Reassessing the 20-year-old Northwest Forest Plan, wolf trapping in Idaho, Idaho ranchers find common ground with the BLM while fighting range fires, and more.
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected…
A new collaboration has Idaho ranchers and the BLM fighting fire together
On a hot day in August 2011, lightning sparked a fire in the rocky bluffs outside Glenns Ferry, Idaho. With the Bureau of Land Management’s fire crews tied up on the other 16 or so fires burning in the area, a few local ranchers, some of whom had grazing allotments on the land, rushed in…
Seeking balance in Oregon’s timber country
“Now, that is an old-growth tree!” shouts Jerry Franklin on a September day in the hills above Roseburg, Ore. A mammoth Douglas fir towers 10 stories above, dwarfing everything around it. Sunlight filters down through the thick canopy to a group of about 20 University of Washington students. “You can really see who the veterans…
Seeking Ben Kennedy: a quest to find a mysterious Montana philanthropist
Ben Kennedy didn’t talk a lot. He was never a family man. He liked having a beer or a cup of tea with his soup and seldom got around to bathing. He died essentially alone, a man without means and with few close friends. He was born in 1922 in rural Belt, Mont., about 100…
The Forest Service battles placer mining with an obscure law
On a clear day last October in northern Idaho, Forest Service geologist Clint Hughes panned for gold on the North Fork Clearwater River. The area attracted gold prospectors in the 1860s, but these days, the river, which flows through a wild stretch of country near the Montana border, is popular with campers and anglers. Hughes…
Emily Guerin on ranchers’ and BLM’s collaborative approach to fighting wildfire
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talk with High Country News assistant online editor Emily Guerin about why this unusual collaboration is working in Idaho. Wildfire sound courtesy of dynamicell, freesound.org Shovel…
Lawmakers scramble to fix the funding problem in Oregon’s timber counties
State and federal lawmakers are scrambling for solutions to the funding crisis in the southwest Oregon timber counties that have been hard hit by cuts in federal aid. A few of the proposals: The O&C Trust, Conservation and Jobs ActThis controversial proposal would move 1.5 million acres of federal forestland into a timber trust to…
Northwest Forest Plan timeline
1990 Under court order, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the northern spotted owl as threatened. 1991 U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer halts Forest Service timber sales in spotted owl habitat across the Northwest. 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) enacted under Clinton. Timber harvest resumes, but at much-reduced levels; safety net of “spotted owl…
Spread the word and get an exclusive HCN poster
High Country News launched its first “friends” referral subscription campaign on April 11. And, so far, several of you have stepped up to spread the word about HCN to your friends, family and colleagues. Participating subscribers who recruit two people to subscribe (or give gift subscriptions) will get a top-notch poster of a graphic that…
The latest: A cautious cave re-opening
BackstorySince 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed nearly 6 million bats in the Eastern and Southern U.S. In 2010, when white-nose syndrome spread into Missouri, the Forest Service at first kept Western caves open, but asked spelunkers to disinfect their equipment. Then, that summer, the agency closed all caves and abandoned mines in its…
A review of Passage to Wonderland
Passage to Wonderland. Michael A. Amundson, 208 pages, hardcover: $35. University Press of Colorado, 2012. In 1903, photographer Joseph Stimson rode in a horse-drawn buggy along a new 50-mile route leading from Cody, Wyo., to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. He stopped periodically to take pictures for a display at the 1904 World’s…
The latest: Mixed messages about nuclear power safety
BackstoryIn January 2012, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Orange County, Calif., started leaking radioactive water and was shut down. When Southern California Edison announced that the plant could be back online within six months, then-chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gregory Jaczko publicly chastised the company. Jaczko, who helped kill plans to store…
Contemplating the future
In the last few months, I think that you have increased the quality and timeliness of your articles. This latest cover story is proof in the pudding (“Sacrificial Land,” HCN, 4/15/13). Not only did Judith Lewis Mernit cover what is going on in the Mojave Desert — a complicated subject — but she also included…
Trappers catch a lot more than wolves
As the feds handed management of gray wolves to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming over the last few years, reactions were mixed. Conservationists worried that wolf numbers would plummet, while hunters and trappers were thrilled they’d get to legally pursue the predators. All three states have hunting seasons now. Idaho started allowing wolf trapping last year;…
Hispanic leaders spearheaded the Río Grande del Norte National Monument
In early April, Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, R, began pushing a bill that would limit presidential authority to designate new national monuments by forcing proposals to undergo environmental review first. The draft law is among a slew of similar measures House Republicans are working on in response to Obama’s March 25 creation of five new…
You, too, can be a BLM groupie
Craig Childs’ March 18 article about the Bureau of Land Management’s “shadow national park system” highlighted the remarkable discoveries — personal and scientific — available on the millions of acres within the National Landscape Conservation System (“Secret Getaways of a BLM Groupie,” HCN). On the hundreds of unique and irreplaceable conservation sites managed by the…
Historic Northwest Forest Plan needs a careful overhaul
It’s hard to imagine anything like it happening today: An American president and members of his Cabinet fly into a Western city to broker a deal over the use of public lands. With a small group of stakeholders, they quickly craft a scientifically defensible plan that serves as the regional decision-making framework for another generation.…
Just the facts, ma’am
I was very disappointed with your travel issue (HCN, 3/18/13). The trees of Bernal Heights, a kayaking adventure to Alaska, gambling on the rez, volunteer tourism, secret getaways of the BLM groupie — it read more like a tourist tabloid for the West rather than the newspaper that I expect to inform me of the big…
Necessary evil: a review of Boom, Bust, Boom
Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, The Metal That Runs The WorldBill Carter274 pages, hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2012. Arizona is known for the five C’s — cattle, cotton, climate, citrus and the king of them all, copper. Bill Carter’s book Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World is more…
Parched lives in a parched land: A review of the Ordinary Truth
The Ordinary TruthJana Richman375 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2012. Traditionally, springs and wells are centers of life around which people gather and sometimes form communities. In Utah author Jana Richman’s second novel, The Ordinary Truth, metropolitan claims to desert waters unsettle a small town and pit one family’s members against each other. Shifting between…
Bigger fires and evolving threats force changes in the Northwest Forest Plan
The summer of 1994 was a nasty one for fires in Washington’s Chelan County, cradled in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. Dozens of blazes, including a disastrous one in Icicle Canyon, tore through the drought-stricken forests in late July. Almost a million gallons of fire retardant were dropped on that county, and some of…