With some help from Congress, forest restoration may be gathering steam
Jane Braxton Little
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Quincy collaboration heads to court
CALIFORNIA The Quincy Library Group has given up on collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service. Nearly nine years after developing a controversial management plan for 2.4 million acres of national forest land in Northeastern California, the coalition of environmentalists and civic and timber industry leaders has suspended its monthly meetings with agency officials. It now […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Pesky pike persist
CALIFORNIA They’re back. More than 5,000 spiny-tongued predatory pike are once again haunting the waters of northeastern California’s Lake Davis. Planted illegally in 1994, the voracious exotic fish resurfaced just 18 months after the California Department of Fish and Game spent $2 million poisoning the reservoir to get rid of them (HCN, 5/25/98: How California […]
Posted inJuly 30, 2001: Not in our back yard
Forestry nominee: Rey of light or death Rey?
‘Mastermind’ of salvage logging rider would oversee U.S. Forest Service
Posted inJuly 2, 2001: Can Nevada bury Yucca Mountain?
The greening of the Nevada Test Site
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Deep inside the Nevada Test Site, in a moonscape of craters and radioactive ruin left by nearly 1,000 nuclear bombs, Stephen Zitzer lies face down, his hands plunged into a creosote bush. Stark, white upright pipes encircle him like soldiers. Each pipe silently puffs […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Green power threatens the Black Rock
A proposed geothermal plant in a newly protected Nevada desert sparks a fight
Posted inFebruary 12, 2001: Mr. Babbitt's wild ride
A new plan frames the Sierra Nevada
Opponents have criticized everything from the science to the sentence structure
Posted inNovember 20, 2000: Water pressure
A desert state axes water planning
The Nevada Division of Water Planning meets an untimely demise
Posted inApril 24, 2000: At your service: Unions help some Western workers serve themselves
Dust settles in Owens Valley
Los Angeles vows to return some water to a parched lakebed
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Quincy experiment to begin
The Quincy Library Group claimed a hard-fought victory last month after the U.S. Forest Service doubled logging on three California forests while protecting habitat for the northern spotted owl. After years of bitter battles against environmentalists, attorney and group co-founder and Michael Jackson can’t help gloating. “This is absolute complete vindication,” he says. The Forest […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Lions push bighorn onto an island
Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the latest addition to the federal endangered species list, may survive extinction with the help of Mono Lake, itself threatened for decades by the diversion of its feeder streams to Los Angeles (HCN, 12/8/97). Mono Lake can help to save bighorn by providing what one expert calls “an imaginary zoo” – […]
Posted inApril 26, 1999: Visionaries or dreamers?
Quincy Library Group bars outsiders
The Quincy Library Group, nationally acclaimed for its open and politically diverse membership, will be holding some of its meetings behind closed doors. The restriction, adopted March 30 in a unanimous voice vote, is to prevent disruptions the group fears from longtime opponents of its controversial forest management plan for three national forests in the […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
A quiet victory in Quincy
QUINCY, Calif. – The day after President Clinton signed the Quincy Library Group’s forest management plan into law on Oct. 22, members of the grassroots coalition celebrated with a sparkling cider toast. That was it. No Main Street parade. No victory banner across the Plumas County Courthouse. After five years of planning, plotting and politicking […]
Posted inAugust 3, 1998: Tribes reclaim stolen lands
At Tahoe, it’s agreed: old growth gets to stay
The residents of the Lake Tahoe Basin want their old-growth trees, dead or alive. A regulation that took effect last month all but prohibits the harvest of trees over 30 inches in diameter, whether they are on public or private land. Because it applies to both green and standing dead trees, the Tahoe ordinance expands […]
Posted inMay 25, 1998: Tackling tamarisk
How California poisoned a small town
PORTOLA, Calif. – The northern pike, a voracious species, has claimed what may be its biggest victim yet: this small town. Officials of the Plumas County town of 2,200 residents say they have lost their backup water supply, half their tourism business and their reputation for a pristine mountain environment – all to the predatory […]
Posted inMarch 2, 1998: Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
Waste to snake through West
Nuclear waste may be coming soon through rural Western communities. As early as June, the U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship five loads of nuclear waste through Concord, Calif., to a federal storage facility near Idaho Falls in eastern Idaho. The waste, spent nuclear fuel rods from Asia, is a legacy of the Eisenhower […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 1998: Looking at dams in a new way
Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future
If you think preserving natural resources is all about scientific data and arcane legal maneuvers, read Storm Over Mono. In his richly documented account of the battle to save Mono Lake, John Hart focuses on the people who mounted the successful campaign against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Most were ordinary mortals: […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Note: an essay by Charles Wilkinson about Mono Lake accompanies this feature story. LEE VINING, Calif. – Mono Valley hovers at the western edge of the Great Basin on the Sierra Nevada range, a majestic place of stark horizons and haunting skies. In autumn, Lombardy poplars and cottonwoods blaze golden along the highway and seem […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Plumas lake poisoned despite civil disobedience
The California Department of Fish and Game poisoned Lake Davis despite a last-minute barrage of legal assaults and pre-dawn civil disobedience hours before the Oct. 15 treatment occurred. A week after pumping Nusyn-Noxfish and powdered rotenone into the lake north of Lake Tahoe, state officials had collected 15 tons of dead fish, including an 18-pound […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Big stink over northern pike
A battle over poisoning Lake Davis to rid it of non-native northern pike appears headed for a shoreline showdown. The courts have endorsed a California Department of Fish and Game plan to poison the lake 70 miles north of Lake Tahoe. A Plumas County ordinance is now one of the last obstacles, short of civil […]