A recent federal court ruling may delay plans to declare grizzly recovery in Yellowstone a success. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled Oct. 4 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 1993 Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan lacks an adequate yardstick for measuring recovery of the species, which gained federal protection in 1975. Citing the plan’s […]
Wildlife
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
To: Mom from: Wolf 3, Somewhere in Yellowstone National Park
About the last thing I remember, we were standing around that dead elk in Canada, you and me and One Eye and the triplets. You were laying out the meal at the south end of dinner, and I was leaving a message for those brain-dead coyotes on a pine tree. Then there was this loud […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
‘The hate in our country is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Nevada’s ugly tug-of war. “The hate in our country is reminiscent of Nazi Germany.” – Guy Pence Last March, a pipe bomb blew a hole in the wall of Forest Service District Ranger Guy Pence’s office in Carson City. In August, dynamite blew up […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
‘As long as people are breaking the law …’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Nevada’s ugly tug-of war. “As long as people are breaking the law and getting away with it … it’s going to be tough.” – Jim Nelson Jim Nelson, supervisor of the Toiyabe and Humboldt national forests in Nevada, has led the agency in cracking […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Saving salmon
Saving Salmon Billy Frank, chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, said it was now or never: “You going to wait until the last salmon is gone from the last spawning bed?” Frank was speaking at a ceremony in Seattle, Wash., marking the formation of For the Sake of Salmon, an organization of Northwest government, […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Bears forced to defer to cows
A plan by Wyoming officials to relocate two grizzly bears with a taste for beef has environmentalists concerned. They say cows are taking precedence over bears in important grizzly habitat near Jackson, Wyo. In mid-September, Wyoming officials decided to move one bear from a grazing allotment inside Grand Teton National Park and another from the […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Timber sales are throwbacks to beastly days
Though the science of forestry has advanced over the past decade, green timber sales in forests west of the Cascades in Washington and Oregon don’t show it. Take the Roman Dunn timber sale, a tract of old-growth Douglas fir managed by the Bureau of Land Management along the central coast of Oregon near Eugene. A […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
ATVs shred redds
If endangered salmon trying to reach central Idaho didn’t have enough to worry about, now they need to dodge tires. Over the Labor Day weekend, drivers of all-terrain vehicles blasted through two miles of prime spawning grounds for salmon and bull trout along the upper Salmon River. The marauders tore up gravel and algae in […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Alberta proves deadly for wolves
Though the wolf population in northern Canada is strong, southwestern Alberta – with ranch land bordering on wilderness – is becoming a killing ground for wolves. Biologists on both sides of the border fear that if the open shooting season there continues, the 100 or so wolves that have migrated on their own into western […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Just ask the loggers
Though environmentalists feared the worst when President Clinton signed a controversial timber-salvage law this summer, the Forest Service told them not to worry: The agency would take every precaution to protect the environment. A memo sent to regional foresters Sept. 21 from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., suggests otherwise. Citing a lack of government […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Peak preserved
PEAK PRESERVED Hikers on the summit of 13,462-foot Treasury Mountain, near Crested Butte, Colo., may not have known it, but until recently they were standing on private property. That changed Aug. 21 when the Wilderness Land Trust purchased 200 acres of private land inside the Raggeds and Maroon Bells-Snowmass wilderness areas. Much of the land, […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Buy some shorts: Save a salamander
BUY SOME SHORTS: SAVE A SALAMANDER All 50 state wildlife agencies have joined a campaign to add user fees to outdoor products. Their aim: to save wildlife that isn’t hunted or endangered but still in need of habitat. The International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and seven conservation groups, including the World Wildlife Fund […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
To save a Utah canyon, a BLM ranger quits and turns activist
Floating past cottonwood trees and tamarisk just before dusk, Skip Edwards deftly keeps his raft within earshot of ours so he can pummel us with facts about the 1964 Wilderness Act. But around the next bend, the former Bureau of Land Management river ranger falls silent and points to a massive red and orange sandstone […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Fifteen people march in Idaho to mourn the vanishing salmon
There is a chaos theory adage about the movement of a butterfly’s wings setting off a hurricane on the other side of the globe. It is an interesting notion; for every action, a reaction. It has about it a certain humility, a recognition that we know very little about the potential impact of our doings. […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Cut to the past: logging wars resume
Less than three years after the Clinton administration devised a plan to protect most of the remaining ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, the big trees have started to fall again. Taking advantage of an obscure provision in a salvage logging bill recently signed by the president, loggers have begun cutting healthy old-growth forests west […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Move over, Catron County
Not to be outdone by other angry rural counties in the West, Lake County, Ore., wants to buy the 1 million acres of Forest Service land within its boundaries. Officials of the county in south-central Oregon say they’re frustrated by a federal bureaucracy that has slowed timber harvesting and hurt the local economy. To make […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Civil disobedience heats up in Oregon
Frustrated by their inability to appeal two old-growth logging sales, environmentalists in Oregon have taken to the woods. More than 30 people have been arrested since Sept. 11 in protests against the Sugarloaf logging operation in southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest (HCN, 9/19/94). Farther north, in the Willamette National Forest, 20 to 30 people have […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Triage for trees attacked
Triage for trees attacked Environmentalists in southern Oregon say the Forest Service wants to “kill the patient” in an effort to protect a rare tree species from a fatal root fungus. The Port Orford cedar, native to the southern Oregon and northern California coast, has succumbed throughout its range to the fungus, which spreads through […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Sheep vs. sheep in Hells Canyon
To protect bighorn sheep, the Forest Service has decided to kick the domestic variety out of Hells Canyon National Recreation Area – again. The agency decided in 1994 to shut down three grazing allotments that straddle the Oregon-Idaho border. It feared that bighorn sheep reintroduced into the area were succumbing to a deadly bacteria, Pasteurella, […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Clamping down on trapping
When Judy Goss of Aspen, Colo., recently found her neighbor’s missing dog, Pooh, caught but unhurt in a wire snare trap in the White River National Forest, she got angry. Now she and Pooh’s owner, Cody Lacy, have joined others in a fight to clamp down on sport trapping of wildlife such as badgers, bobcats, […]