Janelle Holden is in the business of changing minds — including her own. Holden, the coexistence director for the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance, grew up on a cattle ranch on the Great Plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. When grizzly bears began moving into the area in the 1980s, her father was far […]
Wildlife
Posted inWotr
When a forest goes feral, it’s time for volunteers
Wallace Stegner once wrote that the worst thing that can happen to a piece of land, short of coming into the hands of an unscrupulous developer, is to be left open to the unmanaged public. His great fear seems to be coming true. With the downsizing of the federal workforce and the increasing mountain of […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Toothy nuisance moves north
Global warming may be one of the reasons behind the recent appearance of football-sized, orange-toothed aquatic rodents in the Skagit River Valley of northwestern Washington. Nutria, beaver-like creatures native to South America, are notorious for destroying flood-control levees and chewing through wetlands in the Southeastern United States. Fur entrepreneurs brought them to this country in […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Cougar Management Guidelines
Cougar Management Guidelines Cougar Management Guidelines Working Group 137 pages, softcover: $21.95 WildFutures, 2005. Wildlife managers and citizen activists alike will find this book useful. It collects current cougar research into a set of guidelines for managing these secretive and increasingly rare big cats. Full of charts and figures, the book explores topics such as […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Forest Service tries to teach greens a lesson
Agency attempts to bend court order to halt minor projects, but is knocked back
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
The end of something really big
As soon as we read about the dead whale, it was clear we were about to take a field trip. “Let’s go,” said my friend Nathan, peering at a newspaper photo of a giant beached vertebrae. He’s a sculptor, so he has an artist’s appreciation for bones. Besides, his mother had recently cracked one of […]
Posted inWotr
Wilderness bill is a test for common-sense conservation in Idaho
For solitude and inspiration, we seek out wilderness on our public lands, where the road ends and the trail begins, where, by law, we leave our mechanized contrivances and walk, float or ride in on horseback. Wilderness, a gift of nature, remains today because of laws, and where protective laws don’t yet exist, the values […]
Posted inWotr
Idaho wilderness bill is another Teapot Dome giveaway
It sounds like a paradox, but a congressional designation of wilderness can actually harm what is wild. I believe that will come true if Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson’s bill, the Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act, becomes law. Whether we like it or not, once that law is passed, the law of unintended […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
Salvage logging speeds up
The timber industry and environmentalists can agree on one thing: The Forest Service’s Biscuit Fire salvage logging program has been a fiasco. Despite accidentally allowing logging in a botanical reserve, the agency has sold just one-fifth of the timber it promised (HCN, 5/16/05: Unsalvageable). Now, two Oregon Republicans have a plan to prevent similar […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
Restoration-by-poisoning plan shot down
Just hours before the California Department of Fish and Game was to poison a stream in the Sierra Nevada — part of an effort to restore a threatened trout — a federal court halted the project. The plan called for killing all fish in an 11-mile stretch of Silver King Creek and Tamarack Lake, then […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
The Ghosts of Yosemite
Scientists from the past bring us a message about the future
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
Pombo takes on the Endangered Species Act
‘Critical habitat’ is likely a thing of the past
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
Handling griz: How much is enough?
At least 5 percent of the West’s grizzly bears should wear radio collars, researchers say
Posted inOctober 17, 2005: The Ghosts of Yosemite
In the Great Basin, scientists track global warming
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Ghosts of Yosemite.” Eugene Raymond Hall, one of biologist Joseph Grinnell’s first graduate students, was “a robust, pipe-smoking, extroverted individual,” known for his stubbornness and rough edges, writes historian Barbara Stein. In many ways, he was unlike his reserved mentor, but his scientific […]
Posted inWotr
The House takes an ax to the Endangered Species Act
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, the states can serve as “laboratories of democracy” by testing new approaches to see if they might work for the nation as a whole. The idea is that if a new approach falls flat, the rest of the country can learn from the mistake without going […]
Posted inOctober 3, 2005: Out of the Four Corners
Meloy’s last message — from bighorn country
Author Ellen Meloy died unexpectedly at her home in Bluff, Utah, last Nov. 4. The gifted writer, illustrator and environmentalist leaves behind an impressive canon of nature writing that includes Raven’s Exile, The Last Cheater’s Waltz and The Anthropology of Turquoise, a book short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Eating Stone, completed just before her death […]
Posted inWotr
Wildfire can make you run for your life
As we stood on a hillside in Idaho’s Boulder-White Cloud mountains watching a fire bear down on us, I told my friend Dave that this was the closest I’d been to a wildfire without getting paid for it. We’d just finished speed-hiking down from a high lake basin, after the Forest Service told us to […]
Posted inWotr
The end of something really big
As soon as we read about the dead whale, it was clear we were about to take a field trip. “Let’s go,” said my friend Nathan, peering at a newspaper photo of a giant beached vertebrae. He’s a sculptor, so he has an artist’s appreciation for bones. Besides, his mother had recently cracked one of […]
Posted inWotr
Lions and cheetahs and elephants, yippee
In a recentNature magazine article, scientists suggest that threatened African wildlife can be saved by moving the animals to the American Great Plains. What a great way to restore our faith in cowboys! Many have forgotten that cowboys with broken bones regularly compete in bronc and bull riding, and all have survived lousy prices and […]
Posted inWotr
One man’s grisly encounter with a grizzly
It’s easy to come away from the new Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man, persuaded that its subject was a delusional crackpot who deserved his fate: to be killed and eaten by a bear. That certainly is the popular impression of Timothy Treadwell, who died in Alaska nearly two years ago at the claws and fangs […]