Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Miles County lives near the town of Brush in northeastern Colorado. Last winter, he lost most of his bees and he suspects the cause was the insecticide Penncap-M. Miles County: “I think farmers started getting lazy in the 1950s and 1960s. There were so […]
Wildlife
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
When dead bees don’t make a case
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If most beekeepers are the proverbial shy and retiring types, Tom Theobald isn’t one of them. From his beeyards in Niwot, just northeast of Boulder, Colo., he has pushed state and federal officials hard to address bee kills he believes have been caused by […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Rain and clearcuts make fatal brew
UMPQUA, Ore. – In their octagonal house on a remote forested slope 30 miles northwest of Roseburg, Rick and Susan Moon and their next-door neighbor, Sharon Marvin, sat in the path of disaster Nov. 18. Above them in the gathering dark, curtains of rain were working away at the mountain, swelling a small creek and […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Checks are in the mail
Home siding by Louisiana-Pacific Inc. sold as a cheap alternative to cedar turned out to be more expensive than expected. When it swelled, buckled, soaked up water, rotted and even grew a mushroomlike fungus in wet weather, customers began frantically calling the company about their Inner Seal siding (HCN, 8/21/95). Now, Louisiana-Pacific says it will […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Where’s the fish?
Maps from Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources show more than a thousand miles of the state’s streams contain no fish. But they’re wrong. This distinction is important because state law requires that loggers and developers leave protective corridors of vegetation for erosion control next to fish-bearing streams. But biologists fear the mapping mistakes have […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Wear what you sow
South Dakotan Michael Melius sells jewelry you plant – -Seed Beads’ loaded with seeds of increasingly rare native grasses and wildflowers and strung on scraps of linen thread. It was the simplest packaging Melius could think of. “I had tried to sell seed mixes in packets with little success, I think, because that packaging implies […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
This machine makes trails …
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Parked in the back lot of the Forest Service office in Delta, Colo., is a skinny little bulldozer that looks almost like a toy. Designed to build trails, the Swepco 450 is tricky to maneuver since 8,000 pounds of steel balance on tracks only […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
…while ‘Rambo Cat’ obliterates them
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. The Forest Service’s Alan Vandiver is boss of some 800 miles of roads in the Hebgen Lake District in Montana, just outside Yellowstone National Park. That’s a lot of road, but it’s 130 miles less than it used to be, thanks to a road-ripping […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
A little bug causes a big stink in Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CORAL PINK SAND DUNES STATE PARK, Utah – -This might be a little rough,” says Rob Quist with a grin, as he guns the engine of his four-wheel drive truck. Suddenly, we are lurching toward a 50-foot-tall sand dune, wheels spinning in the soft […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Agency ordered to study trout – again
The beleaguered bull trout has been given another chance to make the endangered species list. U.S. District Judge Robert Jones ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review its 1994 decision that the fish doesn’t warrant immediate protection because other species have more pressing needs. Jones called parts of the Fish and Wildlife Service […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Forest Service building is torched by night raiders
A Forest Service ranger station in Oregon has become the latest target in the wave of violence directed at federal installations around the West. The Oakridge Ranger Station, about an hour’s drive southeast of Eugene, burst into flames early on the morning of Oct. 30. By the time firefighters had arrived, the 25,000-square-foot building had […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Some big birds come back
It didn’t take long for wildlife biologists to swoop down after a court decision cleared the way for bringing California condors back to the Colorado Plateau. A federal judge ruled Oct. 16 that officials from San Juan County in Utah could not stop reintroduction efforts since they could not prove harm from the birds. Less […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Idaho jury hits 12 Cove-Mallard protesters hard
An Idaho county jury recently assessed $1.15 million in damages against 12 Earth First! protesters, one of the largest civil awards ever levied against environmental rebels. The Oct. 30 verdict was made in connection with construction delays and $20,000 in damage to a D-8 Caterpillar tractor, a rubber-tired skidder and an excavator in the Nez […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
A listing and a delay
Faced with a court-imposed deadline, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed only one West Coast coho salmon population as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The agency announced Oct. 25 that coho along coastal Central California deserved threatened status under the law, but two populations in Northern California and Oregon will be studied for another […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Newspaper sues Forest Service
When Forest Service agents broke up a logging blockade several months ago at Oregon’s Warner Creek, they arrested five protesters plus two journalists from the Eugene Register Guard who were caught in the fray. Although no charges were ever filed against the journalists, the newspaper has now sued the Forest Service, citing violations of constitutional […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Utah tells Babbitt to back off
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has been sued by the state of Utah for his decision to reopen the process of wilderness designation (HCN, 9/2/96). Filed Oct. 14 in federal court, the suit challenges the legality of Babbitt’s “re-inventory” of Bureau of Land Management lands in Utah without public involvement. Babbitt announced on July 24 that […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Eyes of fire
It was March 7, 1996, on the fourth day of a 10-day lion hunt in the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona, when rancher Warner Glenn and his hunting dogs happened on a big cat they’d never seen before in America. It was a jaguar, and Glenn, in this quickly produced little booklet, tells us he […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Will ‘wanton killer’ lope into Colorado?
EAGLE, Colo. – Wes Schlegel, a lifelong rancher, just couldn’t figure it out: “If my dad and granddad could have heard what was said here tonight, they’d be rolling in their graves.” What he’d heard was praise for wolves, now gone from the Flat Tops Wilderness some 30 miles from here. Schlegel lives about 15 […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’
The dirt two-track rises quickly from the river to a ridge of pines. After a few miles the track veers out onto the sagebrush flats of this high desert plain in Montana, and there, on a patch of ground where grass and sage thin out, I spot what I have come looking for: small mounds […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
A rodent that can outlast a camel in the desert
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to as essay, “‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’.” It was a quote from naturalist J.R. Mead in 1859 that got University of Montana zoology professor Bert Pfeiffer curious about prairie dogs. Mead wrote: “Not a drop (of water) […]