Rancher Sid Goodloe battles pinon-juniper and uses a variety of controversial methods to restore his ranchland in New Mexico.
Group sues to stamp out tolerance and diversity
When the National Park Service shows some sensitivity to the religious needs of Native Americans, stomp it. And be sure to also grind a heel into American Indian religious liberty. That’s the way Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver apparently views it. Last month, the foundation filed a lawsuit against the Park Service for respecting…
Stop the flooding
The devastating floods that swamped Oregon early this year could be reduced in the future by restoring former wetlands and woodlands in the Willamette River floodplain. That’s the conclusion of a study commissioned by River Network, a Portland, Oregon-based conservation group. The 60-page study, written primarily by Kevin Coulton of Philip Williams & Associates, an…
Christensen goes quarterly
In the maiden issue of Great Basin News, editor and publisher Jon Christensen lays out the mission: “We believe the time is right to bring the Great Basin together to understand itself, to relish its own iconoclastic visions, to ponder its own quirky fate. You might consider this a test of that idea.” Christensen, who…
Malpractice as usual
Taxpayers are paying the price because Forest Service officials in California handed out timber contracts without adequate environmental reviews, according to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Business As Usual: A Case Study of Environmental and Fiscal Malpractice on the Eldorado National Forest describes how top managers weren’t penalized…
Rendezvous at Cove-Mallard
The Cove-Mallard logging area in central Idaho, scene of protests and arrests, may attract 500 people for this year’s Earth First! Rendezvous, June 30 through July 7. The event marks the group’s fifth year of campaigning to save trees in the largest roadless area in the lower 48 states. Mike Roselle, one of Earth First!’s…
Gold medal watchdog
To ensure that “environmentally and socially responsible choices’ are exercised in the planning of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Ivan Weber has founded the Olympic Watch League (OWL). Weber is a member of the environmental advisory board to the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, but he warns that environmental issues are not…
Utah wilderness proposal rises and dies
The Utah wilderness bill is dead again, but not without a struggle. In mid-March, Alaska Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski sent the Utah delegation’s controversial plan opening 2 million acres of southern Utah to development on to the Senate as part of an omnibus parks bill. The bill linked wilderness designation of 1.2 million acres in…
Last chance for wetlands
Is the marsh in your neighborhood in danger of being bulldozed for a strip mall? In fast-growing Washington state, where experts estimate 33 to 50 percent of wetlands has been lost, that scenario isn’t farfetched. But the Washington Wetland Network (WETNET), founded by the Seattle Audubon Society, can help. WETNET is composed of more than…
Indian gaming still in legal muddle
States and tribes fighting over Indian gaming were looking to a U.S. Supreme Court case, Seminole Tribe vs. the State of Florida, to clarify the future of the contentious, $4-billion-a-year industry (HCN, 4/1/96). Instead, legal experts are hailing the March 27 ruling as a clear victory for states’ rights but an unclear directive for Indian…
The dam complicates everything
Dear HCN, The jet tubes of Glen Canyon Dam have been opened, the dye dumped, the posturing of politicians and politician-scientists is over. As I write this, a bunch of real scientists are down in Grand Canyon poking, prodding and monitoring the Colorado, its beaches and residents to determine if this “flood” will restore a…
Forest Service Economics 101
It seemed an offer the Forest Service couldn’t refuse: The government gets the best price for its timber, and the buyer never cuts down any trees. Yet on March 21, the agency rejected an environmental group’s high bid of $28,875 for 275 acres of fire-damaged trees in the eastern Cascades of Washington near the Canadian…
Dem bones are your bones
Dear HCN, The story “Who owns these bones?” (HCN, 3/4/96) addresses a timely and important issue prompted by recent introduction in Congress of the “Fossil Preservation Act” by Reps. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., and Joe Skeen, R-N.M. The proposed legislation requires clarification. Your article states that, under the new law, “commercial and amateur collectors would be…
Agencies help fossil collectors
Dear HCN, We appreciate the attention that High Country News recently gave to fossil ownership, but first, we need to point out that part of the nation’s fossil legacy also occurs on land administered by the Forest Service. The Forest Service has been managing fossil localities for years on a case-by-case basis, and began developing…
About those buff bird-watchers
Dear HCN, While it was certainly entertaining to read that “naturalists’ go to the park to nap in the nude (Heard around the West, March 18) – and perhaps quite true – I can’t help but suspect that you meant “naturists’ instead. What characterizes most of the naturalists I know is not so much an…
Stirring things up on the Colorado River
