The land-grant university system has been challenged and is slowly beginning to change.
A last laugh
A Last Laugh Although environmentalists don’t have much to laugh about these days, Orlo, a Portland, Ore.-based environmental education group, wants to help lighten the mood. Its free exhibition of environmental cartoons called “The Last Laugh” is now showing at The Art Gym on Marylhurst College campus until May 20, featuring more than 150 editorial…
Goats in the crosshairs
GOATS IN THE CROSSHAIRS Managers at Olympic National Park propose shooting mountain goats to save the stuff they graze, wallow and walk on – native plants. A recent draft environmental impact statement recommends killing the park’s 300 non-native goats rather than transferring them outside the park, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Park managers say efforts to…
In Utah, the extremists are against wilderness
Dear HCN, Within hours of the announcement by Utah counties of their 1 million-acre wilderness recommendation (HCN, 4/17/95), I visited a special place touted in rural county tourist brochures as “Utah’s Little Grand Canyon.” As the sun fell upon the western horizon, the Colorado Plateau light played its technicolor magic upon a slickrock face; to…
Wild symposium
WILD SYMPOSIUM “Always Cry Wolf” is the theme of a symposium during the 17th annual MountainFilm festival in Telluride, Colo., May 26-29. Speakers include author Rick Bass and wildlife photographer Jim Brandenburg, and on tap are wolf films and talks by filmmakers such as Ray Paunovich, who is now documenting the lives of wolves released…
Recall Ben Campbell
Dear HCN: On March 30, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., offered a substitute amendment that would have improved the “salvage logging” amendment by requiring that federal land management agencies comply with environmental laws. The Murray amendment was defeated by one vote due to the efforts of Colorado’s own Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell – Democrat turned Republican.…
Bring in more wolves
BRING IN MORE WOLVES The private group Defenders of Wildlife recently extended its Wolf Recovery Fund, established in Wyoming in 1987, to cover the Southwest. The program reimburses ranchers for livestock killed by wolves by raising funds from “the millions of wolf supporters all over the nation,” says Hank Fischer of Defenders. A Phoenix-based citizens’…
Some things should stay free
Dear HCN: I’d like to comment on Scott W. Reed’s opinion, March 20, that “there should be no free lunch for recreationists.” Here we are again: a bewildered and beleagured public losing another freedom we take for granted. I’m wondering, what’s a recreationist? It’s no doubt a person, probably a human, out for a stroll…
Baiting continues unabated
Baiting continues unabated When the Forest Service announced last year that it would write a new policy regulating bear baiting, environmentalists and animal rights advocates were hopeful. They thought the agency might take a hard look at the controversial practice of laying out rotting foods to attract bears within shooting distance. But the new policy,…
HCN ignored the real issues
HCN IGNORED THE REAL ISSUES Dear HCN: Does Jon Christensen work in his off hours for the wise-use movement? He should learn a little more about Nevada before he writes about environmental issues. With several articles about ranching April 3, how come Mr. Christensen fails to give readers a full understanding of how this one…
A place of one’s own
A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN Are you thinking of buying a few acres of land to satisfy that pastoral desire? It may be more complicated than you think and not as much fun. That’s why Montana has published a brief booklet for small-acreage landowners called Tips on Land & Water Management for Small Farms and…
The holistic approach isn’t fanatical
THE HOLISTIC APPROACH ISN’T FANATICAL Dear HCN: We would like to respond to an article in your April 3 special issue on the Great Basin which included comments about Holistic Resource Management made by rancher Tony Tipton. We are concerned that readers may be left with the impression that Holistic Resource Management is some sort…
Conspiracy of optimism
Conspiracy of Optimism Until World War II, private forests provided 95 percent of the nation’s wood products; from 1945 to 1960, the timber industry turned away from its overcut land to publicly owned trees on the national forests. Confident in their talents and technology, Forest Service managers embraced clearcutting over selective harvesting and built 65,000…
Nevada’s grassroots are healthy
Dear HCN, Congratulations to Jon Christensen for his April 3 comprehensive Great Basin special edition and thank you for devoting the resources and energy to this project. It will surely encourage more thoughtful communication among all parties about the myths and challenges we face here. While I was flattered by Jon’s article on me, the…
Grassroots unite
GRASSROOTS UNITE Activists concerned about health, justice, peace and the environment will share organizing tactics May 5-6 in Missoula, Mont. Bryony Schwan, director of the Missoula-based Women’s Voices for the Earth, says the conference aims to diversify the environmental movement and pinpoint common ground among the participants. Speakers include Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs, now…
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone
Dear HCN: Regarding “Sinful Las Vegas’ (HCN, 4/3/95), I would like to ask why the predictable, banal cliché that Las Vegas is “sin city” can’t be abandoned. What is here is legal and above board. Are you suggesting other cities where gambling and prostitution are illegal are “sinless’? Come on. Las Vegas has about 1…
Will the bill’s authors please stand?
A memo to Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., shows lobbyists wrote most of a bill scaling back the Endangered Species Act. The Feb. 28 memo from Gorton aide Julie Kays says in part: “The coalitions delivered your ESA (Endangered Species Act) bill to me on Friday” I know you are anxious to get the bill introduced.…
Jail for a poacher
A Utah construction worker who killed a large, photogenic elk along a major road through Yellowstone National Park in the fall of 1993 and pleaded guilty to the crime will serve four months in prison and pay $30,000 in fines. But the rank act of poaching the elk was not what led Chad S. Beus,…
The heat is on
Forest Service officials are under intense political pressure to reverse a decision ordering most of a rancher’s cows from the 227-square-mile Diamond Bar allotment on the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wilderness areas near Silver City, N.M. (HCN, 5/2/94). The agency told ranchers Kit and Sherry Laney to move 90 percent of their 660-cow herd off…
Bleak future for cutthroat
Fishery experts agreed at a February conference that there’s no practical way to eliminate the illegally planted lake trout that are killing native cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake. “There isn’t a fix, there isn’t a silver bullet – even suppression is a forever commitment,” federal biologist Lynn Kaeding told the Billings Gazette. A draft report…
Who killed the cows?
