In California, the Forest Service issues a revolutionary management plan for the Sierra Nevada’s forests, putting the health of trees and wildlife before that of the timber industry.
Who mans forest flows?
NATION Streams on Forest Service land may soon be a little more vulnerable. For the past eight years, the Forest Service has been able to insist on “bypass flows,” or minimum instream flows, when towns and other water users divert streams on national forests. The agency says it has the right and responsibility to demand…
The wild West lives
Jack Hunter abandons his Sierra Club lobbying job in D.C. and a marriage gone sour, eager to settle on life’s placid surface near the Diablo National Forest of southwestern New Mexico. He takes up horseshoeing and jumps into a meaningless affair, enjoying the respite from strenuous work for hopeless causes. But then he meets a…
Four-wheelin’ for fee
COLORADO Known as the “Jeep Capital of the World,” Canyon Creek, just south of Ouray, Colo., leads four-wheel-drive enthusiasts into alpine areas that are world-renowned for their abundant wildflowers and sweeping vistas. But if you’re planning to visit, don’t forget your wallet. This summer, the Forest Service has begun charging $5 per vehicle to enter…
Dangerous parks
National park rangers say inadequate funding is adding new risks to their jobs. Crime in parks is on the rise, and most parks don’t have the money to beef up their law enforcement. To publicize the problem, the U.S. Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police has listed the top 10 most dangerous…
Small steps for change
A third-generation Coloradan, Jessica Sherwood remembers returning to her hometown of Boulder after a 10-year hiatus in Washington, D.C. “I actually cried,” she recalls, on seeing the once-pastoral corridor between Denver and Boulder transformed into an almost continuous mass of houses and malls. Determined to make a difference, Sherwood decided to tout alternative transportation to…
Arctic Refuge
“When a lone wolf howls it sounds distinctively alone. When a pack howls, the sounds harmonize and mix until the voices of a few blend into the chorus of a multitude. A call answered and passed on. A call to gather.” – Lentfer & Servid in Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony That the call…
Fire plan gets a scolding
NATION The $1.6 billion National Fire Plan, approved by Congress last September, promised a cooperative, interagency approach to fire management (HCN, 9/25/00: Fires bring on a flood of federal funds). But the government’s in-house watchdog says that promise is far from fulfilled. In his testimony before a House subcommittee on July 31, General Accounting Office…
Harvesting ancient farming
Western agriculture is a risky business. Even if crops survive the frequent summer droughts, their soil can be washed away by fast and furious monsoon rains. Brook LeVan, co-director of the nonprofit Sustainable Settings in Aspen, Colo., wants to help farmers avoid this annual double jeopardy. This summer, with the help of two teachers and…
Rainbow family vs. environment
Dear HCN, I find the “essay” on the back of the July 30 issue full of hypocrisy. Writer Bill Cope would have the reader believe that the Rainbow Family of Living Light was a very environmentally conscious group. Come on, now. I saw firsthand what that group did to the lands of the national forest…
Yucca Mountain coverage biased
Dear HCN, Nobody has more distrust of the government in affairs radioactive than I do. My credentials are impeccable. My brother and I both had occurrences of thyroid cancer 20 years after leaving Richland, Wash., where we grew up at the Hanford plant in the ’40s and ’50s. Most likely we were contaminated by drinking…
Minnow melee continues
NEW MEXICO As the battle for scarce Rio Grande water pits central New Mexico farmers against the three-inch silvery minnow (HCN, 8/28/00: Shaky truce on the Rio Grande), a controversial federal-state agreement is aiming to ensure the survival of both species. Under the three-year plan, signed June 29, the state will sell 100,000 acre-feet of…
The Latest Bounce
Cara might yet become the girl she used to be (HCN, 11/6/00: CARA’s not quite the girl she used to be). Last year, Congress whittled the $3 billion Conservation and Reinvestment Act, or CARA, down to a $1.6 billion appropriation in the Interior budget. Now, a resuscitated CARA has been approved by the House Resources…
Neighbors get nasty in New Mexico
Is Deirdre Wolf a martyr or a menace?
