Not only are salmon runs diminishing in the Pacific Northwest, the fish themselves are also shrinking, according to several recent studies. A study conducted at five Washington hatcheries revealed size decreases from 11 percent to 27 percent over a 12-year period, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That means some salmon that used to average 6 pounds […]
Wildlife
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. VANCOUVER, Wash. – Environmentalists chanted, “Habitat, habitat, have to have the habitat.” Some carried stuffed animals and paper fish. A straggly line of loggers dressed in prison garb marched past them, wearing buttons proclaiming “Property Rights ESA Hostage.” Inside the […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A tough law meets tough foes
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. In his classic 1940s essay, “Round River,” Aldo Leopold made the case for conserving biological diversity: “saving all the parts’ of the natural world. “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote. That […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A full-court press to save ecosystems
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. Boulder, Colo. – Jasper Carlton, head of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, sits at a table in his suburban townhome, intently sketching a map of the Selkirk ecosystem in northern Idaho. “I spent time in those mountains for weeks on end […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Soft-path approach to saving species
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. “Hank Fischer: least popular man in Montana,” shouts a 1978 headline in High Country News. The Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife earned that label by fighting the federal Animal Damage Control and its use of compound 1080 to […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Interior wants to kill a success
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. Ask a rancher in the West which he’d rather see traveling down the dusty road to his spread, a rattlesnake or a biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the rancher might just choose the snake. Many Montana […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Five states squirm as bull trout declines
Note: this article is one of several in this issue about the Endangered Species Act. What’s spotted, lives in pristine habitat on national forests and could put some loggers out of work if protected under the Endangered Species Act? No, it’s not that feathered denizen of the ancient forests, the northern spotted owl. It’s a […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
A war of ideologies, with endangered species as weapons
Big Bill Rose, my brother Tom’s redheaded boyhood friend, works for Union Pacific and lives in a mountain canyon west of Denver. Tom and I were visiting him some years ago, and the talk came around to Two Forks Dam. This proposed behemoth, since canceled, would have flooded the nearby canyons and mountain villages. Bill […]
Posted inMay 15, 1995: Dog and pony show about salmon and owls
Wolves born outside the park
After an international journey, nine weeks in a chain-link pen, a trek over Montana’s Beartooth Mountains and the loss of her mate, a female wolf brought to Yellowstone National Park in January delivered pups near Red Lodge, Mont. “All of a sudden I heard a whimper, kind of a squeal, and there they were,” ” […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Idaho injunction lifted
A federal judge recently dissolved an injunction that threatened to halt many activities on six Idaho national forests in order to protect endangered salmon. The injunction had prompted angry protests in the forest-dependent community of Salmon, Idaho, earlier this year (HCN, 2/20/95). But U.S. District Judge David Ezra said a biological opinion released March 1 […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Jail for a poacher
A Utah construction worker who killed a large, photogenic elk along a major road through Yellowstone National Park in the fall of 1993 and pleaded guilty to the crime will serve four months in prison and pay $30,000 in fines. But the rank act of poaching the elk was not what led Chad S. Beus, […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Bleak future for cutthroat
Fishery experts agreed at a February conference that there’s no practical way to eliminate the illegally planted lake trout that are killing native cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake. “There isn’t a fix, there isn’t a silver bullet – even suppression is a forever commitment,” federal biologist Lynn Kaeding told the Billings Gazette. A draft report […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Goats in the crosshairs
GOATS IN THE CROSSHAIRS Managers at Olympic National Park propose shooting mountain goats to save the stuff they graze, wallow and walk on – native plants. A recent draft environmental impact statement recommends killing the park’s 300 non-native goats rather than transferring them outside the park, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Park managers say efforts to […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Bring in more wolves
BRING IN MORE WOLVES The private group Defenders of Wildlife recently extended its Wolf Recovery Fund, established in Wyoming in 1987, to cover the Southwest. The program reimburses ranchers for livestock killed by wolves by raising funds from “the millions of wolf supporters all over the nation,” says Hank Fischer of Defenders. A Phoenix-based citizens’ […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Baiting continues unabated
Baiting continues unabated When the Forest Service announced last year that it would write a new policy regulating bear baiting, environmentalists and animal rights advocates were hopeful. They thought the agency might take a hard look at the controversial practice of laying out rotting foods to attract bears within shooting distance. But the new policy, […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Conspiracy of optimism
Conspiracy of Optimism Until World War II, private forests provided 95 percent of the nation’s wood products; from 1945 to 1960, the timber industry turned away from its overcut land to publicly owned trees on the national forests. Confident in their talents and technology, Forest Service managers embraced clearcutting over selective harvesting and built 65,000 […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Forest Service scrambles to obey law it long ignored
It’s a case of a bureaucratic train wreck creating a congressional train wreck. After refusing for decades to apply the National Environmental Policy Act, the U.S. Forest Service is now applying the law so fiercely that it’s put a host of other programs on the back burner. The Forest Service is delaying timber sales, archaeological […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Wolf lovers give Idaho sheriff a piece of their mind
SALMON, Idaho – Linda Borton of Tucson, Ariz., was furious when she heard that one of the Canadian wolves released in central Idaho had been shot, and that Lemhi County Sheriff Brett Barsalou said he didn’t “give a damn who shot it.” That same night she fired off a letter to Barsalou. “I’m very much […]
Posted inMay 1, 1995: Land grants under the microscope
Non-native bird ruffles feathers
Conservationists clipped the wings of a controversial plan to introduce a non-native game bird into southwestern Colorado. Although the state Division of Wildlife hoped to release 40 ruffed grouse in the San Juan-Rio Grande National Forest in April, four environmental groups and two individuals sued the Forest Service to stop the transplant. The day after […]
Posted inApril 17, 1995: The New West's servant economy
Big groups drop appeal
Big groups drop appeal Eleven environmental groups, including the Wilderness Society and National Audubon Society, have decided not to appeal a recent federal court decision upholding President Clinton’s Pacific Northwest forest plan, known as Option Nine. While the groups agree the plan fails to protect and restore the heavily logged ecosystem, they say they’ll focus […]