The new report, “Water in the West: The Challenge for the Next Century,” is a remarkably far-sighted federal study that should serve as both a mission statement and a wake-up call about water management in the arid West.
Fees please visitors
Land-management agencies call new user fees an “unqualified success’ and they’re asking Congress to make them permanent. During its first season on more than 200 sites around the country, the fee program raised $53.5 million. Before the trial fees got under way, public correspondence ran about 2-to-1 against, saying they discouraged low-income and local users…
Pat Tucker and Bruce Waide respond
Dear HCN, A complete review of the situation is the subject of a book, not an article, but in response to Mr. Macfarlane’s more salient complaints: 1) There was no reliable documentation of wolves breeding in central Idaho, despite the efforts of trained, professional biologists to find them. If wolves had, as Mr. Macfarlane claims,…
But trouble the Mountaineers
Mount Rainier National Park bypassed public discussion and sprang a surprise fee on backcountry visitors recently, drawing a protest letter from the Mountaineers, the Seattle-based conservation group. The Mountaineers says the new hierarchy of fees is too steep, especially for short visits. Two visitors might pay $10 to enter the park, $20 to camp in…
Holy hyperbole!
Dear HCN, As a fan of fire (and past pulaski-wielding partisan of that subgenus “flamebo heroicus’), I read the article about early fires in the West by Mark Matthews with great interest (HCN, 5/25/98). The various signs and symptoms he surveyed were familiar: “I’ve never seen things burn this well, this early in the year.”…
Motorizing Montana’s trails
The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Forest Service give motorized trail projects the go-ahead without scrutiny, according to The Montana State Trails Program: Motorizing Montana’s National Forest Trails, a 13-page report by the Predator Project in Bozeman. Widening trails significantly damages habitat, but agencies dismiss it as “repair and maintenance,”…
How tamarisk tripped a senator
Dear HCN, Only a couple of years ago Utah Sen. Bob Bennett appeared at a town meeting and, in response to some agitated inquiries, produced a magnificent color photograph of a green canyon in southern Utah. This was his proof that the area was even greener now than it was in another photograph of the…
Utah Wilderness Coalition
The Utah Wilderness Coalition of 155 conservation groups is taking its show on the road. Open houses explaining its re-inventory of potential wilderness on Bureau of Land Management lands will be held in Ogden, July 1, and Salt Lake City, July 8, both at 7 p.m. Later meetings are scheduled for San Francisco, Seattle, Denver,…
The same beast stalks the West
Dear HCN, Thanks for Jon Margolis’ piece exposing the West’s new menace (HCN, 4/27/98); for far too long, the recreation/tourism industry has been treated with kid gloves, wrongly presumed environmentally benign. Yet, while I applaud questioning the motives of the American Recreation Coalition, there is hidden in Margolis’ analysis a seriously flawed and potentially destructive…
Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks
Winter recreation is a hot topic at Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks as well as at the five-mile John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway that connects them. To involve the public in an upcoming environmental impact statement, open houses have begun in Idaho, with more meetings set for Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota and Washington,…
It is cruel to fool a fish
Dear HCN, Ted Williams in his essay on fishing said that “What so offends the animal-rights crowd about catch-and-release is that there can be no motive other than fun” (HCN, 5/25/98). This statement, while true, only gives half of the reason. The other is much more important and severe. When a fish is hooked and…
Wisdom of the West: Designing our Future Together
The Wisdom of the West: Designing our Future Together, a conference in Wenatchee, Wash., sponsored by the Planning Association of Washington and others, and to be held July 29-31, invites those interested in Western planning to participate in dozens of programs such as “Ethics for the everyday planner & commissioner” and “Stream corridor management –…
Tribe seeks its key peak
Tohono O’odham Indians have long gazed up at the soaring tower of Baboquivari Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., with mingled reverence and consternation. They have never accepted a 1917 boundary survey that placed the east side of the tribe’s most sacred mountain on federal land, outside their main reservation. Now, the tribe hopes the dispute…
Aspen Center for Environmental Studies
The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies hosts a summer of naturalist-guided programs for kids and adults. Participants can choose from activities such as exploring beaver ponds at sunset or riding a gondola to the summit of Aspen mountain. Call 970/925-5756 or visit the Web site at http://www.aspen.com/aces. This article appeared in the print edition of…
