Recently I had the opportunity to backpack in Northern California’s Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness. The wildflowers were wonderful and among the many birds I got a close up look at a Lazuli Bunting. One day I climbed Black Rock Mountain which provides spectacular 360 degree views – including a view of several of last summer’s […]
Politics
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Rise up swinging
Northern Cheyenne boxer Duran “Junior” Caferro takes on challenges inside the ring and out
Posted inGoat
Is humanitarian aid really “littering”?
In summer, the southern Arizona desert is among the most merciless environments on earth. Temperatures spike at 120 degrees. Shade is scarce. Each year hundreds of undocumented migrants die trying to walk north from Mexico. The grisly accounts of survivors and the quickly-mummified evidence on the ground suggest that a cooked brain and water-starved sensory neurons […]
Posted inWotr
This wilderness bill is a homespun vision for the West
Growing up in Montana, we always heard about national forests as places of “multiple use.” When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, that meant everything from hiking and backpacking to hunting, grazing, selective logging, fishing and catching glimpses of wild animals. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, however, we saw more and […]
Posted inWotr
Why I say “no” to a regional wilderness bill
Wyoming folks are cantankerous souls, with independent notions about where they can go and what they ought to be able to do when they get there. We love wild country, but a lot of us also love our four-wheelers, snowmobiles and four-wheel drive pickups. We don’t have anything against drilling, logging or grazing on the […]
Posted inGoat
Mixups over tribal IDs
From Walmart to the U.S.-Canadian border, Indians are encountering problems with their tribal IDs — partly due to new laws which went into effect June 1, partly due to bureaucratic glitches, and partly because of the ongoing failure of the U.S. government to treat Native Americans fairly. HCN reported on this problem in a story […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
States rev up ORV rules
Western legislation aims to curb off-roading problems
Posted inWotr
You don’t need a gun to enjoy a national park
When I was 11 years old, I papered the walls of my bedroom with pages from gun catalogs. It was an attempt to convince my father that I really wanted a gun. He eventually gave in when I was 12 or 13, and I’ve owned guns ever since, even carrying one or more in the […]
Posted inWotr
Army targets southeastern Colorado rangelands
Ranchers feel under siege from site expansion
Posted inGoat
BLM’s unheroic response to civil disobedience
“One day the South will recognize its real heroes.” – Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail In the Alabama of the mid-nineteen sixties, Martin Luther King could see the arc of history bending before him. He knew that the South’s real heroes were people like Rosa Parks, who defied the law because […]
Posted inGoat
Adopt a stimulus project
Affirming that “investigative journalism is at risk,” ProPublica began publishing a year ago. A nonprofit newsroom in Manhattan led by Paul Steiger (former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal) and Stephen Engelberg (former managing editor of Portland’s Oregonian and once an investigative reporter at the New York Times), ProPublica is bankrolled by the Sandler […]
Posted inGoat
From Gitmo to Montana?
During the presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain promised to close the detainee prison at the Marine Corps base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Obama won, and he’s been looking at ways to fulfill his promise. One complication is that there are people in custody who should stay in custody — […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Sci-fi conservation
Enviros create forcefields around wilderness areas and parks
Posted inWotr
The real Washington vampire story
Vampires are taking the West by storm, descending on rural communities like Forks, Wash. Is this a reference to Twilight, the now cult-classic book and movie? No, in this case, the malevolent outsiders are agents of ICE, which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Border Patrol. There is a strong parallel here […]
Posted inWotr
Democrats and Republicans can work together
Like a ghost from the 1970s, when Republicans and Democrats teamed up to pass major environmental laws, bipartisan politics has reappeared in Washington, D.C. The just-passed Omnibus Public Land Management Act has something for nearly everyone, including more than 2 million acres of new wilderness, more than 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers; expansions […]
Posted inRay
How the rightwingers hold Interior hostages
Republicans in the U.S. Senate today stood up for a downtrodden victim — the oil and gas industry. That’s how they described it anyway. Really a lot more is at stake. The superficial news: On behalf of their chosen industry, using classic Senate martial arts, the Republicans blocked the Obama administration’s nominee for the Number […]
Posted inGoat
Notes from el Mundo Nuevo
We are not talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert. The hungers grow. Fewer crumbs reach the global economy’s bottom-dwellers, so they abandon the slums and failing campos to take their best shots at something more. For this, they must be hunted. I am in the Altar Valley to look at the […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Get angry… or get a squeegee
The president of the University of Washington, announcing the elimination of 1,000 jobs at the Seattle college, plus a yet-to-be determined number of layoffs, wants people to become furious and do something about it. Budget cuts this deep are unprecedented, Mark Emmert told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and will take 10,000 students per year out of […]
Posted inRay
No conspiracy in Libby, despite hundreds of deaths
Maybe it’s more incompetence by U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors — kind of a holdover from the Bush era. Maybe it’s because a criminal conspiracy charge is always difficult to prove. Or maybe it’s a form of justice. A jury in Missoula, Montana, just decided that the W.R. Grace corporation and some former Grace executives […]
Posted inGoat
The cost of progress
The Environmental Working Group just released a two-year study focusing on the toxins found in five minority women at the forefront of environmental justice battles. Within each community, these women work tirelessly to protect citizens from various forms of pollution. And within each of these women, scientists found significantly higher amounts of toxins than other […]