Yellowstone National Park Supervisor Michael V. Finley stirs controversy and conflict as he fights to save America’s oldest national park.
The West’s new prospectors seek microbes
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A park boss goes to bat for the land. Karl O. Stetter and his team ignore the fresh tracks of a grizzly on their way to hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. Once there, an electronic monitor reveals the pH of the soil is…
Here’s a chance to speak up for clean air
Nineteen years ago Congress directed the EPA to clean up “any existing impairment of visibility” in the nation’s cleanest areas, called Class 1, and prevent further degradation caused by pollution from man-made sources such as coal-fired power plants and vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency failed to act. It will be 1999 before any improvement takes…
Burning down the house
Under a new federal policy, fire managers will be allowed to put protection of natural resources ahead of property when they battle blazes on public lands. That policy is the major contribution of a new report issued jointly by the departments of Interior and Agriculture. “In the past people expected their homes to take priority,”…
Wild Rockies Online
If you’re hungry for more environmental resources on the Internet, there’s a new World Wide Web site that’s sure to keep you connected – in more ways than one. The Wild Rockies Slate, launched into cyberspace last December, features up-to-date information on the issues, organizations and ecology of the northern Rocky Mountains. A project of…
Locals sickened by bison slaughter
In tiny West Yellowstone, Mont., more than 350 bison have been gunned down after wandering out of Yellowstone National Park. The Montana Department of Livestock kills the bison because of fears they will transmit brucellosis, a disease that causes cattle to abort. But for residents such as Donna Lane, who watched state officials shoot 18…
Healing a dirty town
Chip Ward, an environmental activist from Grantsville, Utah, started the West Desert Healthy Environment Alliance (HEAL) because citizens noticed abnormally high rates of illness in town. But when the group approached the state Bureau of Epidemiology for information, the agency said that though cancer rates were high, its research showed no discernible pattern among the…
Feds to Idaho mines: Clean up
Despite pleas from Idaho’s congressional delegation and governor, the federal government has filed suit against eight mining companies for polluting the Coeur d’Alene River basin in Idaho’s panhandle. The suit seeks monetary damages for the alleged discharge of more than 70 million tons of mining waste into the basin over the last 100 years. Each…
Hands across the water
More than 30 Japanese volunteers who built a boardwalk and overlook at Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park are coming back this summer to revegetate trampled meadows. While Japan is not known for environmentalism, these teachers, engineers, nurses and other professionals have formed a Tokyo-based group, Japan Volunteers in Parks Association. They responded to a letter…
Pennies on the Railroad
The annual Wild Idaho! conference at Redfish Lake on May 17-19 is called Pennies On The Railroad, in reference to the flattened condition of Idaho environmentalism this year. Panel discussion will focus on the dysfunctional management of the Endangered Species Act and the effects of salvage logging on streams and wildlife. Louisa Willcox of the…
A cautionary tale in Washington state
The GOP sweep in 1994 hit Washington state like a monsoon: In seven of nine districts, voters sent freshmen Republicans to the House of Representatives. But this year’s election presents a cautionary tale: If you won your last election by a razor-thin margin, perhaps you’d better not slavishly follow the GOP line on environmental issues.…
Wildlife and Trail Recreation
Can mountain bikers and wildlife coexist? Find out at a conference on Wildlife and Trail Recreation: Integrating Demands in the Wild/Urban Interface, hosted by the San Juan National Forest Association, May 10-11 in Durango, Colo. John Mumma, director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife, will give the keynote address. To register, call the San Juan…
Navajos win round in coal mine war
After years of fighting Peabody Western Coal Co., Navajos in northeast Arizona have won a court victory against a strip mine on their reservation. Citing the desecration of burial sites, poisoned livestock and filthy air and water, an Interior Department judge in Phoenix reversed a decision by the federal Office of Surface Mining to renew…
MountainFilm Festival
Telluride, Colo., hosts the 18th annual MountainFilm Festival May 24-27, featuring over 40 films plus seminars and discussions with the film makers. Speakers include Dick Durrance, captain of the first U.S. Olympic skiing team in 1936, and Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. For more information and tickets, contact MountainFilm at 970/728-4123.…
Phoenix will try to save desert wash
Arizona has told the city of Phoenix that if it wants to save a state-owned desert wash teeming with wildlife, it must buy the land for $25 million. A citizens’ group hopes to persuade state officials that the historic, biological and recreational value of Cave Creek Wash makes it worth the money. But state staffers…
Talking Gourds Retreat
Poets and performing artists are invited to join author Dolores LaChapelle for the 1996 Talking Gourds Retreat, an artists’ workshop on “deep ecology,” hosted by the Telluride Writer’s Guild and the Ah Haa School for the Arts. The gathering, held June 28-30 at the Faraway Ranch near Telluride, Colo., includes performances and drumming. Call Judy…
