President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt have a new strategy for protecting and managing the public lands, encouraging citizens and politicans to implement national conservation values in a regional and local way.
Montana Wilderness Association
The Montana Wilderness Association’s annual conference will be held Dec. 3-4 in Butte. Plans for the gathering include a slide show of Montana’s wildest places and an update on efforts to inventory the state’s roadless areas. Write MWA at P.O. Box 635, Helena, MT 59624 (406/443-7350), or e-mail: mwa@wildmontana.org. This article appeared in the print…
Montana Audubon
Montana Audubon will be offering grants totaling more than $1,000 in the year 2000. The money will be awarded to individuals or nonprofit organizations whose project will directly benefit wildlife in Montana. Preference will be given to projects involving non-game wildlife, from birds to invertebrates, and their habitats. Interested applicants should call 406/443-3949 to obtain…
Frank Church lecture series
The late Idaho Sen. Frank Church, an architect of the Clean Air Act and the Wilderness Act, is often hailed as an environmental hero. The Environmental Resource Center of Ketchum, Idaho, will pay tribute to Church’s spirit at its first annual Frank Church lecture series, Dec. 4 in Sun Valley. Speakers include Assistant Secretary of…
Score one for the owl
A federal judge has clamped down on permits for new subdivisions, roads, power lines, shopping malls, and other projects in the habitat of the endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl in and around Tucson. Many of Tucson’s suburbs continued to approve subdivisions after the pygmy-owl was listed in 1997, despite a county-wide effort to preserve the owl’s…
California Wildlands 2000 Conference
Supporters of California wilderness are invited to participate in the California Wildlands 2000 Conference, co-sponsored by the California Wilderness Coalition, the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and Friends of the River. The May 5-7 conference at California State University in Sacramento will focus on building support for an initiative to inventory all of the land…
Wilderness water wins round in court
In what Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, calls a “devastating blow to Idaho’s water sovereignty,” almost 3,000 claims to water rights upstream of Idaho wilderness areas were placed in doubt by an Oct. 1 ruling of the Idaho Supreme Court. The court ruled 3-2 that when the federal government established wilderness areas in Idaho, it also…
Wolves at Colorado’s door?
During a recent presentation at the University of Colorado by a Boulder-based wolf recovery organization, Sinapu, a captive-raised wolf named Rami was introduced to the audience. As Rami calmly walked up and down the aisles with her handler, sniffing boots and licking faces, audience members sat in awed silence. Wolves, like many other predators, are…
Court enforces a healthy environment
A provision in Montana’s constitution guaranteeing residents a “clean and healthful environment” has as much bite as bark, thanks to a recent Montana Supreme Court ruling. In October, the court unanimously agreed that that the constitution protects the state’s resources from actual, proven damage, and from potential harm as well. “Our constitution does not require…
Wolff campaigns for wolves
For nine years, New Mexican Pat Wolff has been working to shut down publicly funded programs that kill predators and other problem animals (HCN, 4/27/98). Last year, the organization she founded, New West Research, won a lawsuit requiring the government to release names of ranchers who get federal help to control predators. Now, she’s touring…
A lasting chemical legacy
When a Missoula Rail Link train derailed April 11, 1996, ruptured tank cars exposed suddenly wakened residents of Alberton, Mont., to 129,000 pounds of chlorine gas and 17,000 gallons of potassium cresylate (HCN, 8/3/98). More than 1,000 people were evacuated from the western Montana town that night, and most didn’t return until health and emergency…
The Wayward West
New York-based copper producer Asarco Inc. said Oct. 25 that it has signed an agreement to merge with Mexico’s largest copper company, Grupo Mexico (HCN, 4/13/98). Total value of the deal is $1.18 billion. The copper industry has been consolidating in reaction to a global oversupply of the metal and record low prices earlier this…
Keeping Glacier Park intact
Four years of work, months of public review and a $1.5 million investment have paid off for Glacier National Park planners. Last summer, the Park Service signed the General Management Plan that will guide Glacier’s resource management for the next few decades. Project leader Mary Riddle says the plan reflects people’s desire to keep the…
Wising up to whirling disease
Scientists are considering new management strategies for whirling disease, which has been attacking fish in the West since the early 1990s. The disease has spread from one Western river to the next, eluding attempts at a cure and draining funds from state game and fish department budgets. Trout get the disease by eating worms infected…
Mining may need some brakes
Outdated federal mining regulations cause environmental disasters, says the Mineral Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Its 32-page report, Six Mines, Six Mishaps: Six Case Studies of What’s Wrong With Federal and State Hardrock Mining Regulations and Recommendations for Reform, describes a wide range of mining sites that have “slipped through the loopholes of regulations,” says…
