Not a day goes by without someone bemoaning the lack of public access to private lands in the West. Gone are the good old days, some say, when landowners welcomed visitors. Today, it often seems like there are “NO TRESPASSING” signs across every gate and orange paint on every fence post, blocking public access to […]
Writers on the Range
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What if the Grand Canyon were private? An alternate future for the park.
In the beginning, you didn’t need any permits. OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. Even back in the halcyon days of the 1960s, permits were required to backpack in Grand Canyon, but they weren’t a big deal. We would drive up after school and bang on the door of park headquarters, whereupon a ranger would clamber […]
Posted inJanuary 25, 2016: The Forever War
Modern sagebrush rebels recycle old Western fantasies
Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of scofflaw Nevada rancher Clive Bundy, appear to have made an ambitious New Year’s resolution: Force the federal government, which has managed more than half of the American West’s lands for the past century, to relinquish them, at gun point if necessary, to the locals. Over the weekend, the Bundy […]
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A place where bears own the right of way
A few months ago, I found myself in a remote area of Alaska, watching pink and chum salmon splash through the shallows of an unnamed stream. The sounds of the salmon, the breeze coming off the ocean, the breakers on the beach, and the continuous calls of gulls made for an Alaskan symphony. A bush […]
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The folly of “taking back” the West
Do 700 million acres of national parks, national monuments, national forests, national wildlife refuges and Bureau of Land Management units belong to you and your fellow Americans? No, according to the increasingly popular notion in the West that it’s time for states to “take back” federal land. “Taking back” property that belongs to Alaskans and […]
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Justice in the West has a double standard for protesters
In Boston over 200 years ago, a group of American patriots dressed and painted like Indians smashed crates and dumped tea into the city’s harbor. In today’s American West, protesters ride their ATVs into publicly owned canyons to protest federal restriction of motorized access, and more recently, grazing-fee opponents forcibly “occupy” the desks of wildlife […]
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Sieges like the Oregon standoff turn the rural West into a political stage
The armed protesters occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon have indicated that they will leave if the locals so desire. Well, it’s time for them to go: Harney County residents, who just held a huge community meeting about this invasion, seemed to heartily agree that they want the vigilantes to pack their […]
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I have a lot in common with the Bundys. Here’s what I’d like to say to them.
Like the Bundy brothers now illegally occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, I’m a lifelong rural Westerner, and I believe that if I were to talk with them, we’d most likely find we have a lot in common. There’s the way our lives were shaped by the land, for instance. I was […]
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I send my toddler to school outside. You should, too.
“Your son looks quite … warm,” another mother says, eyeing my 3-year-old son as we drop off his older brother at kindergarten. I look down at Isaac, his body encased in a snowsuit, two additional insulating layers hidden beneath. “He goes to an all-outdoor preschool,” I reply, but the mother is already distracted, busy waving […]
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Don’t delist: Yellowstone grizzlies still need federal protection
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has indicated that it plans to remove the iconic Yellowstone grizzly bear from the protection of the Endangered Species Act early this year. The federal agency’s plan is irresponsible and premature because grizzlies are struggling to adjust to declining food sources, even as they face an uncertain future caused […]
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PZP: Where hope, science and mustangs meet
The longtime mustang advocate, TJ Holmes, and I head into southwestern Colorado’s Spring Creek Basin Herd Management Area, searching for mustangs. We do this regularly. TJ has documented these mustangs for eight years, working in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management. A big part of her work is administering PZP, the fertility-control vaccine (porcine […]
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The obscure music where wild animals sing from the heart
In a small corner of popular music, there are songs that have been written and sung in the haunting voices of animals, and the Canadian singer-songwriters Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson have written what I think are the best of them. In Lightfoot’s “Whispers of the North,” a loon speaks: whispers of the northsoon I […]
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In Idaho, rancher buyouts take a big step forward
Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains seem like an unlikely place for the beginning of a positive shift in public-land management. They gleam high and cold above the seemingly endless sagebrush plains of southern Idaho, one of the most conservative states in the West. Yet it was here last year that Republicans worked with environmentalists to plant […]
Posted inDecember 21, 2015: Secrets of the Deep
Western nativism has a rotten odor
Back in my railroad days, we often said that something had “a bad smell.” “I smell a bad order!”— lingo for a car that was rolling wrong and needed to be removed from the train. The alarm was shouted down from the conductor up in the “angel’s seat” in the caboose, back when a person actually […]
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Locavores aren’t loved by everybody
In the last 20 years, the amount of locally grown foods consumed in the American diet has tripled, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it now comprises 2 percent of the food consumed in the country. As with anything that’s popular, some have seen fit to attack this trend. Why do they do […]
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Big Ag stands on shifting ground
Between 2006 and 2011, farmers on the western edge of the Midwest’s farm belt in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas converted more than 1.3 million acres of grasslands to corn and soybean fields. Some people were seriously alarmed. Wildlife habitat was destroyed, and water, soil and the air itself suffered. But that conversion of […]
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He didn’t die with dignity (so I threw a party)
My father’s recent death was not beautiful, and neither were any of the other deaths I’ve witnessed of late. This has left me wondering about a better path. Death is not easy, to be sure, but these were made particularly painful by medical interventions — or perhaps I witnessed the confusion between saving a life […]
Posted inDecember 7, 2015: Good Neighbors
Adrenaline junkies get political
Do young recreationalists who like things faster and steeper care about the land the way their forebears did?
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Leave your dog at home, please
What I say will not make me a popular person, but here it is: For excellent reasons, dogs should not be – and usually aren’t — allowed in the backcountry of national parks. Dogs, being predators, bother wildlife even when they’re leashed. Then there’s canine fecal matter, which carries a number of diseases and parasites […]
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It’s time to let Lake Powell go
In today’s ‘new normal,’ there is simply not enough water to maintain both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.