An unusual group founded by environmentalists and logging companies, the Willapa Alliance seeks to bring economic and ecological healing to Washington’s Willapa Bay.
Still no deal for New World Mine
With great ceremony last August, President Bill Clinton announced he had saved Yellowstone by blocking a proposed gold mine that bordered the park (HCN, 9/2/96). Once the applause died down, critics who worried that the the deal was a ploy for re-election warned that the deal was not done: Clinton still had to secure $65…
Copper mine rouses opposition
Flanked by massive cottonwoods and sycamores, Pinto Creek winds through the rugged mountains of central Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. Its narrow valley is a haven for an endangered hedgehog cactus, it contains scores of archaeological sites and it may soon become an open-pit copper mine. That prospect has roused local protest and national criticism, yet…
Cut the fat out
Cut environmentally damaging subsidies and save $36 billion doing it, urges a report targeting 57 wasteful federal programs. The third annual Green Scissors describes how each program costs both taxpayers and the environment. Ending below-cost timber sales, the report says, could save $1 billion over five years. Twenty-five taxpayer and nonprofit groups contributed to the…
The importance of prairie dogs
A report, Conserving Prairie Dog Ecosystems on the Northern Plains, defends one of nature’s best dinners. Published by the Predator Project in Bozeman, Mont., the 30-page booklet explains how prairie dogs create a unique environment that provides food and shelter to at least 158 other species, including the endangered black-footed ferret and the swift fox.…
Uproar over Owyhee
It’s been 15 years since the Bureau of Land Management wrote a management plan for the 1.3 million-acre Owyhee Resource Area in southwest Idaho, and the agency’s attempt to revise it isn’t sitting well with ranchers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts. BLM officials were caught off guard in November when several hundred critics showed up at…
Trade treaty may protect Arizona river
The U.S. government must respond this month to a citizens’ petition accusing one of its Army bases of helping to dry up Arizona’s last free-flowing river, the San Pedro (HCN, 6/12/95). The river boasts North America’s largest surviving expanse of cottonwood and willow forest and serves as a migratory coridor for many birds. The petition…
Spotting lawless logging
Last year’s timber salvage rider made some people at the Alliance for the Wild Rockies see red. They channeled some of their anger into creating a map that pinpoints, with over 500 crimson spots, timber sales in the Northern Rockies. An accompanying eight-page report addresses the costs of such logging, its erosive effects on roads…
National Conference on Habitat Conservation
Habitat Conservation Plans, agreements implementing the Endangered Species Act on non-federal land, are almost always described as “win-win” situations. But are they truly conserving habitat? How are the species themselves faring? Come find out at the National Wildlife Federation’s first-ever National Conference on Habitat Conservation Plans, May 17 and 18, at Washington, D.C.” s Georgetown…
Babbitt moves on mining reform
After four frustrating years of cajoling Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law that allows hard-rock mining on public lands, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has decided to see what he can do on his own. Recently he announced a task force that would investigate the ways the administration can prevent some of the environmental damages…
The Raven Chronicles
The Raven Chronicles, a magazine of cultural diversity published three times a year in Seattle, Wash., is seeking contributions for an upcoming summer issue on images and ideas of the West. It is open to a variety of styles and asks only that submissions be “specific, original, brilliant.” The deadline is May 1. Write The…
It’s cows as usual in Oregon
Last fall, Oregon activists envisioned cattle fenced away from riverbanks, and streams tested for purity after a district court ruled that grazing was polluting water on the state’s Forest Service lands (HCN, 10/28/96). It hasn’t happened yet. Instead, state officials are scrambling to draw up “emergency” grazing rules so ranchers can turn out their cows…
Carbon Monoxide Forecasting for Colorado Springs: 1996-2020
Local planners in Colorado Springs have underestimated both population growth and carbon monoxide pollution so as not to hinder the city’s rapid growth, warns physicist Val Veirs. The director of environmental science at Colorado College, Veirs predicts the sprawling city will violate the federal Clean Air Act within 15 years. His detailed report, Carbon Monoxide…
Ski resort beefs up
The Forest Service won’t allow developers on Oregon’s Mount Hood to expand onto more public land. But the agency will allow 5,000 more skiers, six new chairlifts and a restaurant on the slopes. The Mount Hood Meadows ski area is a private business that operates on Forest Service land under a special-use permit. The developers,…
Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition
Looking for a beautiful patch of land to defend on Earth Day? A desert gathering April 25-27 will protest a proposed low-level nuclear waste dump planned for Ward Valley, 20 miles west of Needles, Calif. (HCN, 3/3/97). Events include nonviolence workshops, ecology walks, tours of the proposed dump site and a Spirit Run hosted by…
Paying 1 percent for place
In the ski town of Crested Butte, Colo., purchases of everything from a rack of lamb to rock-climbing hardware will now go toward buying a piece of paradise. Thanks to the efforts of a local sporting goods store, businesses this month began offering a 1 percent surcharge on all purchases for the acquisition of open…
Beekeepers have the patience of Job
Dear HCN, First, on behalf of the beekeeping industry, I want to thank the High Country News for running what is probably the most comprehensive look at Penncap-M since it was introduced in 1974 (HCN, 1/20/97). I would like to clarify two points, however. The first is that, contrary to their claims, Colorado state pesticide…
You can’t trust some greens
