Western forestry schools slowly begin to reflect the changes in modern forestry.
Rural reality check
RURAL REALITY CHECK Four years ago, economist Ray Rasker began touring towns in the Greater Yellowstone region with a slideshow. His message: New growth in local economies comes mostly from high tech and service industries, not resource extraction like mining or grazing. Rasker, with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont., says, “Most people told me,…
Writers for Utah wilderness
We are not, of course, in dire need of roads, transmission towers, dams, reservoirs, and gas pipelines. We are in dire need of courtesy. We are in dire need of a broadly intelligent conversation about human fate. We are in need of a thorough and piercing review of our plan for economic development, a plan…
Environmental Activism 101
Environmental Activism 101 The University of Montana will train activists as well as scholars during a new 16-week joint venture with the federally funded Green Corps. Called the Environmental Organizing Semester, it will teach 26 college juniors and seniors from around the country how to run petition drives, investigate environmental abuses, write press releases and,…
Defending the desert
Defending the desert In the minds of far too many people, says former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, the Southwest’s public lands are a wasteland. “Indestructible because there is nothing to destroy; unworthy of protection.” Now, a new handbook by the Environmental Defense Fund provides activists and educators with the tools to tackle this myth. Defending…
Untangling Washington
UNTANGLING WASHINGTON When the 1994 Congress cut funding for its research groups, the Environmental and Energy Study Conference didn’t die, it reorganized as the for-profit Congressional Green Sheets. As a part of Congress, the conference had provided information about House and Senate actions on environmental issues. With the same staff and its new name, Green…
Helping hand isn’t
Helping hand isn’t The best way to help wildlife live through a bitter winter is to leave them alone, says the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Free food can accustom deer and elk to human hand-outs and erode instincts that protect the animals, says the group. If the ration suddenly disappears, the animals may descend…
The Snake runs through it
THE SNAKE RUNS THROUGH IT Lewiston and Idaho Falls stand like bookends at either end of the Snake River’s path through Idaho. Those two ends will converge Nov. 28-29 in Boise, Idaho, at Snake: the River Between Us, a conference about the future of Idaho’s largest river. The meeting grows out of a series of…
Yearning for balance
YEARNING FOR BALANCE Americans find simplicity complicated. According to a recent survey conducted for the Merck Family Fund, a foundation that promotes environmental sustainability, the majority of people questioned said they want to simplify their lives, spend more time with loved ones and consume less. But they have found it’s easier said than done. Although…
Preserving open spaces
PRESERVING OPEN SPACES Colorado Open Lands works to preserve large stretches of undeveloped land across the state. So it’s only fitting that the nonprofit group’s quarterly newsletter, which includes photos and descriptions of recently completed projects, is laid out on big, airy pages. The group’s projects, detailed in past issues of Landscape, include acquisition of…
Clinton says: Stop logging
President Clinton says he’s distressed because the salvage rider he signed in July opened up the wrong ancient forests to logging. Faced with growing civil disobedience in the Northwest, the president said last month that he wants Congress to change the law. As interpreted by a federal judge, part of the salvage law mandated the…
Guy Pence leaves Nevada
The Forest Service has ordered Guy Pence off of the front lines in Nevada. The district ranger in Carson City has been the target of two bombings this year (HCN, 10/30/95). The agency is reassigning him to a staff position at the regional office in Boise, Idaho, out of concern for his personal safety and…
The butterfly and the golf course; and the widow’s story
The butterfly and the golf course The Allegation: In a cover story titled “The Butterfly Problem,” in the January 1992 issue of The Atlantic, the authors portrayed an Oregon developer whose lifelong dream of carving fairways on a section of the Oregon coast was snuffed out in the morass of Endangered Species Act protection of…
‘Anything you say about a whole forest is wrong’
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Two views of forest health at the University of Idaho, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. Art Partridge is walking through the tall firs of the Coeur d’Alene National Forest in northern Idaho. Pausing occasionally to keep tabs on his…
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…
Note: this article appears in the print edition as a sidebar to the news story titled “Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes.” The continuing question of where to bury nuclear waste has high stakes for the West. Federal officials have focused on permanent burial of the waste in two locations: Yucca Mountain, Nev., for commercial…
Critics say an Idaho think tank could be more scholarly
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Two views of forest health at the University of Idaho, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. Controversy comes with the territory in Jay O’Laughlin’s job. He directs the University of Idaho’s Policy Analysis Group, which is charged with explaining natural…
Northern Arizona U. looks back, moves forward
Presettlement forests provide map for management
Reformation in the Vatican of sawlog forestry
History takes Oregon State for a ride
The ax falls at the University of Washington
Environmental institute is chopped; other programs cut
Silencing science at UW: one researcher’s story
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, The ax falls at the University of Washington, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. When the University of Washington offered aquatic biologist Steve Ralph a job in 1989 directing a major new stream-research program, he jumped at the chance. His…
A new breed of academic at Colorado State
Note: this story is one of several feature articles in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. Fort Collins, Colo.- At 6:38 a.m., Rick Knight is happily installed in his campus office, propelling himself about at high velocity on a chair with well-greased rollers. He drums out memos on his computer, organizes slides for…
DC’s green power-brokers look for new home
A chastened national environmental movement, watching the progress it fought for over decades being dismantled by a hostile Congress, is going back to its roots. Or so its leaders say. Big national organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Wilderness Society,…
Heard around the West
When you buy Nikes, you get more than shoes. You become part of the wise-use movement, or perhaps of your local militia, judging by a Nike ad printed in the November Outside and elsewhere. The ad leads with: “Boundaries are set by dictators. Created to regulate cattle grazing and employ tollbooth attendants. With no regard…
Sinclair Lewis’ George Babbitt would be at home in this Congress
When I read recently that a couple of Republican congressmen were still fighting an impending ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), I was overtaken by a literary obsession: I had to re-read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Let me explain. About a year ago, while still gainfully employed, I wrote a column about Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who…
Dear Friends
A near visitor He was probably looking for the High Country News office. Where else would a bear go in Paonia? But it got distracted by its stomach and began lunching on discarded produce at neighboring Don’s Market on Oct. 14. The bear temporarily eluded the town’s entire police and public works departments – all…
The end of certainty
Western universities learn there is more to forestry than chainsaws
The anecdotal war on endangered species is running out of steam
Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth stepped up to the podium at the Wise Use Leadership Conference in Reno, Nev., this summer and charged the Endangered Species Act with a series of assaults: Californians lost homes to the 1993 fire because they were not allowed to clear weeds where endangered kangaroo rats live. Snails smaller than a…
Environmental paradigm spurs collaborative research
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, The end of certainty, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. For many years, the federal government spent more money studying the breeding and production of corn than it did studying forests. Yale Forestry Professor John Gordon speculates this was related to…
Two views of forest health at the University of Idaho
Are the forests sick or well?
Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes
Just before dawn on Oct. 24, police officers from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe in Fort Hall, Idaho, parked a patrol car across railroad tracks at the border of the reservation. Then they waited. Hours later, the engineer of a train hauling six casks of radioactive nuclear waste from Navy ships spotted the car and slowed to…