When I think of Canada, I picture caribou herds, universal healthcare and the occasional hockey brawl. Officials at our Department of Homeland Security, however, seem to think the neighbors up North pose a serious security threat. After all, the department has spent the last five years quietly building a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — […]
Oregon
Posted inJune 23, 2014: River of No Return
The Latest: After a long battle, agreement for the Klamath
BackstoryTo protect endangered fish during 2001’s drought, federal officials shut off irrigation water in Oregon and California’s Klamath Basin, costing agriculture millions. The next year, farmers got their water – along with a massive salmon die-off that infuriated Klamath tribes. Tribal members and farmers remained at odds until 2004, when federal rulings prompted dam-owner PacifiCorp […]
Posted inGoat
Railroads inch toward transparency on oil shipments
On April 18, a wildflower photographer looking for blooming balsamroot on the Oregon slopes of the Columbia River Gorge happened to glance down and see dozens of black tankers barreling along the railroad below. The identification numbers on the tankers’ warning signs revealed that they were carrying crude. Yet despite tragic derailments in the past […]
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
The first college degree in drones, a baby born in Walmart parking lot and more
IDAHOIn the TV studio, the faces of the journalists questioning the four Republican would-be candidates for Idaho governor sometimes registered dismay, other times wonder. They simply could not believe what they were hearing, when Walt Bayes declared his “main loyalty” was to God and against vile affections and wickedness, when motorcyclist Harley Brown boasted that […]
Posted inGoat
ESA changes could help protect sage grouse on private land
In an increasingly subdivided and trailblazed West, southeastern Oregon’s Harney County is a place that can still make you feel small. From the empty blacktop two-lane highways 78 and 20, broad grasslands rise to sagebrush-studded mesas and hills that crest and break to the blue horizons like the landlocked waves of a parched sea. Drive-fast-with-your-windows-down […]
Posted inGoat
Against all odds, wolf OR7 may have found a mate
On May 3, a wolf slipped through the frame of a remote camera in southwestern Oregon, a blur of black and brown. The next day, under the cover of darkness, it stared directly at a camera, eyes aglow, and did something ordinary that, under the circumstances, was an extraordinary sight: It squatted and peed. This […]
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
Adventure travel vs. conservation
A conversation with outdoor entrepreneur Bill Bryan.
Posted inGoat
Discovery: Good ol’ tallgrass was formed by good ol’ bacteria
It’s always tempting to reflect on how wonderful the West used to be. You know what I mean: Conservationists and Natives lament that the first invasions by white settlers wrecked everything, and ranchers and loggers long for a return to the era before 750-page environmental-impact statements. Who among us hasn’t conjured up wistful images of […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Seeking balance in Oregon’s timber country
“Now, that is an old-growth tree!” shouts Jerry Franklin on a September day in the hills above Roseburg, Ore. A mammoth Douglas fir towers 10 stories above, dwarfing everything around it. Sunlight filters down through the thick canopy to a group of about 20 University of Washington students. “You can really see who the veterans […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Northwest Forest Plan timeline
1990 Under court order, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the northern spotted owl as threatened. 1991 U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer halts Forest Service timber sales in spotted owl habitat across the Northwest. 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) enacted under Clinton. Timber harvest resumes, but at much-reduced levels; safety net of “spotted owl […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
A fresh take on an old crime: A review of The Case of D.B. Cooper’s Parachute
The Case of D.B. Cooper’s ParachuteWilliam L. Sullivan411 pages, paperback: $14.95.Navillus Press, 2012. In November 1971, a man traveling under the name “Dan Cooper” hijacked a Boeing 727 flying between Portland and Seattle, demanded $200,000 from the FBI, then parachuted from the plane into history, somewhere in the Northwestern wilds. The FBI has searched unsuccessfully […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
How the amount of fish you eat impacts water quality
Idaho plans to conduct a $300,000 study to learn how much fish its residents eat from state waters. The amount consumed helps determine regulatory limits for pollutant levels in rivers and lakes. Most Western states use the EPA’s default fish-consumption rate, a cracker-sized 17.5 grams per day, to set human health standards for dozens of […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Tracking Ice Age people in Oregon
Wind-whipped rainclouds formed a low ceiling over the oceanic buttes and basins of south-central Oregon. The usually sundrenched sage darkened in the weather as I walked, my hood pulled up against the grass-bending tug of the northwest breeze. The air smelled richer than it usually does on the dry side of the Cascades, the sagebrush […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
County kickbacks
Though Westerners tend to idealize frontier independence, rural county governments often rely on Uncle Sam. Federal payment programs meant to compensate counties for lost cash from tax-exempt public lands distributed about $900 million nationwide in 2009. One of these programs — the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) — was barely renewed in […]
Posted inWotr
Wolves: The debate is seldom rational
The wolf pot continues to boil in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Now, another state has been added to the stew. In Oregon, environmentalists are protesting the piecemeal removal of wolves from the Endangered Species list, hunters want less competition from wolves, and ranchers complain that wolves are killing their livestock. In eastern Oregon, where there […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Cultural blight
Plant disease threatens traditions of California tribes.
Posted inWotr
The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Cheewa James: Chronicler of the ‘Tribe That Wouldn’t Die’
Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn’t DieCheewa James352 pages, softcover: $19.95.Naturegraph, 2008. With song and prayer, soil and prairie grass, Native American author Cheewa James recently honored the memory of her long-lost great-great uncle. Frank Modoc left his Oklahoma reservation for a Quaker seminary over 120 years ago, fell victim to tuberculosis and never returned. While […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2007: Which Way West
Heard Around the West
OREGON Rick Kirschner, a naturopath who works with corporations to resolve staff conflicts, has been hired to train the trash-talking city council of Ashland, a city better known for hosting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The therapist will have his work cut out for him. At the last meeting of the seven-member group, Councilman David Chapman […]