Earth First! founder Dave Foreman and conservation biologist Michael Soulé founded The Wildlands Project, a scientifically based plan to save endangered wildlife by restoring and reconnecting the scattered islands of wilderness remaining in the West.
Nostalgic for the Pleistocene
“We are space-needing, wild-country Pleistocene beings, trapped in overdense numbers in devastated, simplified ecosystems.” – Paul Shepard (1925-1996) How’s this for a statement of opinion: In this century and a whole lot of others, no other thinker has been anywhere near so visionary, prophetic, revolutionary and important as Paul Shepard. Yet, if you know about…
Counties put a bounty on coyotes
The price of a movie ticket or six gallons of premium gasoline is now the going rate for a pair of coyote ears in two southeastern Colorado counties. Baca County now pays $7.50 per coyote, the first bounty in Colorado in almost 30 years. Since January, the bounty has brought in 412 pairs of ears.…
Tribe buys a ranch
Thanks to casino earnings, the fast-growing Pascua Yaqui Tribe has spent $3 million to buy a 5,300-acre cattle ranch. The purchase expands the tribe’s land base to 6,300 acres. Tribal Chairman Benito Valencia said he would not rule out building a second casino on the ranch. Under gaming compacts with Arizona, however, tribes cannot put…
Nuclear waste goes camping
Rocky Flats, the closed atomic bomb factory on the outskirts of Denver, is running out of room to store the waste from its cleanup efforts. By this summer, low-level transuranic waste will be stored in stainless steel containers placed in 9,600 steel drums, which will then be stored outside under temporary tents. Although the tents…
The Wayward West
Three Idaho Supreme Court decisions the first week in April reaffirmed the right of an anti-grazing group to bid on state grazing leases (HCN, 12/21/98). A week later, the Idaho Watersheds Project won a federal court decision that pulled grazing permits from 1 million acres of BLM grazing lands in Idaho. The group’s Jon Marvel…
Don’t trust the military
Dear HCN, While the Air Force is busy in Nevada, giving lip service and meeting time to ecosystem management and touchy-feely sound bites, it is forging right ahead with the destruction of the Owyhee Canyonlands of Idaho (HCN, 3/15/99). No matter that a broad coalition of public-interest groups and a majority of Idaho citizens oppose…
The link between lynx and stupidity
Dear HCN, Talk about stupidity! The trapping and relocation of lynx from their natural habitat in northern Canada to Colorado has to top the list (HCN, 2/15/99). Most people in the Colorado Division of Wildlife have never seen a lynx, let alone have much knowledge of how they live, but because they were pressured by…
Expensive cows
Dear HCN, The articles about the Trout Creek Mountains in the March 1 edition of High Country News overlooked a key player, the American taxpayer (HCN, 3/1/99). The Bureau of Land Management addressed this effort as a “must not be allowed to fail” demonstration grazing project. Funding was redirected to the tune of about $500…
How are grazing and smoking similar? Both kill
Dear HCN, Tom Knudson’s story on the Trout Creek working group in Oregon lacked some important factual information that would have cast the “success’ of this BLM propaganda project in a less favorable light (HCN, 3/1/99). The article implies that the Trout Creeks can serve as a model solution for public-lands grazing disputes across the…
‘This is not a radical notion…’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Dave Foreman: “Earth First!, as far as I’m concerned, died in 1988. All the urban anarchist children – the monkey-wrenching types – started the modern Earth First! (after I left). It is not even a descendent of the original. All they wanted was stories…
‘It’s like the Manhattan Project…’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Michael Soulé: “We live in an extraordinarily bleak period for nature. Things are going to get worse before they get better. We’ll lose, I would guess, half of the world’s species in the next 50 years. It’s quite tragic – and preventable. The degree…
Dear Friends
Out of the courts Robert Amon, the grandfather of the Earth First! forest protests at Idaho’s Cove-Mallard (HCN, 9/2/96), wrote us recently to share his good news. For the first time in more than five years, he tells us, he is legally untangled. The last lawsuit against him was dropped by Highland Enterprises, an Idaho…
Western weather: feast or famine
In February, Washington’s Mount Baker Ski Area was forced to turn skiers away for two days – a storm had buried even the chairlifts in snow. Boasting 90 feet of snow, the mountain is very close to setting a world record for yearly snowfall. Neighboring Mount Rainier isn’t far behind with 77 feet. Getting much…
Quincy Library Group bars outsiders
The Quincy Library Group, nationally acclaimed for its open and politically diverse membership, will be holding some of its meetings behind closed doors. The restriction, adopted March 30 in a unanimous voice vote, is to prevent disruptions the group fears from longtime opponents of its controversial forest management plan for three national forests in the…
Star light, star bright, where are you tonight?
Growing up in Canyonlands National Park in the 1940s and ’50s, Alan Wilson often took camping trips into remote areas of Utah with his father, Bates Wilson, Canyonlands’ first superintendent. “The sky was absolutely brilliant at night,” Alan Wilson recalls. Last summer, Wilson returned to Canyonlands. Instead of finding a stark, black sky filled with…
Congress searches for a ‘green conspiracy’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congress does not just sit around and pass laws. Nosiree, Bob. It makes sure the executive branch does its job right. This is known as congressional oversight, and it helps to keep the big boys honest. When a government project goes awry, a congressional committee will track down the facts, expose the…
Visionaries or dreamers?
“Our vision is simple. We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska; when gray wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals; when humans dwell with respect, harmony,…
Extra photos to Visionaries or Dreamers
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Extra photos to Visionaries or Dreamers.
Can science heal the land?
From the air, west-central New Mexico is a sea of brown, lined here and there with a dry riverbed or peppered with juniper and mesquite. In places, the vegetation is so sparse that from 3,000 feet up, you can make out the pockmarks of kangaroo rat colonies. “They look like smallpox vaccinations,” says Merry Schroeder,…
Heard around the West
A house in Taylorsville, Utah, was suddenly drenched by a foul-smelling liquid, according to The Denver Post. When the sewage fell from the sky, the homeowner beseeched Salt Lake City International Airport for help, logging in more than 60 phone calls. The official response? It’s not our problem. The city’s fire department finally accepted responsibility,…