YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – Dawn … low clouds … swollen river. Like a field of dark toadstools the herds of resting bison take shape across the water. Above them on the grassy benches elk begin to move – cows and calves, a few of the very young ones still hobbling. Geese fly down the […]
Essays
Posted inJune 12, 1995: The Southwest's last real river: Will it flow on?
Learning the trick of quiet
Some 50 years ago a bachelor farmer paid tribute to his mother by giving land to Idaho in her name. The park, named for her – Mary Minerva McCroskey State Park – is only 4,400 acres balanced on a narrow ridge called Skyline Drive. No one would ever mistake it for wilderness. Logging clear-cuts border […]
Posted inMay 29, 1995: Politics 101
This budget cut is destructive
Business isn’t being conducted as usual on Capitol Hill these days, and no better example exists than the perils besetting the Land and Water Conservation Fund The fund, created in 1965 at the height of the Great Society, was designed to finance federal purchases of land for recreation and habitat enhancement, and to give states […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A tough law meets tough foes
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. In his classic 1940s essay, “Round River,” Aldo Leopold made the case for conserving biological diversity: “saving all the parts’ of the natural world. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote. That […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A war of ideologies, with endangered species as weapons
Big Bill Rose, my brother Tom’s redheaded boyhood friend, works for Union Pacific and lives in a mountain canyon west of Denver. Tom and I were visiting him some years ago, and the talk came around to Two Forks Dam. This proposed behemoth, since canceled, would have flooded the nearby canyons and mountain villages. Bill […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Armed, crazy and lost in the Wild West
Back in December, I covered some Western militia meetings as part of a nationwide report on the militia movement. In the wake of recent events, those gatherings have taken on a more sinister glow. What struck me at the time was that every person I randomly interviewed was a recent transplant to the Northwest. It’s […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
If rain doesn’t fall, the money will
LAS CRUCES, N.M. – Drought returned to the West last summer, with a little help from the federal government. Ranchers from Oregon to New Mexico – their herds grown too abundant as a result of a well-intentioned drought relief program – let grass-starved cows and sheep strip parched rangelands bare. The emergency feed program, run […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Montana State University to local environmentalists: Get lost!
In an editorial in their monthly newsletter, which I’ll call the Big Sky Cow Pie, the Montana Stockgrowers Association branded me the “Ralph Nader of the West.” It was not meant as a compliment. I’m not exactly sure what set them off. Perhaps it was something I’d said while president of the National Wolf Growers […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
It’s deja vu yet again, says Bruce Babbitt
Washington, D.C. – On Dec. 24, 1992, while most Americans were eating Christmas Eve dinner, the four Marstons were listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. The occasion was Bill Clinton’s nomination of Bruce Babbitt to be secretary of Interior. To be honest, the occasion was NPR reporter John Nielson’s taped interview of […]
Posted inApril 3, 1995: The Great Basin: America's wasteland seeks a new identity
After the gold rush
Miners have many ways of turning rock into metal – brute force, corrosive chemicals, high heat and extreme pressure. Likewise, environmentalists are discovering there is more than one way to transform the West’s most refractory industry. Mining has fiercely resisted change since it was first given free license to pillage the mineral riches of a […]
Posted inApril 3, 1995: The Great Basin: America's wasteland seeks a new identity
Unlikely reformer: Can sinful Las Vegas help change the West?
The way people gamble, it’s no wonder casino owners in Las Vegas build thousands of new hotel rooms a year. Take the man next to me at the roulette wheel in a run-down casino whose three-story marquee announced, “Where the locals play.” He was betting his Social Security check on a system based on his […]
Posted inMarch 20, 1995: The fight for Reclamation
You say you want to cut government spending? Kick off cows
Dear Congress: Since you say you want to stop wasteful federal spending, I am writing to alert you to what’s going on at the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, where, in 1990, they spent $52 million more managing livestock than they collected in fees. Part of the problem is that the current […]
Posted inMarch 20, 1995: The fight for Reclamation
Slash and burn
Many good, green guys and gals were blown away Nov. 8, and bills now in Congress would block environmental regulation through “takings” analyses that elevate property rights above the public good. But legitimate fears should not blind the environmental community to new opportunities for positive change. Voters also blew out deadwood and shook the foundations […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Pride and Glory of firefighting is hard to resist
The southwest winds brought waves of red smoke streaming into the valley from the fires near Boise and McCall every day last summer. A helicopter would come in overhead, and I’d hear the almost subsonic whump-whump-whump that meant a big craft. The smoke and the morning air and the noise took me back to a […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
Democrats resort to banana bread
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The scene was vintage Washington power breakfast: a private room at the Old Ebbitt Grill across from the Treasury Department. The table held plates of bagels and banana bread. The burgundy napkins complemented the Oriental rug and the velvet chairs. Those are the lures reporters expect from a deposed potentate or a […]
Posted inMarch 6, 1995: The fires next time
The word according to a weighty Republican
Alaska Republican Don Young, the new chairman of the House Resources Committee, (he removed “Natural” from the committee’s name) recently talked at length with reporter Angela Bouwsma: A congressional committee stumbles on the diversity of life: I’m, by the way, the only member of that (House Resources) committee that ever voted for the Endangered Species […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
1995: Cecil Andrus knew how to take a stand
Cecil Andrus tells the story about how, as a young logger in Orofino, Idaho, he would skid logs down streambeds because it was the easiest way to move them. Skidding, for those who don’t know the rough-and-ready truths about logging, rips up the land and streams. “Those of us in logging in those good old […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Waaaaaaaaaaaahh! The West refuses to be weaned
RESERVE, N.M. – Ah, the West, where the spaces are wide open and the skies are big, where they know when to hold “em and when to fold “em, where the handclasp is a little stronger and the smile dwells a little longer and where, above all, men are men. Not really. In fact, the […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
In surprising ways, wolves will restore natural balance
When wolves arrived in Yellowstone last month, it was as though a boulder were tossed into a lake: the ripples began to spread, and eventually they will touch everything. As trucks carrying the predators entered the park, coyotes nearby began to howl; now they yip and sing almost every hour near the wolf pens. “I […]
Posted inJuly 24, 1995: Making a mountain into a starbase
Ranchers forced into numbers game
Imagine the Western range as a half-billion acre game board. It’s not hard; section lines, pasture lines, power lines, irrigation lines, and roads straight as lines subdivide it into as many playing squares as there are players. But it is not chess or checkers. It’s a deadly serious game, where the stakes are the health […]