Billions of dollars are being spent to fight Western wildfires, but some scientists now believe that the big blowups can’t be prevented, and that they may be good for the health of the forests.
Also in this issue:Environmentalists fear the Republican-sponsored “Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003” – intended to prevent wildfires – will prove anything but healthy for the forests.
Inside HCN
Radio High Country News has released the first of a three-part series on fire in the West. The series includes on-the-ground reports and interviews with the scientists, managers policy-makers and writers who are framing today’s debate over fire policy. Listen online at www.hcn.org/radio. Are animal-rights activists leading the environmental movement astray? Arizona writer Dave Gowdey…
Monuments under attack
The old debate over the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is fascinating (HCN, 4/14/03: Change comes slowly to Escalante country), but you missed the larger story: the emerging threats to the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS). This system has the potential to dramatically reshape conservation in the West. Established to encompass the crown jewels of the…
Mountain bikes rule!
The time has come to let all the little Tilley-hat-wearing granolas give their heads a shake. Mountain bikes are the best form of transportation ever invented and have less impact on the environment than hiking boots (HCN, 3/3/03: Let bikers in, and we’ll stand behind wilderness). They also have less impact than horses and hunters…
Bikes have never been legal in wilderness
As a former wilderness manager for the feds, I’d like to speak to the issue of bikes in wilderness areas (HCN, 3/3/03: Get off and walk — wilderness is for wildlife). Bicycles were never permitted in the National Wilderness Preservation System by the 1964 Wilderness Act or any subsequent designation legislation. It’s understandable, however, why…
The Latest Bounce
The Defense Department needs to do a better job cleaning up its “formerly used defense sites,” according to a report to Congress from the General Accounting Office (HCN, 3/31/03: While the nation goes to war, the Pentagon lobs bombs at environmental laws). The study, requested by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., points out a variety of…
Mountain-bikers stink!
I am out walking, enjoying the peace and quiet, the beauty of the land around me, when all of a sudden I hear, “On your left!” and one or more bikers huff and puff their way around me, leaving the stink of their sweating bodies behind. My sense of peace is ruined by people too…
Revolution? What revolution?
Regarding your editorial, “Republicans wave guns, but where’s the butter?” (HCN, 4/14/03: Republicans wave guns, but where’s the butter?): This editorial emotionally bemoans “BLM and Forest Service lands being hammered by gas drilling,” “environmental laws being weakened,” “national monuments being squeezed” and “land that BLM and Forest Service are supposed to manage is being destroyed.”…
Adopt a burro!
In your photo gallery, you picture a llama guarding sheep (HCN, 3/31/03: Springtime on the ranch). I have to offer an alternative suggestion! All you cowmen and especially sheepmen, facing losses from coyotes, consider placing a solitary burro in your flock or herd. Burros cost about one-tenth the price of a llama, if you were…
Road-builders pay for archaeological damage
Even in “wild and woolly” Catron County, N.M., you still have to pay if you’re caught damaging archaeological sites on public land. In 1999, a private landowner hired a construction company to clear a dirt road through a national forest to a patch of private land. In the process, the bulldozer plowed through three prehistoric…
Desert saved from ‘dingbat’ development
The Wildlands Conservancy, a California-based nonprofit organization, has wrapped up the largest purchase of private land for conservation purposes in the country’s history. In March, the Conservancy completed a four-year effort to buy over 600,000 acres in the Southern California desert and turn the land over to the federal government. The land was owned by…
A book big enough to make waves
Northern Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a big place with big oil reserves. And now it has a big photographic book that explores the collision of conservation and development there — a book that has created quite a stir in Washington, D.C. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, A Photographic…
Enviros squash plan to kill crickets
Where are those ravenous seagulls when you need them? Idaho farmers are bracing for an invasion of Mormon crickets this summer, but they are unlikely to be as fortunate as early Utah settlers, whose besieged crops were miraculously rescued by flocks of birds. Instead, the federal government planned to spray pesticides over huge tracts of…
Looking out for the little guys
From its roots as a scrappy, garage-band-style environmental group, the Paonia, Colorado-based Center for Native Ecosystems has become a voice for the kind of endangered species often overlooked by other conservation groups. The center has championed such unlikely species as Graham’s penstemon, a wildflower threatened by oil and gas development, the boreal toad and the…
Mining rules put industry on rocky ground
California has two new regulations that industry officials say could spell the end of gold-mining in the Golden State. On April 7, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill requiring mining companies to fill in open-pit mines near sacred Indian sites on federal lands, once they have completed mining. The same week, the California State Mining…
A green light for gas drilling
The Bush administration’s push for increased oil and gas development in the West just got a boost from the Bureau of Land Management. In April, the agency issued two separate decisions that pave the way for 66,000 new coalbed methane wells and 5,000 conventional oil and gas wells in the Powder River Basin by 2011.…
A native son of Oregon writes of heartbreak, determination
As its subtitle suggests, David James Duncan’s latest book of essays, My Story as Told by Water, has a little bit of everything: “confessions, Druidic rants, bird-watchings, visions, prayers.” At its core, the book is about how this native son of Oregon — author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K —…
Big blowups will continue, whether we like it or not
We’re spending billions to fight ‘catastrophic’ forest fires. But the big blowups will continue, whether we like it or not. For the forests, this may be good news.
