wilderness

A Bird’s-Eye View of Dwindling Open Space

When Nature Emails

Ah, wilderness — the chirping of birds, the burbling of creeks, the melodic chime announcing that new mail has just arrived in your inbox. Yep, that’s right — or it will be if the Colorado Department of Natural Resources has its way. In an effort to boost revenue in the middle of a massive budget […]

Pain in the Tongass

Moderate Republicans, as well as Democrats and environmentalists, are up in arms over eleventh-hour language added by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to a huge $395 billion spending bill that would boost logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The provision would exempt nearly 2 million acres in the Tongass from a rule approved by former President […]

Jesse Lichtenstein reviews The People’s Forests by Robert Marshall

At 3:30 in the morning, on July 15, 1932, 31-year-old Bob Marshall started walking. His goal: to see how many peaks in the Adirondack Mountains he could scale in one day. At 1 p.m., he met up with Herb Clark, an old family friend, at the summit of Mount Marcy, the highest mountain in the range. Clark was with a young architect named Paul Schaefer. More than 30 years later, looking back on the encounter, Schaefer could vividly recall his impression that Marshall's eyes "reflected a great joy for living."

Order in the Court

With a staunchly anti-environmental White House and a Republican-dominated Congress, environmentalists are turning to the third branch of government to fight their cause. Happily, the courts have presented a relatively safe haven for greens, upholding strict clean air standards the Bush administration sought to water down, blocking oil and gas exploration in the West, limiting […]

Keep the Pedal From the Metal

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is barring off-road enthusiasts from one of their favorite playgrounds in Utah — but this time, it’s to safeguard their own health, not that of the environment. At Manning Canyon, a recreation area near Salt Lake City, the soil is contaminated with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals […]

Can’t See the Trees for the Forest Service

Two House Democrats have accused the U.S. Forest Service of cooking its books in order to blame environmentalists for the fires that raged across much of the West this summer. Reps. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) spoke out yesterday against a recent USFS report in which the agency claimed that environmental appeals delayed […]

Lambs to the Slaughter

The wildfires that are raging across the western U.S. this summer aren’t just threatening the trophy homes of billionaires; they are also posing a danger to wildlife. Take bighorn sheep, which were reintroduced to the shores of Washington state’s Lake Chelan after a century’s absence. The sheep were finally gaining a foothold in the area; […]

Go Get ’em, Tigers

The world’s largest mangrove forest, Sundarban, spans the border between Bangladesh and India, but the countries don’t have a joint plan to manage the 3,700-square-mile area. The United Nations is hoping to change that. Two U.N. entities, the International Partnership Fund and the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, are providing funding to help Bangladesh and […]