High Country News back issues from November 2003:
Conservation in an imperfect world
Nov 10, 2003; ... In the three decades since it was signed into law, the Endangered Species Act has had some remarkable successes: Wolves have made a comeback in the Northern Rockies; bald eagles have rebounded. But the ESA is an imperfect tool. The endangered species list is often likened to the ...
A revival on Hart Mountain; The antelope refuge looks better than it has in decades, but managers seem stuck in the past
Nov 10, 2003; ... On Oregon's Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge this year, the news was good. Sage grouse counts were at an all-time high. Migratory birds absent from the refuge for decades have returned. This northwest corner of the Great Basin is seeing a resurgence of forbs, or flowering plants, ...
CALIFORNIA; State picks up federal slack on perchlorate
Nov 10, 2003; ... In late September, outgoing California Gov. Gray Davis signed two bills into law to protect drinking water supplies from perchlorate, a toxic chemical used in rocket fuel and explosives (HCN, 4/28/03). It could be 2008 before the federal Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum ...
'Restoration Cowboy' goes against the flow; Dave Rosgen is popularizing the complex field of river restoration
Nov 10, 2003; ... There's a man standing on the bank of the Weminuche River in southern Colorado, telling 45 people who just shuffled off a tour bus how to restore a river. Stop, he says, chew a toothpick, and think about what you're doing. "Sometimes you just need to sit and drink a beer." The man is ...
NEVADA; Activists raise a stink over outhouse
Nov 10, 2003; ... In the latest skirmish over a long-disputed dirt road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Elko county-rights activists are fuming over the Forest Service's decision to clean a remote outhouse. The county and the Forest Service have clashed since 1995, when the agency closed a ...
San Diego's Habitat Triage; To save room for a raft of imperiled species, one city is making sacrifices to the gods of sprawl. Not everyone thinks it's going to be a happy ending.
Nov 10, 2003; ... For the first 32 years that Anne Harvey lived at the base of Carmel Mountain, a sandy, unpaved road passed by her home. She used to roam the chaparral-covered foothills and climb to a rocky knoll at the top. A philosophy major at the University of California, San Diego, who later became a ...
Vernal pools fall to a shopping mall
Nov 10, 2003; ... The first test of San Diego's Multiple Species Conservation Program came little more than a year after it was passed. Cousins MarketCenters Inc. wanted to build a 453,000 square-foot shopping center and an apartment complex just north of downtown, on 66 acres that were home to more than 60 ...
The West loses a conservation elder
Nov 10, 2003; ... Perhaps all showdowns between environmentalists and industry appear to be clashes of mythic proportion, but the unfolding story of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge seems particularly so, a world-class drama whose players include migratory birds, caribou, polar bears, native Alaskans, ...
A grizzly attack that was bound to happen; WRITERS ON THE RANGE
Nov 10, 2003; ... One of the most egotistical notions humans have is that we can "commune" with unpredictable wild animals. News headlines over the last couple of weeks have revealed the depth of our folly. During Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas nightclub act, a tiger turned on trainer Roy Horn. Doctors ...
Freaky Fridays with the Bush administration; Officials deliver bad news on the environment when no one is listening
Nov 10, 2003; ... On Friday, Oct. 10, the Bush administration made it easier for mining companies to dump tailings on federal land. The timing of the announcement fit what environmental groups call the "Friday Follies." "It's a very effective strategy, a very cynical strategy," says Rob Perks of the ...
It's 'bombs away' on New Mexico saltcedar; State begins an aerial assault on a water-sucking weed
Nov 10, 2003; ... Late-summer air traffic over Socorro County in central New Mexico is generally pretty sparse - usually only a few light planes or high-flying Stealth bombers from nearby military bases. But it jumped in September, when herbicide-loaded helicopters began to spray poison across sprawling stands ...
On a new national monument, has an agency been cowed?
Nov 10, 2003; ... Can cows coexist with rare plant communities in a national monument? That is what President Clinton asked the Bureau of Land Management to determine when he created the 52,947-acre Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in 2000. The monument, east of Ashland, Ore., is an ecological ...
OREGON AND CALIFORNIA; Federal report supports Klamath farmers
Nov 10, 2003; ... Farmers in the Klamath Basin found vindication in a National Research Council report, released Oct. 21, which says the solution to Klamath's protracted water struggles lies not in irrigation shutoffs but in sweeping repairs to an out-of-balance landscape. In 2001, federal biologists ...
SOUTH DAKOTA; Park expansion threatened
Nov 10, 2003; ... A ranch that promised to be an important addition to Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills is now for sale on the open market. The 5,555-acre Casey Ranch would increase the park's land base by 20 percent, and add an 85-year-old homestead and a "buffalo jump" - a cliff from which American ...
Behind the scenes, pressure and doubt
Nov 10, 2003; ... The Center for Biological Diversity and its allies weren't the only ones who found serious problems with the San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Program. Inside the Fish and Wildlife Service two biologists, who have since left the agency, harbored private doubts. Jacalyn Fleming ...
Amid smoke and sprawl, some success
Nov 10, 2003; ... It has taken six years for public officials in and around San Diego to acquire 30,000 acres of private land for a regional endangered species preserve. It took one week for almost 80 percent of that preserve to go up in flames. In late October, as this issue went to press, ...
