Environmentalists face upcoming elections with some anxiety.
The battle isn’t over
Dear HCN: Ed Marston may have been right in his Aug. 22 opinion article that environmentalists have won and there has been an amazing conversion at the Forest Service and BLM and the beasts of contention can now lie down together on Mr. Babbitt’s holy middle ground. But where is the evidence? Has he listened…
Bambi takes a hunter safety course
Hey kids, remember when Bambi’s mother got blown away by the hunter? Tom Storm does, and because movies like Bambi have given hunters a bad name, he wants to teach people who don’t hunt all about the role hunters play caring for wildlife. In his book Stormy and The New West, Storm shows Stormy the…
Salmon win again (in court)
Although endangered Snake River salmon appear to be losing their battle with extinction, they continue to win in court. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Sept. 9 that the Northwest Power Planning Council’s plan for restoring Snake River salmon gives too much to industrial interests and too little to tribal and state biologists, reports…
Organizing citizens for the next 20 years
-Where do citizen activists go from here?” asks the 20th anniversary issue of The Workbook, published by the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center. Varying answers come from 19 veteran activists whose essays appear in this special 47-page issue. In New Mexico, Maria Varela says empowering land-based communities to develop their economies is the answer…
Timber industry takes a stand
Stung by the Sierra’s Club’s book, Clearcut, the timber industry has struck back with a glossy 28-page rebuttal. Closer Look: An On-the-Ground Investigation of the Sierra Club’s Book, Clearcut, makes the case that clearcutting can improve forest health. The Sierra Club’s 1993 book presented aerial photographs of nearly 100 denuded sites to represent the industry’s…
Green Classifieds
If you’re a conservationist – budding, seasoned amateur or salaried professional – you may want to check out Earth Work, published 11 times a year by the Student Conservation Association. Every other issue is labeled JobScan and contains nationwide environmental job listings ranging from seasonal internships to career opportunities. Other issues contain interviews with conservation…
Wilderness Act at 30
Is there a difference between a wilderness in a national park and a wilderness in a national forest? Why are cows and sheep allowed to graze in wilderness? Are airports permitted? The Wilderness Act Handbook, reissued by The Wilderness Society, aims to answer these and other questions about this country’s 96 million acre National Wilderness…
A wilderness rates one official boss
A wilderness once run by six national forests will get its own supervisor, budget and district managers – just like a national forest. By centralizing management of Idaho’s 2.3 million acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the Forest Service hopes to save on costs and improve services, says John Twiss, the agency’s national leader…
Uncontrollable coyote
For Wayne Grady, it was on a cold, clear night in eastern Ontario, Canada, when he heard coyotes howling: “The sounds seemed to tremble on the verge of language, to be, almost literally, the voice of the wilderness.” This recollection introduces The World of the Coyote, a glossy book about the canine’s habits and history.…
Parks give free rides
While the Clinton administration proposes charging people more to visit national parks, the National Park Service continues to lose more than $100 million a year in fees it fails to collect. According to an Interior Department audit, the agency took in $68 million in gate and campground fees at the nation’s 367 parks, monuments and…
Come into the forest
-Nature is not only more complex than we think; it is even more complex than we can think,” said biologist Frank Egler, whose observation is one of dozens of quotations gracing a new, permanent exhibit at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore. Called The Changing Forest, the exhibit features ceiling-high trees and indoor and…
A sunny future for nuclear test site?
The Nevada Test Site, home to nuclear weapons testing for more than 40 years, may have a brighter future. Clear skies and high insolation – the amount of solar radiation available at ground level – make the test site one of the best places in North America for capturing solar energy, according to a feasibility…
Witness
-Each species is a masterpiece,” says biologist and writer E.O. Wilson in his introduction to Witness: Endangered Species of North America, a large-format book of 200 stunning black-and-white and color portraits. Photographers Susan Middleton and David Littschwager collaborated with the California Academy of Sciences and Chronicle Books to produce this collection, to try to focus…
Open sesame, grazing boards
The public must now be allowed, if not welcomed, to sit in on Utah’s grazing advisory board meetings. In late June, the state attorney general’s office issued a decision that forces all five of Utah’s BLM advisory boards to open their doors, even to activists such as grazing watchdog Scott Groene of the Southern Utah…
Celebrate the West
Growth, politics and the future of the region will come under scrutiny at a “Celebrate the West” conference in Jackson, Wyo., Nov. 5-7. The conference honors Western historian and author Alvin M. Josephy Jr., who has helped Indians establish their voice in the telling of Western history. The gathering at the National Wildlife Art Museum…
Pay to play
The Southwest Idaho Mountain Biking Association believes mountain bikers should pay to use trails on public lands. The group wants Idaho to enact a $10 annual fee to maintain trails, create new ones and develop trail-etiquette education. Cyclists, who would register any bike that they ride off-road, could influence how funds are spent through advisory…
When are trapped wolves “taken’?
