San Diego, Calif., adopted its groundbreaking Multiple Species Conservation Program to protect wildlife habitat while allowing for continued community growth – but critics say endangered wildlife is the loser in the deal.
Also in this issue: Critics say it’s not a coincidence that the Bush administration announces bad environmental news – like the recent rollback of mine-tailings limits – late on Friday afternoons, when media coverage is sparse.
Activists raise a stink over outhouse
In the latest skirmish over a long-disputed dirt road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Elko county-rights activists are fuming over the Forest Service’s decision to clean a remote outhouse. The county and the Forest Service have clashed since 1995, when the agency closed a 1.5-mile stretch of South Canyon Road after most of it was…
Federal report supports Klamath farmers
Farmers in the Klamath Basin found vindication in a National Research Council report, released Oct. 21, which says the solution to Klamath’s protracted water struggles lies not in irrigation shutoffs but in sweeping repairs to an out-of-balance landscape. In 2001, federal biologists reserved so much water for fish farmers nearly rioted. But there is no…
Farmworker protection agency misrepresented
“Harvesting Poison,” (HCN, 9/29/03: Harvesting Poison) failed to mention or accurately report the efforts of the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) to protect farmworkers from pesticide exposure. WSDA places a high priority on farmworker protection. For more than a decade, WSDA’s Farmworker Education Program has provided Spanish-language pesticide safety training to agricultural workers and…
Misquoted on pesticides
I am compelled to respond to “Harvesting Poison” (HCN, 9/29/03: Harvesting Poison), as the article misrepresents what I said in my interview with the author. I did not say that every time I go out I see people spraying too close to unprotected workers. What I said was that every time I go out I…
The author responds
Overall, I stand behind my story, “Harvesting Poison” (HCN, 9/29/03: Harvesting Poison). While the Washington Department of Agriculture has done some work to address the safety of illegal farm workers, these people remain a largely invisible, and neglected, workforce. Reading Mr. Zamora’s letter, one might think the two of us were in different rooms when…
Follow-up
Just say “no” to greenhouse gases. New Mexico has joined the growing number of states that have sued the Environmental Protection Agency for weakening the federal Clean Air Act (HCN, 10/27/03: West Coast states tackle global warming). So far, 13 states, 20 cities and 14 environmental or public health groups have decided to fight the…
Mucking around San Francisco Bay
Judging by its scenic photos of bridges, ships and seals, San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary is the kind of book a Bayside resident might keep on her coffee table as a reminder of why her ludicrous rent is worth it. But the book is more than a Bayside lovefest: It’s also a reckoning…
Calendar
The Great Old Broads for Wilderness just printed a new booklet for public lands lovers. “Dung to Dust: How cattle have grazed our public lands to death” includes tales from seven writers who have “camped in cow poop.” www.greatoldbroads.org 970-385-9577 The University of Colorado Natural Resources Law Center and the Colorado School of Mines are…
Bee kind, please redesign
If you dread mowing the lawn, maybe you should just give it up altogether next year. Native pollinator insects — bees, butterflies and others — are declining across the nation because of land-management practices that range from vast single-crop farm fields to manicured urban lawns. This is very bad news, because despite their tiny size,…
Agriculture’s wild side
It’s no coincidence that farming and ranching are at least partly responsible for a huge number of federal endangered species listings. When the goal of agriculture is to create monocultures of corn, soy, wheat, hogs or cattle, biodiversity loses. But that doesn’t mean modern agriculture has to be incompatible with healthy ecosystems. In his new…
State picks up federal slack on perchlorate
In late September, outgoing California Gov. Gray Davis signed two bills into law to protect drinking water supplies from perchlorate, a toxic chemical used in rocket fuel and explosives (HCN, 4/28/03: Cold War toxin seeps into Western water). It could be 2008 before the federal Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate,…
Park expansion threatened
A ranch that promised to be an important addition to Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills is now for sale on the open market. The 5,555-acre Casey Ranch would increase the park’s land base by 20 percent, and add an 85-year-old homestead and a “buffalo jump” — a cliff from which American Indian…
Behind the scenes, pressure and doubt
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” The Center for Biological Diversity and its allies weren’t the only ones who found serious problems with the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Program. Inside the Fish and Wildlife Service, two biologists, who have since left the agency, harbored private…
Vernal pools fall to a shopping mall
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” The first test of San Diego’s Multiple Species Conservation Program came little more than a year after it was passed. Cousins MarketCenters Inc. wanted to build a 453,000 square-foot shopping center and an apartment complex just north of downtown, on…
Amid smoke and sprawl, some success
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “San Diego’s Habitat Triage.” It has taken six years for public officials in and around San Diego to acquire 30,000 acres of private land for a regional endangered species preserve. It took one week for almost 80 percent of that preserve to go up…
San Diego’s Habitat Triage
To save room for a raft of imperiled species, one city is making sacrifices to the gods of sprawl. Not everyone thinks it’s going to be a happy ending
Conservation in an imperfect world
In the three decades since it was signed into law, the Endangered Species Act has had some remarkable successes: Wolves have made a comeback in the Northern Rockies; bald eagles have rebounded. But the ESA is an imperfect tool. The endangered species list is often likened to the hospital emergency room, and the comparison is…
Dear Friends
Radio Special Radio High Country News will return to the airwaves in mid-November for a special one-hour show called “Atomic Tales: Living in the Nuclear West.” The program will explore our region’s cradle-to-grave relationship with all things nuclear — a relationship that reaches from the dawn of the nuclear age to the burial of radioactive…
Freaky Fridays with the Bush administration
Officials deliver bad news on the environment when no one is listening
A grizzly attack that was bound to happen
One of the most egotistical notions humans have is that we can “commune” with unpredictable wild animals. News headlines over the last couple of weeks have revealed the depth of our folly. During Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas nightclub act, a tiger turned on trainer Roy Horn. Doctors say Roy remains in serious condition. And…
A revival on Hart Mountain
The antelope refuge looks better than it has in decades, but managers seem stuck in the past
On a new national monument, has an agency been cowed?
Can cows coexist with rare plant communities in a national monument? That is what President Clinton asked the Bureau of Land Management to determine when he created the 52,947-acre Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in 2000. The monument, east of Ashland, Ore., is an ecological crossroads where three distinct bioregions – the Siskiyou Mountains, the Cascade Range…
‘Restoration Cowboy’ goes against the flow
Dave Rosgen is popularizing the complex field of river restoration
It’s ‘bombs away’ on New Mexico saltcedar
State begins an aerial assault on a water-sucking weed
The West loses a conservation elder
Perhaps all showdowns between environmentalists and industry appear to be clashes of mythic proportion, but the unfolding story of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge seems particularly so, a world-class drama whose players include migratory birds, caribou, polar bears, native Alaskans, eco-activists, oil executives and politicians. The outcome of this mythic tale is yet unscripted. But…
Heard Around the West
UTAH It must be nerve-racking to teach school in Salt Lake City, where, at any time, a person can legally walk into a classroom with a gun concealed in clothing or tucked into a backpack. But that’s state law, so what’s a school district to do? One state legislator pooh-poohs potential problems, advising teachers and…