Drawing a line in the mud
Coloradans weed out tamarisk before it takes over
Sierra Framework treads between protection, treatment
While everyone agrees that the Sierra Nevada’s vast forests and its creatures are in trouble, no one knows for sure how the U.S. Forest Service can restore the range to a condition that inspires rather than alarms – not even the authors of the agency’s 3,100-page Sierra Nevada Framework. The usual characters are present -…
Heard around the West
One hundred and ninety million years ago, give or take a few millennia, a meat-eating dinosaur walked to an oasis in a place now close to Vernal, Utah, and bent down for a drink. The 12-foot-tall beast was heavy, and its clawed, three-toed feet sank deeply into what is now wonderfully preserved sandstone rock. Scores…
The way it works
The final Sierra Nevada Framework is the guiding planning document for 11 million acres of national forest lands in California. It covers the Humboldt-Toiyabe, Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Tahoe, Eldorado, Stanislaus, Sierra, Inyo and Sequoia national forests, and the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. In a nutshell, the plan will: Reduce the total allowed timber harvest…
A plan for the Sierra: 20 years in the making
1981 The U.S. Forest Service starts to consider the impact of intensive logging on the California spotted owl. 1984 The agency recognizes the California spotted owl as a “sensitive” species, vulnerable to extinction. 1991 Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson writes a series on the forest-health crisis in the Sierra Nevada. “The Sierra in Peril” wins…
A former oilman says no to drilling in the Arctic
I come from a long line of Texas earth-divers: prospectors, trappers and explorers who have spent their lives in the successful pursuit of oil and gas. I am proud of our part in supplying the world with energy – in feeding this country – and am proud of how today’s geologists have survived the volatility…
Restoring the Range of Light
In California, the Forest Service sets fires, protects big trees and owls, and leaves loggers in the lurch
Modern-day Muir copes with victory
Craig Thomas, 56, has been hanged in effigy, had his property vandalized and his life threatened. Yet he says he feels like the luckiest guy living in the Sierra Nevada: “I actually get paid to keep this mountain range intact,” he says. Thomas works for the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, a coalition of 72…
Dear Friends
About this issue Writers for this special issue about the Forest Service’s Framework for the Sierra Nevada’s 11 national forests researched and wrote their stories while taking a course in environmental journalism with Ed and Betsy Marston, the publisher and then-editor of High Country News. The couple taught the course at the Graduate School of…
Fire managers play a subtle new game
SPRINGVILLE, Calif. – “I’ve been a pyromaniac ever since I lit my shirt on fire when I was five,” says Brent Skaggs. He’s not quite kidding. Thirty-four years later, Skaggs still plays with fire, but now he has two fire engines, 40 drip torches, a crew of 22 firefighters and he carries a million-dollar liability…
Sierra loggers get the ax
EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. – It is not yet 10 a.m. on a rainy spring morning, and a computer in the Wetsel-Oviatt sawmill already reads 797 trees turned into boards since dawn. Sawdust fills the air as workers wearing ear plugs roll white fir through an assembly line of blades. This mill in the hills…
Showdown on the Nevada range
Ranchers trespass on public lands, says the BLM
‘The fire group is in a real building process’
Berni Bahro, 43, directed the fire analysis team for the Sierra Nevada Framework. He is a fire specialist in the Region 5 office of the Forest Service in Sacramento, Calif. “The information that we used to plan fuels management for the Framework was the best we’ve ever had. But at the site-specific level, there are…
Utah town goes ‘U.N. free’
Controversial law highlights growing culture clash in Utah’s land of Dixie
Forest Plan has plenty of appeal(s)
VALLEJO, Calif. – If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Sierra Nevada Framework did something terrible to burglar-alarm companies. The staff at Giotto’s Alarm Tech in Tulare, Calif., accounts for 10 appeals – more than the Forest Service received from all the timber companies combined. “We’ve got a real activist office here,” says the…
A-LP gets federal A-OK
Colorado’s huge water project poised for funding
Cows aren’t wanted here
Dick O’Sullivan stands in a lush meadow near Mount Lassen. What he sees is excellent habitat for an uncommon and drab little bird called the willow flycatcher. It’s also plush green forage for his cows. He thinks there’s room for both. The upper third of the meadow is Forest Service land. The lower third is…
Career bureaucrat blazes a new trail
By nature and by training, Brad Powell, regional forester for all of California, could never be called a “bunny-lover.” Yet the forest plan he signed on Jan. 12 has most environmentalists cheering. Activists were happy because the Sierra Nevada Framework is more concerned with critters such as owls than with timber volumes. It sets fires…
Timber towns search for a new economy
NORTH FORK, Calif. – Hidden away in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, this town of 3,500 lies 16 miles from the nearest major road. Occupying, as the sign on the roadside says, “the exact center of California,” it’s a nice place to live: The air is crisp, everyone knows everyone else and the oak- and fir-covered…