Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Other regions, such as the Sierra Nevada and the interior Columbia Basin, have attempted to develop ecosystem management plans. In the interior Columbia Basin, the attempt is not going well. The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (the initials ICBEMP inevitably became “Ice-bump’) is […]
Wildlife
Posted inNovember 23, 1998: A patchwork peace unravels
Wildlife crossings cut down on roadkill
MISSOULA, Mont. – A radio-collared Canada lynx cautiously approaches the Trans-Canada Highway in Alberta’s Bow River Valley. A large recreation vehicle rumbles into view. The cat hesitates, then nervously skitters back into the brush. About 50 yards from the roadside, it lies down for about a half hour before rising to make another attempt to […]
Posted inNovember 23, 1998: A patchwork peace unravels
Amateur essayists walk a changing forest
HART’S COVE, Ore. – In the Siuslaw National Forest, the contrast in viewpoints among those on the trail is as stark as night and day. “They’re amazing,” says Mary Collins, shaking her head in wonder as she stares through the rain at the gray-barked, old-growth trees that rise like pillars. Sitka spruce trees – some […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Poacher gets trapped
When the authorities cracked an extensive Utah cougar-poaching ring this fall, they got help from an unlikely source: the poachers themselves. The hunters, unaware that their guide didn’t have the proper permits, documented their illegal hunts in photographs, videotapes and boastful magazine articles. In mid-September, Colorado hunting guide Samuel Sickels pleaded guilty to wanton destruction […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Lynx stops timber sale
The Canada lynx – proposed but not yet listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act – has stopped a controversial timber sale in southern Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest. Deputy Regional Forester Tom Thompson overturned an earlier decision to allow the 1,473-acre Tie Camp timber sale within a dense forest of lodgepole pine, spruce […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
The lynx: To list or not to list?
You may be seeing more of the elusive Canada lynx if conservationists have their way. Groups such as the Biodiversity Legal Foundation have long argued that this cousin of the bobcat needs protection under the Endangered Species Act. Last spring, a federal judge ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the lynx. The […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Gutsy scientists stand up to bureaucratic juggernaut
Science Under Siege: The Politicians’ War on Nature and Truth By Todd Wilkinson, Johnson Books, Boulder, Colo., 1998. Paperback, $18. 364 pages. The struggle to protect the American landscape is often portrayed as a boxing match between powerful corporations and gritty environmentalists. That simplistic picture leaves out a less-heralded yet equally critical player: the federal […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
A Montana writer’s real-life tales of bears and terror
Joe Heimer had the sow grizzly’s upper lip clenched in his fist, shoving and squeezing as hard as he could. The bear had knocked him flat on his back in the deep, sticky snow, and she was standing on his mauled legs, trying to shake his hand loose and sink her jagged teeth into his […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Grizzly war
Scientists, activists and politicians clash over taking away the great bruin’s federal protection
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Bare facts
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. * An adult male grizzly can stand eight feet tall, weigh up to 1,000 pounds and run as fast as a racehorse – 35 miles per hour – uphill or downhill. Females are just as fast as males, but may be half their size. […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Idaho grizzly plan shifts into low gear
Note: this story appeared in the print edition as a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Three years ago, Tom France and Hank Fischer were on a roll. The two veteran conservationists from Missoula, Mont., had successfully completed negotiations with timber and labor leaders to bring back grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot country that straddles […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
A quiet victory in Quincy
QUINCY, Calif. – The day after President Clinton signed the Quincy Library Group’s forest management plan into law on Oct. 22, members of the grassroots coalition celebrated with a sparkling cider toast. That was it. No Main Street parade. No victory banner across the Plumas County Courthouse. After five years of planning, plotting and politicking […]
Posted inOctober 26, 1998: The Oregon way
Roadless, for now
Colorado environmentalists stopped two roadless-area timber sales last month. A federal judge agreed with a Colorado Environmental Coalition lawsuit when he told the Forest Service that the agency didn’t properly account for the protection of two sensitive species, the northern goshawk and the boreal owl, in preparing the Trout Mountain timber sale on the Rio […]
Posted inOctober 26, 1998: The Oregon way
A tie that binds: county income and timber
Peg Reagan wasn’t a typical Western county commissioner. For starters, she’s an environmentalist. “I was in the minority on any land-use issue,” she says of her four-year term on the Curry County Commission in southwestern Oregon. After leaving office in 1995, she decided it was time for the minority to get organized. She founded the […]
Posted inOctober 26, 1998: The Oregon way
Varmints
Some think of prairie dogs as oversized, furry rats – agricultural pests that compete with cows for forage. Others see them as essential parts of prairie ecosystems. Varmints, a soon-to-be-released documentary from High Plains Films, explores the heated controversy that has mobilized the Sierra Club in defense of the critters, and has spawned the Varmint […]
Posted inOctober 26, 1998: The Oregon way
Are birds to blame for vanishing salmon?
ASTORIA, Ore. – In late May, when young salmon and steelhead ride the spring freshet down to the mouth of the Columbia River, Rice Island is a scene of wildlife bedlam. The island, a stretch of windswept sand 21 miles from the river mouth, hosts the world’s largest nesting colony of Caspian terns – as […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
An activist dies in the forest
Logging spokesmen say the death of an Earth First! activist should serve to get protesters out of the woods; Earth First! says: Not a chance. David Chain, 24, of Austin, Texas, was killed when he was struck in the head by a falling tree Sept. 17. He’d been trying to stop logging on land owned […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
Wolves develop an appetite for beef
In Montana, ranchers and government officials remain baffled by the Ninemile wolves’ appetite for beef. Since April, the wolf pack, originally made famous in Rick Bass’s book, The Ninemile Wolves, has been responsible for killing four calves and one 600-pound yearling. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in turn, has been responsible for killing four […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
A county writes strict logging rules
A pro-logging northern New Mexico county has passed a far-reaching law that mandates watershed-friendly logging practices on private land. “There’s nothing else like this (in the U.S.),” said attorney David Gomez of the Western Environmental Law Center in Taos, N.M., who helped draft the ordinance. The three-man Rio Arriba County Commission passed the ordinance unanimously […]
Posted inOctober 12, 1998: A river becomes a raw nerve
Listening for wolf howls
When Suzanne Laverty first met Travis Bullock, who calls himself a “redneck outfitter,” she wrote a brief impression of him in her diary: “Travis Bullock – Butthead.” But Bullock wasn’t so bullheaded that he didn’t see value in Laverty’s suggestion that he capitalize on the nation’s curiosity about the wolves that had been transplanted into […]