As a media event, the Grand Canyon spring flood of “96 was a roaring success. On cue from the Today Show, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt turned a wheel, pushed a button, pulled a lever and opened the first of four jet tubes to send Lake Powell water downstream into the Grand Canyon. Whether the flood…
Take a seat
By the beginning of the 1996 school year, the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Public Affairs will choose a professor to hold the Timothy E. Wirth Chair in Environmental and Community Development Policy. The chair honors the former Colorado senator who is currently undersecretary of state for global affairs, appointed by President Bill Clinton.…
Retreat
-It is better to conquer yourself than win a thousand battles.” “The Buddha. The Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico’s Carson Forest will hold three eight-day meditation retreats from August through September for environmental and social activists. Not for networking or strategizing, these retreats provide silence, meditation training and spiritual renewal for a limited number…
Raising a ranch from the dead
For almost four years I have been biting down on Sid Goodloe’s story as though it were a suspicious gold coin. I have also been telling bits and pieces of it to audiences, testing ideas I wasn’t ready to put on paper. Putting it on paper meant confronting the audacity and complexity of Goodloe’s story,…
Experts line up on all sides of the tree-grass debate
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead If only Sid Goodloe had confined himself to his six or so square miles of private property. Then his would be a straightforward story about the rejuvenation of a piece of exhausted land. But Goodloe doesn’t stop at…
Stephen Pyne
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “As I read the record, there were grasses everywhere in the Southwest linking all its different environments. Even ponderosa pine was more of a savanna than a forest. The grass provided the interstitial medium, and that’s what carried…
Dear Friends
Hello, uh, fire department Pastures smudged with black ash, fast-rising billows of smoke visible from miles away, these are the signs that signal spring in this medium-altitude (5,600 feet) mountain valley. “Burning ditch” is an annual rite here, followed in more than a few instances by emergency calls to a town’s volunteer fire department (-Come…
Utah’s Burr Trail still leads to court
A tentative cease-fire over the management of southern Utah’s Burr Trail ended abruptly Feb. 13 when a Garfield County road crew bulldozed a hillside inside Capitol Reef National Park. Garfield County officials say it was “just something that had to be done” to maintain the “county-owned” road. But Terri Martin of the National Parks and…
‘Two weeks of hell’ saves a stand of old-growth trees
Six years ago, Francis Eatherington fought to keep loggers out of a roadless area in western Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest. A seasonal employee for the Forest Service, she felt passionately about the area’s 1,000-year-old trees and the spotted owls and runs of salmon and steelhead they harbored. With the help of a lawsuit, she and…
A very large subdivision riles a very small town
BIG HORN, Wyo. – Residents of this unincorporated township stared bug-eyed at the lead story in the afternoon paper nearly two years ago. “700 homes planned for subdivision,” the 72-point headline read. Disbelief reigned; seven hundred homes could mean 2,100 people. Big Horn, which doesn’t even have paved streets, barely had 400 residents. But it…
Heard around the West
In North Dakota, when they say extension agents have contacts in high places, they aren’t talking about the halls of North Dakota State University. They’re talking about heaven. Flood-prone Devils Lake, N.D., has inundated thousands of acres in recent years. When an uncharacteristically warm spell caused an anxiety outbreak among local residents last month, extension…
Democrats gag on bitter budget pills
WASHINGTON – How strange have things gotten in negotiations over the 1996 budget? Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveiled an ambitious 1997 budget last month even though his department doesn’t have one for 1996. “This is surely the most unusual budget year in the history of our nation,” Babbitt said. He accused Republicans of “misuse and…
Dance with a cow, and the cow will lead
In 1985, in mid-career, I went back to college. I wanted to be a range conservationist. At the time, I thought I was the only student who wanted to study range management so I could later have an excuse to chase cows on government time. Silly me. Even at granola-crunching, holistically groovy Humboldt State in…
Can Southwest activism and money coexist?
They lobbied. They staged sit-ins. They crashed town hall meetings. They chained themselves to trees. They scrounged for pennies and sued every despoiler of public lands they could find. The guerrilla tactics of the Southwest’s disparate environmental activists have worked. They have contributed to an enormous decrease in logging in the region’s 11 national forests:…
Sid Goodloe
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead “Allan Savory said it best when he said we’re grass farmers and not animal ranchers. But I would say that much more emphasis has been put on breeding animals than on proper care of the range. Ranchers are…
For further reading
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Princeton University Press, 1982. World Fire, by Stephen J. Pyne, Holt and Co., 1995 New Mexico Vegetation: Past, Present and Future, William A.…