Our national obsession with keeping “wild” horses and burros on public lands that are incapable of supporting them has always struck me as bizarre, especially since it’s the result of our alleged love for them. Ask most any wild horse advocacy group and you’ll be told that wild horses are native wildlife and anyone who […]
Ted Williams
Posted inWotr
How bizarre: Wild horses have become sacred cows
Our national obsession with keeping “wild1” horses and burros on public lands that are incapable of supporting them has always struck me as bizarre, especially since it’s the result of our alleged love for them. Ask most any wild horse advocacy group and you’ll be told that wild horses are native wildlife and anyone who […]
Posted inWotr
Puppets on the range
A puppet show just finished a 20-year run in southwest New Mexico. I first attended in 1994, when a magazine sent me to the Gila National Forest to inspect damage grazing had done to habitat of Gila trout, our only endangered inland salmonid. Grazing allotments in the Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses had been leased […]
Posted inMarch 20, 2006: Town Shopping
The trouble with the Endangered Species Act is us
With House approval of his “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act” last September, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., got a step closer to his career goal of eradicating the Endangered Species Act. Pombo, a developer posing as a rancher posing as an advocate of the public good, proclaims that the 32-year-old law is “broken” and a […]
Posted inWotr
The trouble with the Endangered Species Act is us
With House approval of his “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act” last September, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., got a step closer to his career goal of eradicating the Endangered Species Act. Pombo, a developer posing as a rancher posing as an advocate of the public good, proclaims that the 32-year-old law is “broken” and a […]
Posted inWotr
Trees can be just another sacred cow
Only God can make a tree, but anyone can ruin a prairie. Consider the celebrated 19th century journalist Julius Sterling Morton. On moving to Nebraska from Michigan in 1854, he found he didn’t like the way nature had designed the Great Plains. Accordingly, he summoned forth “a great army of husbandmen… to battle against the […]
Posted inWotr
Hullabaloo in the hook-and-bullet press
As a hunter, fisher and full-time outdoor writer, it pains me to admit that most hunting-and-fishing magazines are right down there with supermarket tabloids. You can tell the really important articles by the number of exclamation points after the title, as in: “Sportsmen’s group in all-out battle for shooting and hunting rights!!!” Fact-checking departments are […]
Posted inWotr
Native fish: Some environmentalists don’t get it
This may sound harsh, but it’s true: Environmentalists tend not to see, handle or understand fish, to distrust agencies dedicated to their recovery, and to set up mental spam-filters for facts about short-lived fish poisons. Usually, these poisons are the only tools managers have for saving native trout from being eaten, out-competed or hybridized out […]
Posted inWotr
Sportsmen for Bush: Wise up!
Without enthusiastic support from most of America’s 50 million hunters and anglers, George W. Bush and his appointees would still be employed by oil, gas and coal companies. I still see bumper stickers that say: “Another Sportsman for Bush.” Yet as a lifelong sportsman myself, I wonder why even one sportsman, let alone “another,” would […]
Posted inWotr
Sometimes, it’s trout that have to be killed
Having written for and about trout anglers for 33 years, I’ve repeatedly admonished them for their lack of what Aldo Leopold, sire of wildlife management, called an “ecological conscience.” Too often a “trout is a trout,” and where it came from and what it’s displacing doesn’t matter. So I am astonished and delighted to see […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?
Only God can make a tree, but any ecological illiterate can plant it in the wrong place. Ansel Adams understood this. On running tree-planting Boy Scouts out of California’s Marin Headlands, the photographer declared: “I cannot think of a more tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless area, and to impose an […]
Posted inDecember 21, 1998: Grand Canyon Gridlock
Fallen forester
Did whistleblowers destroy a fine public servant?
Posted inMay 25, 1998: Tackling tamarisk
It only seems cruel to fool a fish
“Who hears the fishes when they cry?” That question was asked by a scold, iconoclast and master angler who worried about the pain he inflicted on his quarry. His contemporaries considered him very weird. His name was Henry Thoreau. The same concern is being voiced today by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Hunters close ranks, and minds
In a few states it is still legal to attract bears with bait for the purpose of shooting them. I call it “garbaging for bears,” and, as an avid hunter, find it repulsive – basically assassination. But this is not an article about garbaging for bears. It is an article about the slow, painful maturation […]