On the night of April 14, rancher Tom Kelly says someone sneaked onto his ranch near Deming, in southern New Mexico, emptied a water storage tank, removed bolts from the legs of a windmill and shot 13 cows and seven calves dead with a high-velocity rifle. Kelly says his opposition to Interior Secretary Babbitt’s rangeland…
Slashing water welfare
Slashing water welfare The Bureau of Reclamation released new rules this month to stop corporate farms from using subsidized water meant for family farmers. In a 1993 court settlement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Bureau promised to look comprehensively at the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982 and propose regulations to close loopholes. Subsidies…
Idaho injunction lifted
A federal judge recently dissolved an injunction that threatened to halt many activities on six Idaho national forests in order to protect endangered salmon. The injunction had prompted angry protests in the forest-dependent community of Salmon, Idaho, earlier this year (HCN, 2/20/95). But U.S. District Judge David Ezra said a biological opinion released March 1…
Montana State University to local environmentalists: Get lost!
In an editorial in their monthly newsletter, which I’ll call the Big Sky Cow Pie, the Montana Stockgrowers Association branded me the “Ralph Nader of the West.” It was not meant as a compliment. I’m not exactly sure what set them off. Perhaps it was something I’d said while president of the National Wolf Growers…
Midnight subdividing creates unsanitary messes
DOäA ANA COUNTY, N.M. – Felix Ledesma stares out at the border shantytown where his family now lives and he shakes his head: “We moved here because New Mexico is the land of opportunity.” But Ledesma’s children play nearby in muddy pools, and around them rise an odd assortment of homes – cinder block shacks,…
Wolf lovers give Idaho sheriff a piece of their mind
SALMON, Idaho – Linda Borton of Tucson, Ariz., was furious when she heard that one of the Canadian wolves released in central Idaho had been shot, and that Lemhi County Sheriff Brett Barsalou said he didn’t “give a damn who shot it.” That same night she fired off a letter to Barsalou. “I’m very much…
Non-native bird ruffles feathers
Conservationists clipped the wings of a controversial plan to introduce a non-native game bird into southwestern Colorado. Although the state Division of Wildlife hoped to release 40 ruffed grouse in the San Juan-Rio Grande National Forest in April, four environmental groups and two individuals sued the Forest Service to stop the transplant. The day after…
Land grants under the microscope
Scrutinized from all sides, they defend their turf and look for new ideas
It’s deja vu yet again, says Bruce Babbitt
Washington, D.C. – On Dec. 24, 1992, while most Americans were eating Christmas Eve dinner, the four Marstons were listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. The occasion was Bill Clinton’s nomination of Bruce Babbitt to be secretary of Interior. To be honest, the occasion was NPR reporter John Nielson’s taped interview of…
Trying to save two of the parts
Utah State University’s Lyle McNeal has spent 20 years reviving Churro sheep and Navajo agriculture
Heard around the West
The Montana legislature is determined to take that state’s clean water. It passed two bills that allow degradation of Montana’s streams and lakes. The bills were pushed by mining, ranching, logging and real estate. Developers succeeded in loosening septic tank standards for new homes. That could spell death for the purity of Montana’s immense Flathead…
Land-grant professor offers Navajo herds a helping hand
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Trying to save two of the parts. It’s a daunting proposition: Take 100,000 Navajo sheep producers, 25,000 native weavers, 24,000 square miles of high desert rangeland and 300,000 sheep and goats, and figure out how to improve life for all of them. But…
Dear friends
Stacked deck? When Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young decided to leave the Beltway to hear opinions on changing the Endangered Species Act, he set no House (Natural) Resource Committee hearings in what we think of as The West: Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, or South Dakota. Young selected mainly small…
The gospel according to Wes Jackson
He believes we can grow food without chemicals, plows or erosion
Forest Service scrambles to obey law it long ignored
It’s a case of a bureaucratic train wreck creating a congressional train wreck. After refusing for decades to apply the National Environmental Policy Act, the U.S. Forest Service is now applying the law so fiercely that it’s put a host of other programs on the back burner. The Forest Service is delaying timber sales, archaeological…
Starting a war at Ohio State
An untenured academic challenged his colleagues, farmers and students to think deeply about the land-grant mission
The Memo War: 1989-1993
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Starting a war at Ohio State. It is difficult to understand this article in this text rendition of the print original. Scanned copies of the original can be obtained from HCN. THE MEMO WAR 1989-1993 The Memo War started when Kamyar Enshayan wrote…
An in-your-face range scientist
Note: this feature article is one of several in this special issue on the West’s land grant universities. LAS CRUCES, N.M. – In the wake of a drought that left the Southwestern range parched and degraded, scientists at New Mexico State University are busy: They’re figuring out which cattle breeds do the best in the…
If rain doesn’t fall, the money will
LAS CRUCES, N.M. – Drought returned to the West last summer, with a little help from the federal government. Ranchers from Oregon to New Mexico – their herds grown too abundant as a result of a well-intentioned drought relief program – let grass-starved cows and sheep strip parched rangelands bare. The emergency feed program, run…