Back with a bang
Humans have killed five of the wolves restored to Yellowstone National Park last year, and a wolf pregnant with six pups died when she fell into a thermal pool; but biologists say at least 30 more pups are on the way. Mike Phillips, leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Recovery Team, is so impressed with the…
Fish kill doesn’t sway the EPA
For years, the EPA has agreed with mining officials that toxic sediments stuck behind the Milltown Dam on the Clark Fork River near Missoula, Mont., were best left alone. But when polluted waters escaped from the dam in February, they killed fish and energized activists, who renewed their call for the agency to remove the…
Santa Fe residents win ski area fight
The Big Tesuque, a mountain basin above Santa Fe, N.M., may yet be saved from ski area development. Expansion of the Santa Fe Ski Area into the basin had seemed like a sure bet. Despite vocal opposition from Santa Fe locals, Santa Fe Forest Supervisor Al Defler approved the plan last December (HCN, 2/19/96). But…
Dam destruction moves closer
The Elwha River in Washington was once home to the largest salmon in the continental United States. But when the Bureau of Reclamation built two dams in 1914 and 1927, 100-pound chinook were unable to make the downstream passage and disappeared. Now that the Clinton administration has allotted $111 million of its proposed 1997 budget…
Letter to Edward Abbey from Earth: A Review
Dear Ed, You won’t, or probably you will, believe what’s currently happening in the West: Too many of us, a commercialized landscape “- all your worst predictions have come true. We’ve finally caught up with your predictions, your “good news.” Armed militias call the West their home – white-guy losers in Montana and Idaho who…
Navajo role model
The group responsible for monitoring environmental issues on the Navajo Reservation, Diné CARE, has chosen Christine Benally as its new director. Benally earned a doctorate in environmental health from Colorado State University and has been involved with Diné CARE, an acronym for Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, since 1991. The group’s first project was to…
Yard Sale
The Uintah Mountain Club in Vernal, Utah, is a small but active group, and it produces one of the best newsletters we get to see. The April issue annouces that members Denise and Jon Hughes will have a “yard sale, literally,” on May 5 at 2554 South 500 East. Bring a shovel and $2 per…
Dear Friends
A confusing season We realize it’s spring when an April day combines snow flurries, afternoon rain and thunder, intermittent sun and evening temperatures in the twenties. And the next morning the grass grows even greener. On this town’s main street the look of the season is layered with the one constant: muddy boots, for this…
Attempt at compromise leads to bloodbath
The Endangered Species Coalition, an umbrella group of over 100 organizations, just threw out one of its own. In mid-April, the Coalition booted the Environmental Defense Fund and severely reprimanded the Center for Marine Conservation and the World Wildlife Fund. Their offense? Some members of these groups had been holding secret meetings with industry leaders,…
A park boss goes to bat for the land
MAMMOTH, Wyo. – In late October, during the short lull between the traffic jams of summer and the snowmobile crowds of winter, the world’s oldest national park breathes a short sigh of relief. Only a few visitors climb the steaming mound of hot springs that looms above park headquarters here, and a herd of elk…
Noranda stirs up a swarm of opposition
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A park boss goes to bat for the land. While Crown Butte Mining Inc. already owns patented land within the Gallatin National Forest, it needs additional land for its mill and waste rock. That need has set into motion the National Environmental Policy Act,…
Can cattle save the pygmy rabbit?
The idea is heresy to some and it sounds odd coming from a wildlife biologist, but Fred Dobler is insistent: Cattle grazing might save the pygmy rabbit. The shy, nocturnal cousin of the cottontail is an endangered species in Washington and exists on isolated chunks of sagebrush-shrub steppe in just one county. “Grazing might be…
Yellowstone’s wintertime blues
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A park boss goes to bat for the land. Summer visitors aren’t the only ones on the increase in Yellowstone: the number of tourists arriving to see Yellowstone’s ice-crusted trees, virginal snowfields and clouds of hot-spring steam are skyrocketing as well. Four winters ago,…
Farmers feel burned by clean air regs
Eastern Washington, with its rolling hills and mid-size cities, seems like a place where farmers and urbanites should easily coexist. But not in late summer, when farmers burn bluegrass fields to clear stubble and stimulate seed production. The conflict is most intense in Spokane, where clean air activists have long claimed that the clouds of…
Heard Around the West
A new logic is unfolding in Montana: If too many quality-of-lifers find your state attractive, get really, really unattractive. The much-publicized stakeout of the Freemen and the arrest of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski have helped Montana step off its pedestal as the compulsory destination for those Americans who can lay claim to a laptop computer,…
Erasing the Southwest’s grandest vista
It was Barry Lopez who said that one of the dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. Until the 1970s, when air pollution from California, Mexico and coal-fired power plants in the region began to limit visibility, the…