Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Rose Comstock is president of California Women in Timber. She also manages Clover Logging, which has shrunk from about 60 employees to two. The Barkley sale she refers to was a salvage-logging-rider sale that the timber firms on the QLG refused to bid on […]
Wildlife
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
My experience with the Quincy group wasn’t positive
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Erin Noel grew up in a small town within the region the Quincy Library Group has staked out as its domain. She founded Forest Alert, which monitored the Lassen, El Dorado and Tahoe national forests. She now studies law at the University of California, […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
I was always welcomed there
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Terry Terhaar worked for the nonprofit Pacific Rivers Council in 1995. She spent 10 months attending Quincy Library Group meetings. Before that, she was a regional vice president for the Sierra Club in northern California and Nevada. She is now a graduate student at […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
We’re much stronger together
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “Charismatic,” “feisty,” “a bulldog,” and “non-stop talker” are just a few of the adjectives used to describe environmental attorney Michael Jackson. He has lived and worked in Quincy, Calif., for 20 years. Michael Jackson: “I’ve taken part in listing almost every salmon on the […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
How a foe saved the Quincy Library Group’s bacon
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Politics has always made strange bedfellows, but this one was stranger than most. One day last July, George Miller took Don Young into one of those rooms near the House Chamber and did him a favor. Well, OK, it was only sort of a favor. But Miller is a liberal California Democrat, […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
New facts about old fish
They have weathered volcanic eruptions and landslides, seen woolly mammoths come and go and outlived the dinosaurs. Now the Pacific Northwest’s white sturgeon are enduring the scrutiny of scientists who want to understand more about North America’s largest fish. The scientists working for Washington and Oregon have been tagging white sturgeon in the Columbia River […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Jackson Hole tries “unnatural’ elk management
-Three, four, five. There are a lot of them!” says the driver of the minivan with Georgia plates parked beside the highway. Behind us, a screen of spruces hides the famous peaks of Grand Teton National Park. In front of us, on a sagebrush plain golden with June flowers, are the rich brown coats and […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Wolves take heavy toll in Montana
In the Tobacco Valley of northwest Montana, wolves killed at least 30 sheep in six weeks. One rancher lost 28 animals on a single night in June, prompting the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife to shell out its largest-ever wolf-kill reimbursement – $4,000. This was one of the worst wolf attacks on livestock in the West, […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Maps may save lives
Participants in an Oregon mapping project want to keep history from repeating itself. When five people were killed by landslides that hit their homes or cars in 1996, many observers blamed logging of steep slopes above the houses and highways. They said the Oregon Department of Forestry should have prevented the situation (HCN, 12/23/96). Defending […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Rid-a-Bird works too well
Rid-a-Bird, a two-man company in Wilton, Iowa, has been killing unwanted birds for over 40 years with the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval. But two dead raptors in Washington have called into question the company’s method of pest control. Rid-a-Bird’s product lures birds to a perch containing fenthion, a fatal nerve poison which paralyzes them. The […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Agencies dunk endangered songbird
ROOSEVELT LAKE, Ariz. – A tall stand of Asian salt-cedars next to a man-made reservoir is the last place anyone would expect to find colonies of one of America’s most endangered bird species. But that’s exactly where several southwestern willow flycatchers were flitting on a warm mid-June afternoon. Less than six inches tall and pale […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Feds take on a sneaky species
Two years ago, Pat Mehlhop waded through a willow thicket on the shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico, carrying a 20-foot-long pole with a mirror attached to one end. The ecologist with the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program was in search of what has become a rarity along the state’s waterways: the […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
The buffalo underground: Now it can be told
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. – Shortly after last New Year’s Day, Vickie Dyar’s cat started acting strangely. When the gift-store owner stepped into the frigid air to investigate, she saw deep tracks leading through the deep snow toward a small barn near the house. As Dyar walked toward the barn, a bison, its magnificent black head […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Will Wyoming warm to wolves?
The second week of April is a brutal time to drive through Wyoming; windblown blizzards coat everything with ice. But that’s what 70 people in Cheyenne did last spring to view my photographic safari about the return of wolves to Wyoming and Montana. I was prepared for more than brutal weather. While antagonism toward wolves […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Keep America green: Hire an illegal alien
From 1975 to 1987, I inspected tree planting in the Klamath National Forest on the Oregon-California border. So I had to laugh a while ago at a quote in a newspaper story about illegal aliens apprehended while planting trees in the Boise National Forest here in Idaho. “The Forest Service does not knowingly hire contractors […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Wet summer a bust for firefighters
MISSOULA, Mont. – Across the West it’s been a good year for rain and a bad one for firefighters. Heavy snows, spring rains and little dry lightning have made this fire season a bust so far. In the Northern Rockies area, the Forest Service says 1,052 fires had burned less than 10,000 acres by Aug. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Injunction shakes forests
Federal judges sided with environmentalists in July, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service has failed to make good on its promise to protect endangered species in Southwestern forests and streamside areas. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a six-week ban on over 20 timber sales and barred grazing on 11 Southwestern […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Crossing borders to save hawks
For more than a decade, biologist Brian Woodbridge watched hundreds of Swainson’s hawks raise their young in the fields of Butte Valley in northern California. Each fall, the birds headed south, but Woodbridge spotted a strange pattern. “I noticed that some years a lot more adults returned from migration than others,” he says. “That really […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Something fishy about this pollution
Industrial waste. Raw sewage. Atlantic salmon. One of those wasn’t considered an environmental threat until recently. Environmentalists from Washington charge that escapees from large floating salmon farms in Puget Sound should be regulated just like factory and sewage-plant discharges. They say Atlantic salmon raised in hatcheries compete with wild stocks, spread diseases through accumulated wastes […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Abnormal amphibians
Have you ever been mucking about in the local swamp and found a one-eyed frog or a five-legged salamander? If you have, you’re not alone. In the last decade, malformed amphibians have turned up in about a dozen states around the country, including Washington, Oregon, California and North Dakota. Herpetologists, the scientists who study amphibians […]