Dear HCN, Sam Hitt may describe the Christmas candlelight demonstration as a protest against the Endangered Species Act (Green Hate in the land of enchantment, HCN, 2/3/97), but we were protesting the abuse of the act. It was not a wise-use protest. Organizers of the protest were small, community-based logging and grazing organizations. Indo-Hispano members…
Kudos for some hunters
Dear HCN, Lynne Bama’s “Bringing Back the Bighorn” (HCN, 2/3/97) raises important questions about the wildlife management that private money (hunters’ money) can buy – and threaten – on public lands. However, I’d like to add a positive comment. The Oregon Hunters Association, with 4,500 members, has been a leader in protecting habitat for Rocky…
Defender of fish
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Les Clark has fished the lower Columbia and Willapa Bay for 52 years. He is a third-generation gillnetter and his sons are the fourth. Les Clark: “When we first moved here, paper mills dumped everything in the Columbia River. It finally got so bad…
An optimistic man
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Spencer Beebe is the founder of the nonprofit Ecotrust, based in Portland, Oregon. Spencer Beebe: “To think that we can destroy the planet is a kind of backhanded pride. It reflects an inflated sense of our own importance and a contempt for the power…
A Chicago bank will try to invigorate Willapa Bay
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. After spending nearly two years in the early 1990s scouting Washington’s Willapa Bay for entrepreneurs with plausible ideas for sustainable businesses, Alana Probst of Ecotrust found more than a dozen. But few local financial institutions were willing to make high-risk loans, and the chances…
Dear friends
Like a moth Idaho storyteller and folk singer Rosalie Sorrels sang at Paonia’s Paradise (movie) Theater last week, and thanks to two Stupid Band sound engineers from Montrose, Colo., her voice was clear and powerful. Yet the setting was as intimate as a cabaret, and the audience of 70 or so seemed entranced. Sorrels sings…
Montana Legislature ‘swirlies’ to the right
HELENA, Mont. – Montana’s Republican-dominated Legislature has taken such a sharp turn to the right, its critics say, that it will take moderate Republican Gov. Marc Racicot to keep it from going off the deep end. A slew of bills have been introduced that would weaken environmental protection or make citizen redress more difficult. A…
Activist who survived bomb leaves a legacy
Judi Bari listened to a special call-in show on Mendocino County public radio Feb. 21, and said afterward that it sounded like a funeral eulogy – her own. The Earth First! activist had hosted a weekly “Punch and Judi” public affairs show at the station for years. Now, dying from inoperable breast cancer that had…
Heard around the West
When birds fall from the sky as thick as snowflakes and a stunned moose splays itself over the hood of a car, does this portend something … weird? First, the phenomenon of the falling web-footed grebes: 3,000 of them plummeted to the snow-covered fields of central Utah apparently believing they were dropping safely onto bodies…
Oregon governor says volunteers can save coho
Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, an avid fly fisherman, has landed $30 million to restore coho salmon populations and clean up the state’s degraded streams. In late February, leaders of the legislature and the timber industry announced they would each chip in $15 million for the programs. With that, the Democratic governor ended an intense period…
No nagging or preaching here
Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, Northwest Environment Watch, 1997. 86 pages, illus. $9.95 paperback. When was the last time you heard an environmentalist complain that we’re recycling too much? No street-corner shouter or mealymouthed apologist, John Ryan is the sober, credentialed research director of Seattle-based Northwest…
Will an elusive cat evade federal listing?
When a southern Arizona rancher recently cornered a black-spotted beast the likes of which he’d never seen before, he shot it with his camera. Turns out he’d found a jaguar – the largest cat in the Western Hemisphere and an animal that’s been seen north of the Mexican border only a handful of times in…
Working the Watershed
Washington’s Willapa Alliance melds science, economic development and plenty of time to plot the restoration of a battered coastal ecosystem
A U.S. senator who shoots from the hip
WASHINGTON, D.C. – How fitting it was that true celebrity came to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell not over a vote in Congress, or a speech, or even when he switched parties, but over advertising. Briefly last year, Campbell was the “Banana Republican,” a literal poster boy in advertisements for the Gap-Banana Republic clothing-store chain, whose…
A 1,000-year plan for Willapa Bay
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Alana Probst works for the nonprofit Ecotrust and looks for ways a community can create sustainable businesses. Alana Probst: “When I worked in Eugene, Ore., in the early ’80s, I learned the hard way that recruiting industry can be a nightmare. The whole city…
Drug smuggler’s ranch falls into public lands
CLARK, Wyo. – Stewart Allen Bost had a dream, he told his drug ring buddies while smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into south Florida in 1986. He wanted to own a ranch in Wyoming. So after retiring from the drug trade, he bought a secluded riverfront spread here, then guarded it and his…
A newsman’s overview of Willapa
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For five years editor Matt Winters has followed the efforts of the nonprofit Willapa Alliance for the Chinook Observer, based in Long Beach, Wash. Matt Winters: “Economic development is long-term and hard to nail down sometimes. Groups like the Willapa Alliance can work for…
Agency hopes fees will protect a crowded wilderness
Desolation Wilderness in eastern California is one of those places that doesn’t come close to living up to its name. Its beauty, some say, is only matched by its crowding. Thanks to its accessibility from San Francisco (three-and-a-half hours away), Sacramento (two hours away), and Lake Tahoe (just a few minutes away), the wilderness is…