America’s national forests belong to everyone, and all Americans deserve and rightfully demand access to this national birthright. Such access is like oxygen for hunters and anglers, but beware: Industry barracudas and their pals in Congress are trying to hoodwink sportsmen into supporting bad legislation by promising more lenient access. Today’s case in point is […]
Wotr
Posted inWotr
Survival of the worthless
I recently flew from my home in southern Oregon to Denver, giving me the opportunity to reflect on the fate of Western landscapes. As we took off from the Medford airport, it was easy to see how the neat pear orchards and vineyards of my compact valley are increasingly hemmed in by subdivisions. But we […]
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Big Sky swipe
Montana has been lauded this year for its tourism campaign, which consists largely of plastering photos, buffalo-sized and beautiful, on things that are decidedly not beautiful: buses in New York City, trains in Chicago. This spring, the American Marketing Association awarded the Bozeman, Mont., company that developed the campaign an “Effie” – “Effie” being short […]
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The monastery of pure landscape
Years ago, I overheard some German motorists talking in the visitor center in Moab: “Yah, zis is ze first time ve are traveling in pure landscape!” Because I’d been to Germany as a high school student, I knew what they meant — no manicured fields and forests, few fences, human settlements few and far between, […]
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Save the land by saving the rancher
The behavior of Congress might seem unusually erratic, but one thing can be confidently predicted: The Interior Appropriations bill for 2012 will contain the largest cuts in conservation funding in 40 years. Look for lots of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in environmental circles. For many reasons, though, I see this as a godsend for […]
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Just a few moments in Yellowstone
Early this summer, I went into the forest near Slough Creek Campground in Yellowstone National Park. Just out of sight of the last campsite, it felt very secluded. I set my folding chair on some flat ground next to a couple of dried buffalo flops and sat there, alone, for an hour or more. Nothing […]
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Billboard battles don’t help much
About a year ago, in northeast Oregon, someone shot one of the wolves that ran with the Wenaha Pack. A few months later, the poacher had not yet been caught, and the case was getting cold. To revive interest, conservation groups raised $10,000 for a reward and rented space on a billboard just outside of […]
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The light is changing… summer is ending
Suddenly it’s the end of August, and everything is different: The light has started to tilt and deepen, and the landscape has that burnished look, as if it’s been drenched in honey and ripened by sun. The world seems balanced; we stand at the brink of September, at the edge of the turn of the […]
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The real side effect of medical marijuana
My father died from an addiction to a dangerous drug when I was 13. The pushers who sold it to him remain in business, and the federal and state governments seem to like that fact. I’m not bitter, but whenever I hear the arguments against medical marijuana in Western states, I’m struck by the hypocrisy. […]
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Great hope, great fear
Last month, three little girls, ages 8, 5 and 2, and their mother, were killed in a Wyoming flash flood that washed away their van. It was the kind of torrential downpour climatologists predict will increase as the planet warms. Their father survived. He alone can speak of the horror of trying to save his […]
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A new chance for Snake River salmon
With his Aug. 2 ruling that the federal government’s plan for salmon recovery once again fails to meet requirements of the law, U.S. District Court Judge James Redden has opened the door to a hopeful approach in efforts for recovery of wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. A better plan can be at […]
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Hats off for a grand American senator, Mark O. Hatfield, 1922-2011
Some people called former Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, who died Aug. 7 at age 89, “Saint Mark,” for his outspoken Christian faith and his teetotaling habit. Mark O. Hatfield was a man of integrity, but a saint he wasn’t — and thank goodness for that. He was the kind of leader many of us wish […]
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Food safety is a matter of power
In Venice, Calif., the Rawesome raw-food club was raided Aug. 3 by armed federal and county agents who arrested a volunteer and seized computers, files, cash and $70,000 worth of perishable produce. Club founder and manager James Stewart, 64, was charged with 13 counts, 12 of them related to the processing and sale of unpasteurized […]
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Live and let live
Lion attacks have been in the news lately, but there’s one story I’ll never forget. It was in the Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner last year, and featured a hunter who’d shot an “angry” mountain lion while out hunting mule deer. Investigators from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources determined that the hunter had acted in self-defense […]
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Bootstrapping in Roundup
The morning of May 26, the town of Roundup in central Montana became separated from the world. The Musselshell River, normally a lazy brown trickle, had been transformed overnight into a raging monster a half-mile wide that swept away everything in its path. In the wee hours, the sheriff’s department received word from 20 miles […]
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The return of the Lords of Yesterday
A couple of decades ago, the West’s conservationists dreamed a lovely dream: The region’s traditional extractive industry base, which had taken such a huge environmental toll, would soon make way for a kinder, gentler economy based on protecting the land for recreation and tourism. And the dream seemed on the verge of coming true; during […]
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Ice matters
“Now I know a glacier,” said Leon, a playwright from New York. We sat across from each other in front of a small driftwood fire, the cool Alaskan evening wrapping us in darkness. Leon had just spent five days with me as an artist-in-residence in the wilderness area where I work. Each day, our near […]
Posted inExtreme green
Suckling responds: Cashing in? Nope, just saving species every day
Note: This is a response to a Writers on the Range column by Ted Williams, headlined “Extreme Green.” Industry-funded zealots are angling to prevent nonprofits from protecting veterans, children, workers and the environment. With the absurd argument that nonprofits are getting rich by making the government follow its own laws, they want to ensure that […]
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The gift of runoff in a wet season
One recent evening, a friend and I walked along a mountain creek in central Colorado that only a few hours before had been covered with snow. Boulders once visible had been replaced by froth and waves, and the water velocity was so great that the middle of the creek was a foot higher than its […]
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Is wildfire always a question of when?
Even before Arizona Sen. John McCain told the media that illegal immigrants were burning down the forests of Arizona, some local ranchers had begun spreading the same rumor. Then as the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona burned, a different kind of smoke rose from my email inbox: “It’s those damn illegals, ya know.” “They found […]