California rice farmers decide to destroy salmon-blocking dams in their Sacramento Valley irrigation district.
Monumental conflict continues
The saying, “time heals all wounds,” may not apply to Utah, at least not to its politicians. Though more than a year has passed since President Clinton created the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, the state’s congressional delegation continues to try to dismantle it. Republican Rep. Jim Hansen told the Salt…
Activists wade through mudslides
Idaho environmentalists say that while the Senate debated cutting subsidies for logging in September, the Forest Service withheld politically damaging evidence that logging on steep slopes harms forests and native fish. After heavy rains triggered 905 massive mudslides during the winter of 1995-96 on the Clearwater National Forest in central Idaho, agency officials ordered an…
Big trees fall in contested sale
Big ponderosa pine trees came crashing down Sept. 30 near Ojo Caliente, N.M., after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied yet another attempt by the environmental group Forest Guardians to stop part of the La Manga timber sale. “This is the last 3 percent of the forest that has old-growth…
Tooele sputters through first year
-You don’t start a $500 million piece of equipment and expect it to hum like a jewel the first time you turn it over. It’s gonna have bugs in it,” says Gary Griffith, a county commissioner in Tooele County, Utah. He’s talking about the Army’s chemical weapons incinerator 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City,…
Burning down the woods
An Arizona timber company that accidentally burned 8,000 acres on the Coconino National Forest last year will be allowed to bid on a salvage timber sale in the burned area. The fire began in May 1996, in a smoldering slash pile left by Stone Forest Industries. The fire burned 8,000 acres north of Flagstaff and…
Wildfire also goes boom-bust
Dear HCN, Montana Sen. Conrad Burns and ecologist Richard Keigley seem to share a common discontent: Both criticize land-management policy in Yellowstone National Park (HCN, 9/15/97). Burns recently chastised Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for park policy that let bison die in the park last winter. Burns said the deaths were proof that “natural regulation” is…
Get the fundamentalists out of Yellowstone
Dear HCN, Thank you for an outstanding Yellowstone issue (HCN, 9/15/97). Ecologist Charles Kay’s opinion alone was worth the price of a year’s subscription. I’m an ex-park ranger with years of sad experience with the fundamentalism that has taken over the environmental movement. Kay is justified in stating that “Environmentalists believe that North America was…
Some questions about bison
Dear HCN, The Great Plains Restorative Council seems to have a worthy goal of letting the bison go free, but I’ve got some questions for letter-writer J. Manos (HCN, 9/15/97). To what degree is his organization influenced by political correctness? How will the farmers be compensated for the loss of their land? When herds of…
A law is a law is a law
Dear HCN, I read with great interest your article about alternative housing, “Earthships’ in Taos County, N.M. (HCN, 9/1/97). The builder asserts he is not creating a subdivision because he is not selling parcels of land and so he refuses to abide by state and county subdivision laws. Hogwash. This developer is circumventing important laws…
Germany targets U.S. airspace
The German Air Force has trained quietly over the American Southwest for 30 years. Now, a proposed bombing range for German planes has attracted the ire of ranchers and environmentalists. The U.S. Air Force, which manages the training program, wants to put the targets on part of the McGregor Range in southern New Mexico. The…
Humans are more dangerous
Dear HCN, I am writing in response to your article, “A Colorado reality check: lions roam and kill” (HCN, 8/4/97). The article draws attention to two mountain lion attacks that took place during July in Colorado. While everyone would agree these attacks are tragic, your story, and the rather melodramatic headline, draws too much attention…
Water project creates bad precedent
Dear HCN, Heather McGregor’s article on the proposed sale of the Collbran reclamation project does a good job of making a complex dispute understandable (HCN, 9/15/97). Nonetheless, there are a couple of points in the article I need to address. I represent a dozen western Colorado, regional and national environmental groups, as well as the…
The Wayward West
The Sierra Club finally has decided to take a stand on the touchy issue of immigration. The club currently has a neutral policy, but in March, members will be asked to vote on endorsing a drastic reduction in immigration. Pushing for this switch are “restrictionists’ who say that all environmental issues hinge on population size,…
Luftwaffe, go home
The noise began as an explosion, then quickly matured into the scream of engines. Racing across the sky, provenance obscured by speed, the jet rocketed away, leaving the blast echoing in my skull like a loose tire iron. Count me among the 13 percent of residents in areas of rural New Mexico, Texas and Arizona…
A deal is no longer a deal in Washington
WASHINGTON, D.C. – There was never a whole lot of certainty in these parts, but not long ago you could count on a couple of things. One was that a deal was a deal. The other was that once you had killed something, it stayed dead. No longer. Remember Bob Dole’s “takings” bill, the one…
Locals rally against logging
Northern New Mexico’s Chama Valley is the last place to expect a battle over a logging operation. The valley is full of people who for generations have harvested the resources of the land. But in July, that started changing when hundreds of “No Trespassing” signs went up on the thickly forested mountains that are part…
River stretch ignites a fight
It’s a historic irony that the most pristine stretch of Columbia River real estate was protected from development by bomb-making at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Military patrols made sure no one got close. These days, anglers can fish freely for salmon on the Hanford Reach, a 51-mile stretch of river that boils past the chalky…
Deconstructing the age of dams
In the early fall of 1991, I got a call from a cheery young man named Bob Herkert, who introduced himself as the field manager for the California Rice Industry Association. He wanted to invite me on a “good will” tour of the Sacramento Valley rice-growing region, where he said I would see two salmon-blocking…
Dam deconstruction – what’s next?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Here are some of the other dams under attack throughout the West: Elwha River dams, Olympic Peninsula, Washington Built decades ago, these two dams have nearly destroyed what was once, given the host river’s size, a salmon fishery nonpareil. Estimates of the Elwha ancestral…
Dear Friends
Thinking out loud Patricia Nelson Limerick, the bane of the Old West’s historians – those (usually) white men who said white folks brought civilization as they rolled over a mostly empty, heathenish continent – came to Grand Junction, Colo., recently. During the afternoon she talked informally with members of the Western Colorado Congress, a coalition…
Snowmobiles remain an issue
Yellowstone is one of the few national parks in the world where snowmobiling is allowed, and about 100,000 people a year take advantage of that fact. But there has never been a formal study of how the noisy, smelly machines affect the park and its wildlife. That could change next year. The Fund for Animals,…
Heard around the West
Pity poor Joe Camel, the billboard cigarette huckster now out of a job. “Cancer-mongering just ain’t the same without Joe Camel,” laments Eric Scigliano in the Seattle Weekly. But thanks to the e-mail grapevine, folks in Washington state have come up with new careers for the cool spokes-cartoon. Our favorite: Filling potholes with tar from…
Salmon says no bears, no way
SALMON, Idaho – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Northern Rockies got a tense reception at a public hearing in Salmon, Idaho, Oct. 8. For more than four hours, speakers blasted the plan before an audience of 200, saying grizzlies have no place in Idaho. At issue is…
Grizzlies and the male animal
The crowd of several hundred area residents who gathered in a school auditorium in Salmon, Idaho, recently was almost totally united in its opposition to the proposal. No one wanted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to introduce some 25 subadult grizzly bears into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness on the Idaho-Montana border over a several year…