federal judges, and nearly all have lost. This year was no exception. The largest trial this year involved 12 […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
John Mumma takes another helm
Four years after jumping out of the political frying pan, John Mumma has leaped into the fire. The former Northern Region forester for the Forest Service has been hired as the new director of the embattled Colorado Division of Wildlife. Mumma quit the Forest Service after 28 years rather than accept reassignment to Washington, D.C., […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting
Lee Metzgar took up hunting as a youngster, as soon as he could handle a rifle. At first he hunted mostly birds; then he moved west to teach ecology at the University of Montana and, as he phrases it, his hunting got serious. For the next 22 years, stalking in the Rockies, Metzgar bagged deer, […]