USFS plans for more planning
The Forest Service proposes to improve national forests by reshaping the 15-year management plans that guide them. The agency’s draft rule says plans must emphasize ecological balance and sustainable use of forests, boost public involvement during the planning process, and shift some decision-making from regional and national offices to forest-level managers. The current system of…
The sacred comes home
In the spring of 1991, the Hopi and Navajo Nations asked Sotheby’s auction house in New York City to remove three ceremonial masks from its annual “Fine American Indian Arts’ auction. Sotheby’s refused the requests, Hopi and Navajo dismay got national coverage, and Elizabeth Sackler, a native New Yorker with a Ph.D. in public history,…
A road-ripper’s report
-The Road-Ripper’s Guide to Wildland Road Removal takes up where the first four Road-Ripper’s Guides left off. While the first four explain legal and political strategies for challenging different land-management agencies to close and remove roads, this guide explains how to make sure those roads are removed correctly.” * Bethanie Walder In 1997, Forest Service…
Life near Rocky Flats
A new major study looks at the public-health effects of Rocky Flats, 16 miles from downtown Denver, where triggers for nuclear bombs were built for more than 35 years. Funded by the federal Department of Energy and administered by the Colorado Department of Public Health, Historical Public Exposure Studies says public risks were low. John…
Cowboy Poetry Gathering
Every January for the last 15 years, ranchers, poets, musicians, gear makers and Western enthusiasts have headed to Elko, Nev., for the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The Jan. 22-29, 2000, event, expected to draw some 10,000 people, will explore ranch culture and cowboy tradition. Tickets range from $15 to $100 for a package. Call toll free,…
A new road for the public lands
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature story. In early October, President Clinton visited the Washington and Jefferson National Forest. From that green pulpit, he asked us to tell him how to manage 40 million to 60 million acres of roadless national forest land: Do we want the clean water they produce, the wildlife…
Dear Friends
Signed, sealed and (maybe) delivered The staff at High Country News does the trivial part of producing a newspaper: We contact writers and photographers, we edit, we lay out, we haul the papers back from the printer, we slap on 21,000-plus address labels, and then we truck the ton or so of forest product over…
Judge topples small timber sales
HOTCHKISS, Colo. – Allen Todd has been in the timber business on Colorado’s Western Slope for about a quarter of a century, and his small but tidy custom sawmill outside the town of Hotchkiss reflects his years of experience. Looking like oversized games of Jenga, neat towers of square timbers, which will soon reinforce shafts…
Can a hog farm bring home the bacon?
MELLETTE COUNTY, S.D. – In this vast, largely empty sea of rolling prairie grass, where little is shiny and new, the sun mirroring off the galvanized silver roof panels of 24 enormous, brand-new hog barns is a remarkable sight. It’s the start of the largest-ever development on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. North Dakota-based Bell Farms…
Floyd brings on a hurricane of hog waste
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”Can a hog farm bring home the bacon?“ Hurricane Floyd vividly demonstrated the downside to factory farming. Televised images of bloated hog and poultry carcasses and vivid accounts of a floating soup of agricultural, human and industrial contamination…
On the Missouri, the middle grounds gets soggy
Only a decade ago, animosity between states in the Missouri River’s upper and lower basins was out of control. If the states weren’t suing each other over Missouri River flows, they were attacking the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for that agency’s management of the river system. South Dakota Gov. William Janklow grumbled that the…
The Forest Service sets off into uncharted territory
TARGHEE NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho – Jim Gerber is staring me in the eye and he doesn’t look happy. He’s tall and lean, wears his gray hair clipped in a buzz cut, and he’s angry. The U.S. Forest Service has dug itself into a hole, he says, and he’s hell-bent on digging the agency out, and…
A convert to conservation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Shawn Regnerus is a native Montanan, a hunter, angler, hiker and a former lover of dirt bikes. Regnerus, 30, grew up in rural Amsterdam, near Bozeman, where his father worked as a high school teacher. He later studied law at the University of Montana…
One forest takes on roads
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. On the Clearwater National Forest in north-central Idaho, a group of hikers follows a Forest Service tour guide along a creek not far from where Lewis and Clark crossed the Bitterroot Mountains. Under clear August skies, they discover a different sort of pioneering effort.…
ORVs run wild and free in Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Buffed-up and bristling with rock-banging, wall-climbing extras, the 1999 Grand Cherokee Jeep Laredo with all the bells and winches will set you back a cool $34,000. And you may need the power of a Grand Cherokee to conquer the Moab, Utah, trail dubbed the…
Heard around the West
Homes on the range: photos by High Country News readers This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard around the West.