Mucking around San Francisco Bay
Nov 10, 2003; ... Judging by its scenic photos of bridges, ships and seals, San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary is the kind of book a Bayside resident might keep on her coffee table as a reminder of why her ludicrous rent is worth it. But the book is more than a Bayside love-fest: It's also a ...
heard around the West
Nov 10, 2003; ... It must be nerve-racking to teach school in Salt Lake City, where, at any time, a person can legally walk into a classroom with a gun concealed in clothing or tucked into a backpack. But that's state law, so what's a school district to do? One state legislator pooh-poohs potential problems, ...
A defensive island
Nov 24, 2003; ... "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, apart of the main." - John Donne, 1623 More than one historian has noted how undeserved is the West's reputation for rugged, go-it-alone individualism. It took tremendous cooperation for American ...
A mountain town considers going 'micropolitan' An airport expansion could forever change an out-of-the-way ski town
Nov 24, 2003; ... Three decades ago, when Beverly Hills entrepreneur Joe Zoline opened a couple of ski lifts in this steep, isolated valley in southwestern Colorado, he acknowledged that his new venture wasn't an easy sell. "Telluride is remote and hard to get to," he said in 1973. "It is making it hard to ...
CALIFORNIA; Logging faces new pollution controls
Nov 24, 2003; ... A recent federal court ruling and a new California law could both curtail stream pollution by the timber industry. On Oct. 12, outgoing Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that allows regional water quality boards to veto logging plans if they would damage streams classified by the federal ...
IDAHO; Moving the cheese to New Mexico
Nov 24, 2003; ... Neighbors and local governments are increasingly fed up with the stinky, unhealthy conditions of the huge dairy operations on the Snake River Plain (HCN, 4/15/02). One of the world's largest cheesemakers, Ireland's Glanbia Inc., recently wanted to expand its operations near Twin Falls, but ...
New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut; As Los Alamos National Laboratory embarks on a new era of weapons development, critics drag its unfinished business out into the light
Nov 24, 2003; ... The thing most people notice about northern New Mexico is the clarity of its sunlight: On most days, the sky is a crystalline blue. The sagebrush, juniper and piñon offer three distinct shades of green, while the mesas have their own variations of sandstone red and volcanic black. But ...
Cold War workers seek compensation
Nov 24, 2003; ... Workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are a special breed: Not only do they work with the most dangerous objects on the planet, but most of them believe in what they are doing and are unflinchingly loyal to their employer and its mission of national security. Now, however, some ...
Butte ponders the power of Evel
Nov 24, 2003; ... This is a town that has stopped at nothing in its pursuit of a buck. It has fouled its water with mining runoff and demolished half its downtown for a gigantic open pit, all for a relentless red harvest of copper. It seems strange, then, that many longtime residents feel Butte has ...
Voters swipe at sprawl; Plan to build commuter expressway through national monument hits roadblock
Nov 24, 2003; ... This "off-year" election season resulted in one significant upset - of a controversial road proposed for New Mexico's Petroglyph National Monument. For over a decade, city officials, developers and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, R, have beat the drum for a commuter expressway that would ...
Mixing oil and water in the Lone Star State; Why are Texans raising hell about a water deal that could raise money for their schools?
Nov 24, 2003; ... Texas is renowned as a place where fortunes have been made from the oil and gas fields, but some of the state's biggest oil barons have also tried their hands at the water business. In 1996, Texas oil moguls Ed and Lee Bass bought up California farmland with plans to transfer farm water to San ...
WYOMING; State struggling to keep up with CBM
Nov 24, 2003; ... Pollution regulations for coalbed methane wells in Wyoming are severely under-enforced, a state task force says. "Basically, there's one full-time (inspector) covering all coalbed methane activity (in Wyoming)," says Todd Parfitt, who represented the state Department of Environmental Quality ...
WYOMING; Whirling disease hits Yellowstone
Nov 24, 2003; ... Cutthroat trout, a native species in trouble around the West, are facing an increasing threat in a key sanctuary, Yellowstone National Park. Whirling disease, spread by a European parasite that showed up in the park five years ago, now infects 12 to 20 percent of the cutthroats in Yellowstone ...
Atomic comics
Nov 24, 2003; ... Visitors to the "history" section of the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos will find more than photos of early lab workers and atomic test explosions. They'll also find comic books, including Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom! Apparently, Dagwood, of the comic strip, Blondie, did more than ...
Our publicly owned forests are being subverted; WRITERS ON THE RANGE
Nov 24, 2003; ... As the nation remains preoccupied with the war against terrorism, President Bush has been carrying out a less visible assault on another front: our national forests. Most of the attacks over the last year have been below the radar - in arcane rules, stealth riders and misnamed legislation. In ...
heard around the West
Nov 24, 2003; ... Here's a story to make you wince: Three mountain lion kittens, all about eight weeks old, tried to cross railroad tracks 12 miles west of Butte. The kittens were wet from crossing a nearby creek, and the air temperature was only 10 degrees. So the kittens stuck fast, one frozen to the track on ...