The Bozeman-based Predator Project has asked the federal Animal Damage Control agency to stop trapping coyotes after a gray wolf was found dead in a trap on a Montana ranch. The wolf, which had wandered from a pack in Glacier National Park, died from overheating in late August. Wolves in Montana are protected under the…
Home on the electric range
-How would you like it if you lost your jobs, your home and communities just because of an animal no one’s even heard of? Is that what America’s really about?” Tammy Jo asked every five minutes, every day, until she was unplugged. She is a member of the life-sized robotic ranching family that enthralled visitors…
Babbitt helps a river
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has declared an 11-mile stretch of southern Oregon’s Klamath River a National Scenic River. Babbitt’s decision deals a death blow to the city of Klamath Falls’ proposed Salt Caves hydroelectric project, reports The Oregonian. Oregon citizens voted six years ago to include the free-flowing portion of the river in the state’s…
Nevada Water Forum
University of Nevada professor Jean Ford has published the findings of a series of Nevada Water Forums held around the state last spring. The forums asked: “How should we manage and allocate water to help create the Nevada we want over the next 20 years?” Participants considered maintaining the current system of water allocation under…
Tell the whole population story
Dear HCN: Thanks for the excellent issue on growth in the West (HCN, 9/5/94). In his essay, Dick Lamm fails to divulge the underlying cause of the population growth and immigration: poverty. It seems that Lamm advocates closing the borders to immigration. Although our borders are lined with 10-foot fences and armed guards and bodies…
Reality intrudes on Big Rock Candy Mountain
The bluebirds no longer sing by the lemonade springs: The Big Rock Candy Mountain Resort on the Sevier River near Marysvale, Utah, is bankrupt. The sulphur- and chocolate-colored mountain, celebrated in a song written by Harry McClintock and sung by Burl Ives, attracted visitors from around the world who during the 1950s drank its mineral-rich…
Ranchers, not ranchettes
Dear HCN: One topic not dealt with in your recent special issue on development in the West: the transformation of the private-land component of public-lands ranches to ranchettes. The proliferation of 10- to 40-acre ranchettes with their accompanying traffic, paving, fences, sewer systems, dogs and horses decimates winter range, degrades groundwater quality, accelerates runoff and…
For sale: low mileage bomb factory
For sale: low mileage bomb factory Without much effort, a used-car and scrap dealer in Pocatello, Idaho, got his hands on $10 million worth of equipment needed to build nuclear bombs. In June 1993, a Department of Energy lab sold dealer Tom Johansen most of the major components to make bomb-grade uranium from spent nuclear…
Extremism is on the rise in Whatcom County, Washington
Dear HCN, I am writing to clarify some statements in the article from your 9/15/94 edition re “Rural residents defy Washington law.” I am a Whatcom County resident, a former candidate for public office (County Council, 1993), and the current co-president of the Washington Environmental Council. As a co-founder of Whatcom Watch, a citizens’ networking…
As salmon die, a traveler plants seeds of rage
McCALL, Idaho – Another 1,000 miles, another month gone by. As relentless as the wild salmon he hopes to save, Charles Ray climbs into his weathered brown truck and each month travels about the same distance the fish must navigate between the Pacific Ocean and their spawning grounds in central Idaho. Many of his work…
A creeping plague of crickets is hitched to everything in the world
There have been a few times when my love of nature has been put to the test: a July 4 snowstorm that trapped me in a tent for three days, a two-month bout with poison oak, a gnat attack in Utah. The Mormon cricket plague was no exception. The outbreak began in 1981 in Dinosaur…
As elections near, green hopes wilt
Two years ago environmentalists were flying high following the election of President Bill Clinton, Al Gore and a cadre of Democrats in Congress. Surely this was the time to reform grazing and mining on public lands, designate millions of acres of new wilderness, toughen laws protecting water and wildlife. But the brief window of opportunity…
Native Americans move ahead politically
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, As elections near, green hopes wilt. Four years ago, Navajos living in the southeast corner of Utah set out to capture county government. A Democratic slate of five Navajos and one Cherokee campaigned for sheriff, county clerk, county assessor, county treasurer, county recorder and…
Dear friends
On the green beat When journalists who cover the environment get together as 450 did Oct. 6-9 in Provo and Sundance, Utah, they tend to talk like underdogs. They tell how frustrating it is to sell complex green-beat stories to editors who ask for 12 inches of copy, or how tough it is to compete…
Missing: another tribal environmentalist
In a case reminiscent of the mysterious death of Navajo activist Leroy Jackson, violence is suspected in the disappearance of an outspoken environmental activist on Arizona’s Gila River Indian Reservation. Fred Walking Badger, who had rallied opposition to pesticide use on the Gila River Reservation, set out to run a brief errand May 21 near…
The progress of freewheeling consensus jeopardized as feds pull back
Early in 1993, some Oregon folks who shared little but a fierce love for their valley met to talk things over on Jack Shipley’s deck high above the Applegate River. Dwain Cross, owner of an Ashland logging company, wondered if there was a way the federal government could resume selling timber despite court injunctions blocking…
Yellowstone fires produce new trees, not meadows
Crouched over a metal screen like a gold rush prospector and peering through its grid at the forest floor, Cindi Persichetty calls out what she sees through each square-inch opening: “Line four: moss, moss, litter, seedling, seedling, seedling.” Another Idaho State University graduate student, Mike O’Hara, sits on a log recording the findings on a…