Everybody’s doing it – the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, former Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, the Sierra Club’s Charlie Ogle – all going to jail for trees and to stop salvage sales. Getting handcuffed and treated roughly by gendarmes. Paying a new, for them, sort of dues. Since our travels around the West put us in […]
Wildlife
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
The secret life of wolverines
STANLEY, Idaho – Snow machines finally silent, four researchers walked toward a trap for elusive wolverines. All was still in the thick timber of the Sawtooth Wilderness until a growl made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Pacing inside the log-house trap was a wolverine about as big as a bear […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Wolf from Canada killed by U.S. red tape
The release of 26 British Columbia wolves into Idaho and Yellowstone National Park seemed a howling success until biologists were forced to kill a wolf after it bit a biologist’s thumb to the bone. The alpha male bit John Weaver during a stopover in Missoula, Mont., the day before the animal was to be released […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Can a salvage sale save the trees?
For the first time in the history of the Forest Service, the high bidder of a timber sale has no intention of felling the trees. The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Bellingham, Wash., bid $29,000 for the Thunder Mountain salvage sale, a 275-acre roadless tract in Washington’s Okanogan National Forest. But […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Welcome back (with a bang)
After 21 days of leave with uncertain pay due to the federal budget impasse, Forest Service workers in Espaûola, N.M., returned to work Jan. 8 to find their office had been bombed. “What a welcome back,” says Sam Mott, a spokesman for the Santa Fe National Forest. “We’d feel better if we knew why. It’s […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Fish for your wall
FISH FOR YOUR WALL A new Trout Unlimited poster tells a few good fish stories. The Apache trout and greenback cutthroat trout are both on the road to recovery since being listed as endangered species in 1973. But the poster, Threatened and Endangered Trout and Salmon of North America also shares less cheery tales of […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
One forest, two studies
ONE FOREST, TWO STUDIES In the old West, arguments may have been settled by a gunfight on Main Street, but in the battle over Southwest forests there is a new kind of showdown – dueling studies. A recent Forest Service report claims that the number of larger trees in the region has decreased little over […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Survival of a trickster
SURVIVAL OF A TRICKSTER The coyote has never gotten much respect. For the past two centuries, ranchers, farmers and federal agents have ruthlessly gunned and poisoned the tawny predator. Yet unlike its larger cousin, the wolf, the coyote has thrived, and expanded its range into virtually every ecosystem in North America. How the legendary trickster […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Logged hillsides collapse into Idaho’s creeks
CLEARWATER NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho – Forest Service ranger Art Bourassa pulls off to the side of the road and looks up at a raw and broken hillside. Some might assume it’s the freshly scalped victim of a strip-mining operation. Not this time. Torrential November rains washed out this section of forest in northern Idaho. At […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hunting: Get used to it
Let me state right off and as unapologetically as possible that I am a member of the “hook-and-bullet” press – a field editor of the venerable Outdoor Life magazine, which along with its sister publication, Field & Stream, are America’s original conservation magazines. Both have been in business since before the turn of the century, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Agency chooses death
Killing is the method most frequently used by the federal government to control livestock predators such as coyotes, lions and bears, according to a recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Although guidelines for Animal Damage Control staff require them to consider non-lethal methods of control first, federal investigators found […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Bird Brains
-If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” * Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, c. 1880s Like coyotes, some members of the crow family have long been considered vermin. Scruffy crows steal crops; ravens rip into garbage; magpies and jays steal eggs and nestlings from “innocent” […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands
(Note: this article accompanies another feature story in this issue, Utah hearings misfire.) When Utah’s congressional delegation announced almost a year ago that it would introduce a bill designating BLM wilderness, environmentalists in the state were shocked. They knew they faced a potentially disastrous alignment of political planets: Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
How to influence Congress on just dollars a day
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands. Ray Wheeler, who has a history of determination that includes hiking nearly all the way across Utah, climbed on a jet in Salt Lake City last July 12, bound for the nation’s halls of power. […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A few modest principles to help us manage Utah’s public lands
It wasn’t every day that I got to speak at a chamber of commerce meeting, so I tried to be careful. But I must have shown a bit too much green or too many urban mannerisms, and one member of the audience came rushing over almost before I’d stopped talking. In seconds we were going […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A monumental clash of values over Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Congress weighs the fate of Utah’s wild lands. Utah’s proposed BLM wilderness areas feature heart-stopping scenery: big rivers booming in sheer-walled canyons thousands of feet deep; labyrinthine canyon systems etched into colorful sedimentary rock formations; forested plateaus ringed by 1,000-foot high cliff walls; […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Move to repeal logging rider gathers speed
Since it became law four months ago, the salvage logging rider has proved a mixed blessing for the timber industry, an embarrassment to the administration and a rallying point for environmentalists. Often called the worst environmental legislation to emerge from the 104th Congress, the salvage law could soon become a litmus test for President Clinton […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Hobbled federal wolf program attracts friends and money
With a little help from their friends, another batch of Canadian wolves will be released in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho this winter, despite congressional budget action designed to halt the project in its tracks. Environmental groups have pledged $40,000 so far, enough money to find and identify about 30 appropriate wolves in British […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Environmentalists say agency uses them as scapegoats
For hundreds of years, rural Hispanics have gathered firewood from the forests of northern New Mexico. After all, it was once their land, given to them in Spanish land grants as far back as the late 17th century. Even after the Forest Service took control of the land grants in the early 1900s, local families […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
Utah hearings misfire
Unidentified speaker: What I would like to do is have a political (poll) … and just let everybody express what they can’t express because of time limits; so until that red light goes off, (inaudible) make noise and … The crowd, chanting: 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, 5.7, – Official transcript, Salt Lake City Wilderness Hearing, […]