The Wayward West
In early June, GOP leaders in the House promised to end logging subsidies for the timber industry, agreeing with the Clinton administration that “road credits’ should die. Soon after, the Forest Service, for the second time in its history, posted a number for what its road-building program really lost last year: $88 million. Jet-boat enthusiasts…
Alaska Wildlife Alliance
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an Anchorage-based nonprofit, is alert to wildlife protection issues throughout its enormous state. Since its start 20 years ago as part of Greenpeace Alaska, the alliance has voiced the opinions of the state’s non-hunters in its quarterly, The Spirit. “Protecting wildlife and their habitat is the bottom line for us. We…
Community Strategic Training Initiative
The eighth annual Community Strategic Training Initiative will be held July 30-Aug. 2 at Reed College in Portland, Ore., with over 50 workshops offered on community organizing. Workshops include Confronting the Anti-Indian Movement and Initiative Campaigns that Win. Registration deadline is July 10. Contact the Western States Center, P.O. Box 40305, Portland, Oregon 97240 (503/228-8866);…
More internal fire at the Forest Service
NEW MEXICO More internal fire at the Forest Service The list of resignations in the Forest Service’s Southwest region is growing (HCN, 3/30/98). Renee Galeano-Popp, a career agency biologist, stepped down from her position at Lincoln National Forest in late April, saying in a letter to the incoming regional forester that “the Forest Service has…
Victory for the bull trout
Compelled by continuing litigation from environmentalists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed two populations of bull trout as threatened – one in Oregon’s Klamath River Basin and the other in the huge Columbia River Basin, reaching into Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. The legal battle was waged by three nonprofit groups – Alliance for…
Rancher stonewalls an agency
The condition of a grazing allotment in southern Wyoming is at the center of a dispute between the National Wildlife Federation and the Bureau of Land Management. The wildlife group’s attorney, Tom Lustig, is protesting the agency’s temporary extension of a grazing permit to rancher Wright Dickenson. Lustig says the impact of 1,000 cows on…
Leeches and cod liver oil
Ever wonder if you could have survived the measles epidemics and the streets that ran with sewage in the West’s early days? An exhibit of over 200 artifacts from the 1880s to World War II at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore., might test your imagination. The exhibit features an “aroma interactive” of Native…
Trees and children win
How much are 30,000 acres of forest worth? Washington conservation groups and the state’s Department of Natural Resources are about to find out. On April 8, the two sides settled a trio of lawsuits over the Loomis State Forest in north-central Washington by agreeing to let the conservation groups pay to remove a chunk of…
Judge disciplines L-P
Judge disciplines L-P At a criminal trial last month in Denver, a federal judge fined the Louisiana-Pacific Corp. a record $37 million for breaking environmental laws at its Olathe, Colo., waferboard plant and for selling a product whose quality didn’t meet the company’s claims. The fine is the latest chapter in the plant’s stormy history.…
In search of Mount Rainier’s power
What is it like to become obsessed with a mountain? In The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, Bruce Barcott describes how he circled the mountain on foot and interviewed mountaineers, climbing guides, priests, historians and scientists before he and his father attempted to scale the country’s highest volcano. Barcott, a…
Forest blowdown causes storm
The Forest Service is preparing to log nearly 3,000 acres of an October spruce and fir blowdown in Colorado’s Routt National Forest (HCN, 11/24/97). The risk of wildfire and the potential for a spruce beetle outbreak in the blowdown make the North Fork salvage sale an “emergency situation,” the regional forester says – one that…
Mike Dombeck – as seen from the ground
Dear HCN, I just read your April 27 story about Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. As a member of a Forest Service family that has been stuck in Idaho for almost seven years, I’d like to add a field perspective to opinions about Mr. Dombeck. The direction that keeps coming down from Washington, D.C., is…
Restoring the Roaring Fork
The Roaring Fork River Valley in western Colorado has a friend – a nonprofit conservancy created to protect the river and its tributaries. From its headwaters at Independence Pass at 12,900 feet, the Roaring Fork flows 45 miles northwest through the booming town of Aspen on its way to the Colorado River. The conservancy, founded…