Learning to live with fire
I went to Mesa Verde National Park to see the ruins — not the cliff dwellings, which the Ancient Puebloan Indians mysteriously abandoned 700 years ago, but the ruined land itself. Since 1996, three major fires have torched more than half of the 55,000-acre park in southwest Colorado. You can’t help but notice the miles…
Firespeak Catastrophe
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” Firespeak catastrophe #1 “Wildland-urban interface.” This catchall phrase describing the forest fringe includes cabins and watersheds in the woods around Salmon, Idaho — a remote town of only 3,200 people that can hardly be described as urban. It also includes Lowman,…
History is full of big fires
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” “Investigating the … arid lands, I passed through South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho by train. Among the valleys, with mountains on every side, during all that trip a mountain was never seen. This was because the fires…
Who should pay when houses burn?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “A losing battle.” CONNER, Montana Greg Tilford and his wife, Mary, pursued a dream when they quit their jobs as cops in California and moved here. They built a two-bedroom cabin on a forested ridgetop above Dickson Creek, installed solar panels and a garden,…
Fire in the West
A losing battle High Country News launches its redesigned print edition with a critical look at fire in the West. Since the 1960s, the ‘let it burn’ approach to wildfire has gained wider and wider acceptance. But as fires increasingly come up against the West’s phenomenal population growth – and as some scientists warn that…
Dear Friends
A new look, same old spunk Here it is, at long last — the new High Country News. As promised, the paper has a lively new look, but what’s inside remains largely the same: sagacious reporting, balanced perspective, a skeptical edge. Here’s hoping you like what you find. To research the cover story, our editor…
Congress jousts over forest health
With fire season on the way, lawmakers again take up the battle over Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative
Agriculture exacts a price in the High Sierra
Scientists home in on what’s killing frogs, and raise new questions about how far the damage could spread
The tangled messages of a servicewoman killed incombat
I live among the remote mesas, canyons and scattered towns and villages of the Hopi and Navajo reservations in northeast Arizona. A desolate and foreboding place by conventional standards, it’s a quiet, starkly beautiful land to the people who have called it home for centuries. But it is, by anyone’s reckoning, far removed from the…
Once more unto the breach: Dams could fall in the Northwest
Many in the Northwest thought they’d killed the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River in Washington when they convinced the Clinton administration to pass on it, and then George W. Bush became president. They celebrated too soon. On May 7, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland threw out the salmon-protection plan…
Rising from the ashes
HUSON, Mont. — The early morning temperature has already reached the 80s, as our six-person Forest Service silviculture crew starts up a steep ridge, our tools stuffed into the pockets of our orange vests. We carry clinometers for measuring the steepness of the slopes, compasses and maps for finding our way, and logger’s tapes for…
Heard Around the West
NEVADA Las Vegas’ drought has gotten so serious that some golf courses are replacing grass with crushed rock. But course managers aren’t ripping out their turf without casting verbal stones at homeowners, who use 65 percent of the area’s water, spraying three-quarters of it outdoors, according to The Associated Press. Golf courses are just the…