With 15 runs of salmon federally listed as threatened or endangered, a conservation group, Long Live the Kings, hopes hatchery reform can help save wild stocks of fish.
The Latest Bounce
Boise, Idaho’s efforts to protect open space are gaining ground (HCN, 6/18/01: Surprise! Boise votes for open space). Almost a year after voters approved a $10 million tax to buy open space in the city’s foothills, the city announced its first purchase: a 42-acre parcel in Hulls Gulch originally slated for subdivision development. The city…
Duwamish? Duwamish who?
WASHINGTON The Duwamish, a Northwest tribe, doesn’t exist, according to Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Since 1978, the tribe has been seeking federal recognition that would grant them control over their government and lands, make them eligible for federal funds for education, health care and social programs, and allow casino operations. The 560 members of the…
Interior’s conflicting interests
Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles is in a pickle. Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency effectively delayed the drilling of 39,000 coalbed-methane wells in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin – a major energy project Griles and the Bush administration had hoped to expedite (HCN, 11/5/01: Wyoming’s powder keg ). The EPA rated Interior’s environmental…
Yellowstone rangers bound and gagged
Dear HCN, Living in Yellowstone National Park, I wanted to get a first-hand opinion on the snowmobile debate. I’d read reports from the EPA, the snowmobile industry, experts on flora and fauna and everything else, but I hadn’t heard the voice that I felt knew the most: the park rangers. So I asked some park…
Kind words are more than coronets
Dear HCN, Your last issues are so readable and well-written, I can’t believe it’s the same paper I struggled to understand five years ago in order to better politically advocate for the environment. The way it’s being written now, I have found that high school and even junior high students can educate themselves from it.…
Margolis blows it again
Dear HCN, For someone like myself, writing to HCN has about the same benefits as a Kurd appealing to Saddam, but here goes nothing, anyway. Jon Margolis’ monument (HCN, 5/13/02: New monuments: Planning by numbers) analysis was linked to me and I had to surf it up – and as usual, Jon blows it. The…
Take a look at California’s dairies
Dear HCN, Thanks to author Stephen Stuebner for the excellent article on dairy problems in the Magic Valley (HCN, 4/15/02: Raising a stink). I was raised on an irrigated dairy farm (70 head of Holsteins) in the Orchard Valley area south of Wendell, Idaho, and still have family there. During visits over the last 10…
No magic bullet for wasting disease
Critics assail slaughter of elk, deer as strategy against CWD
Exotic-killing herbicide is ousted from the range
BLM’s most promising tool for fighting cheatgrass backfires in Idaho
The wild (and not-so-wild) sex life of salmon
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. A quick trip through the life cycle of a salmon, be it hatchery or wild, makes human development appear quite simple. In late summer or early fall, the female salmon deposits several thousand eggs in a shallow river bottom nest called a redd. In…
Tribes blur the line between wild and hatchery fish
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For a glimpse of how far hatchery reform can go, state and federal agencies need only look at what tribes like the Nez Perce, Umatilla and Yakama are doing with their hatcheries. With money from the Northwest Power Planning Council, a congressionally appointed committee…
The name might be green, but not the group
When it comes to environmental, wildlife or habitat issues, it’s smart to be wary of names and titles. I was reminded of that recently when a group called the Nebraska Habitat Conservation Coalition gathered to consider strategies for halting habitat protection for wildlife along the Platte River. That’s right. The Habitat Conservation Coalition opposes habitat…
Heard around the West
The heck with drought! In some suburbs outside of Denver, it’s grass that counts, and heaven help you if you let it yellow and wither. Some residents of the covenant-controlled developments at Highlands Ranch and in the town of Westminster found that out recently when they tried to be good citizens and save water. Notices…
Hatching reform
SEATTLE, Wash. – From 80 feet above downtown, the throngs of people wrapped in raincoats on the sidewalk below look like a spilled package of multicolored candies. The view is less colorful looking outward from the eighth floor window of the historic Cobb building, but no less busy; glass and steel high-rises thrust upward in…
In the throat of a black hole
I am standing over this crevice of Antelope Canyon, a thin fissure in the bedrock of far northern Arizona, a tourist attraction on the Navajo Reservation. It is dark down there, as if I am looking through the cracked roof of a mosque into an unlit interior. A metal ladder leads down and I follow…
Dear Friends
Digging deep When Rebecca Clarren, fresh out of college and working as a maid in Alaska, decided to become a journalist five years ago, she never dreamed she’d soon be writing lengthy stories about federal water policy or the structure of Native American governments. How borrrrrring. She envisioned telling lively stories with fascinating personalities and…
Permanent user fees in the pipeline
Agencies struggle toward a unified public-lands pass