Entrenched agency culture is hard to change
Dear HCN, Is there any hope that change will come from within either the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service? My naive answer as a former federal public-lands agency employee used to be “yes,” if enough conservationists and a few good leaders entered the ranks. Now, after 20 years, my answer is a feeble…
Lonely Art
In a crumbling, long-abandoned building in the desert of eastern Utah, anonymous artists have created one of the world’s loneliest art exhibits. “Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal,” is scrawled ominously above a gutted upholstered chair inside a small building called the White Buffalo Bar. Cowboy boots, stuck upside down on…
Wolves deserve protection
Dear HCN, Pat Tucker and Bruce Weide’s article on wolves contains many errors (HCN, 4/13/98). Wolves were not “occasional loners’ in central Idaho’s wilds, prior to the recent release, as their article asserts. There is ample evidence that wolves did inhabit the Greater Salmon-Selway Ecosystem, dating back to the first confirmed sightings from the late…
Western water: Why it’s dirty and in short supply
Note: in two sidebar articles that accompany this feature story, rancher Patrick O’Toole and chair of the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission Denise Fort share their views in their own words. First, you notice the coyotes. Then shadows swirl near shore – a group of razorback suckers, an endangered species, moving in to spawn.…
This report could destroy irrigated agriculture
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Patrick O’Toole raises cattle, sheep and hay near the Wyoming-Colorado border. He serves on the Wyoming Open Space Committee, the Colorado River Coordinating Council and is a director of the Family Farm Alliance. The lone agricultural member of the Western Water Policy Review Advisory…
We wanted to democratize Western water
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Denise Fort, a faculty member at the University of New Mexico’s School of Law, chairs the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission. She is a former director of New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Division and is a member of the National Research Council’s Water, Science…
Dear Friends
A “genius” in Arizona Composers, artists, writers and historians have all won those coveted John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius’ grants, but Bill McDonald, 46, is the first rancher to receive a hefty $285,000 for his efforts to preserve huge stretches of undeveloped land in southern Arizona. McDonald, along with other ranchers, such as…
Locals stand behind an aging dam
For years, irrigators who benefit from the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in southern Oregon have resisted removal of the salmon-blocking structure. In the past, when the district’s board members agreed to removal, local voters removed those members. Now, irrigators have won another reprieve from federal and state pressure, thanks to a court…
Heard around the West
Maybe it had to happen. The “green glow” emanating from cool corporations in the laid-back Northwest has faded, reports the Los Angeles Times, with just the merest hint of gloating. There’s gigantic Microsoft, targeted by the Justice Department for monopolizing computer software, and Starbucks, assailed for cruelty to songbirds for removing shade trees from coffee…
In the Sonoran Desert, a lesson already learned
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Twenty years ago, cattle roamed the open range near here, and the only sound during the night, besides coyotes, was a car bumping over a cattleguard on north Scottsdale Road. The metal strips hummed like a stroked guitar in the stillness of a desert night. Now the cattleguard is gone, and the…
It rhymes with scourge
I was out weeding my native plants garden when a houseguest chided me about the ethnic cleansing that seemed to be happening there. Targets were dandelions, salsifies, thistles, chicories, henbit and donkeytail spurge, which try to crowd out naturalized grasses and bee-balm, penstemon and Jacob’s ladder. I have the satisfaction of knowing that what I…
Activists join forces against mining law
NEAR DURANGO, Colo. – Some of us at this conference for mining activists are feeling as if we’ve just been sent to summer camp. The main building of the former silver mining camp, with its long wooden picnic tables, picture-window view of San Juan National Forest and cafeteria meals, is making people nostalgic. “Every time…
A lively memoir out of the National Park Service
For a variety of reasons, I have been reading about the National Park Service – reports, histories, and bilious (but also far-seeing) polemics like Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone. They’re useful but tend to be lifeless. Now we have a restorative potion to go with the reports and histories: a book that breathes life…