Deep in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument of southern Oregon lies my favorite wildflower meadow. This summer I need to step carefully, to avoid the lush clumps of Jacob’s Ladder blossoms and the delicate columbines, their blooms nodding in the breeze. I breathe in the scents of the wild: the spice of the conifers, the earthy […]
Pepper Trail
Posted inWotr
An octopus wants to eat the West
What’s 3,500 feet wide, 6,055 miles long and 2.9 million acres big? That’s wider than Hoover Dam, bigger than Yellowstone National Park and almost three times as long as the Mississippi River. This behemoth goes by the name of the West-Wide Energy Corridor, and if you live in the West it could soon devour a […]
Posted inWotr
You can’t stop nature
Why does it have to be so complicated? All we ask of nature is to be able to do what we want to do; no more, no less. We like to think of our impact on the world as controlled and businesslike, with only one variable changing at a time. But no matter how hard […]
Posted inWotr
The BLM plays with fire in Oregon
Everyone here in Oregon loves our forests. These lands — most in public ownership — are the cornerstone for both the economic and ecological health of the state, and are central to our identity. Indeed, more and more of us are making our homes in the woods every year, in the so-called “wildlands-urban interface.” And […]
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When is a barred owl a red herring?
The draft recovery plan identifies competition from the barred owl, which is not native to the Pacific Northwest, as the primary threat facing the northern spotted owl. – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, April 26, 2007. That’s right, I’m a barred owl. My wife tells me to keep quiet, keep my beak clean, try to […]
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The decline of logging is now killing
If the connection between logging and closing libraries isn’t clear to you, then you don’t live in Oregon. Here, the connection is the stuff of crisis, the subject of daily news stories and of increasingly desperate political maneuvering. It is a crisis that reveals much about changing expectations and attitudes concerning government services, taxes and […]
Posted inDecember 25, 2006: Confessions of a Methane Floozy
Of salvage logging and salvation
Salvage is a word that is much in the air these days, not just in the woods, but also in the lecture halls of universities and in the marble corridors of Washington, D.C. It is a word of power, a soothing word implying many virtues: prudence and profit, rescue and redemption, both exploitation and, somehow, […]
Posted inWotr
Of salvage logging and salvation
Salvage is a word that is much in the air these days, not just in the woods, but also in the lecture halls of universities and in the marble corridors of Washington, D.C. It is a word of power, a soothing word implying many virtues: prudence and profit, rescue and redemption, both exploitation and, somehow, […]
Posted inWotr
How do you enter a roadless area?
How do you enter roadless lands in the West? Quietly, with a walking staff, a sketchbook, a camera? Not according to the Bush administration: It enters with a chainsaw. On Aug. 7, loggers arrived at the Mike’s Gulch timber sale in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, fired up their chainsaws, and began cutting trees. […]
Posted inWotr
If only binoculars were cool
I’ve been a bird-watcher since I was a kid. Or to put it another way: Since I was a kid, I have not been cool. For the most part, that stopped bothering me a long time ago. Still, every now and then, I feel it. This happened recently when I got a close-up look at […]
Posted inWotr
Cooking up a whopper on federal land in Oregon
Here in Oregon, the dinosaurs are stirring. The brontosaurs of big timber, almost at their last gasp, are making one last power play, and it’s a WOPR, pronounced — how else? — “whopper,” which stands for Western Oregon Plan Revisions. What’s being revised are management plans for six Bureau of Land Management districts in western […]
Posted inWotr
Killing cougars is the easy choice
The state of Oregon is back in the business of killing cougars. After a long and contentious public comment process, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission recently approved a management plan for the state’s top predator that would allow government-paid hunters to reduce cougar numbers back to 1993 levels. That could ultimately mean the killing […]
Posted inWotr
Pombo’s plan to privatize the West must be stopped
What is it, exactly, that makes the West special? There are certainly many answers to that question, but perhaps the one that Westerners would give more than any other is our “wide open spaces.” Despite much development, there is still open space in the West: space to hike, to hunt, to breathe free, to escape […]
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Avian flu: Don’t fear the flocks yet
It’s November, which means that the snow geese are pouring into Oregon’s Klamath Basin in the hundreds of thousands. The sight of the undulating flocks, snow white against slate blue storm clouds, is unspeakably beautiful. These are tundra geese, passing through en route to winter quarters in California’s Central Valley. They have come all the […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
What’s at stake in the evolution debate
On my desk is the fragment of a tooth from an ancient camel that roamed the area around Fossil, Ore., 40 million years ago. My kids and I unearthed it on a summer camping trip, and today I found myself fingering it as I read yet another story about the evolution “debate.” This controversy pits […]
Posted inWotr
What’s at stake in the evolution debate
On my desk is the fragment of a tooth from an ancient camel that roamed the area around Fossil, Ore., 40 million years ago. My kids and I unearthed it on a summer camping trip, and today I found myself fingering it as I read yet another story about the evolution “debate.” This controversy pits […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Death Valley wakes up with a bang
I stood among the multicolored stones of Death Valley, gazing at the greatest wildflower bloom I’ve ever seen — the greatest bloom of a generation. I had driven from my home in Oregon through the night to see this spectacle, and now that I’d arrived, I found I was unprepared for the power of its […]
Posted inWotr
Death Valley wakes up with a bang
I stood among the multi-colored stones of Death Valley, gazing at the greatest wildflower bloom I’ve ever seen — the greatest bloom of a generation. I had driven from my home in Oregon through the night to see this spectacle, and now that I’d arrived, I found I was unprepared for the power of its […]
Posted inWotr
The ecology and politics of fear
Here’s some good news: In Yellowstone National Park, the cottonwood groves are thriving. Cottonwoods are a key element in the Yellowstone ecosystem, but not so long ago it seemed that they were doomed by dense herds of elk that clustered along the park’s rivers and browsed the trees so heavily that no young saplings survived. […]
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Who can argue with equality for all salmon?
A new policy from the Bush administration on endangered Pacific salmon is startling in its simplicity and brilliance. The policy cuts through all the scientific mumbo-jumbo the press repeats and puts a finger on the basic problem: Salmon are endangered because there aren’t enough of them. If there were lots of salmon in the rivers, […]