John Shively assures us that Pebble Mine is safe in his recent opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News. He promises Pebble Mine will be constructed and operated without jeopardizing the world’s most important wild salmon fishery. Let’s have a look at his arguments and see if he’s right. Most of his opinion is an argumentum ad…
Back in March, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason rejected an attempt by the U.S. Forest Service to open up Prince of Wales Island and some of the smaller surrounding islands to clearcutting of the remaining old growth forest there. In her decision, Judge Gleason left open the issue of the scope of the remedy, and…
WC rarely asks his readers for a favor. It’s happened a couple of times, and each time readers have come through. This doesn’t involve any of your money, it will benefit you and your families, and it will make you feel good besides. WC wants you to contact your Representatives and Senators and ask them…
WC’s first encounter with a wild wolf came in Denali National Park – then called Mt. McKinley National Park – in the upper Sanctuary River Valley. WC had led a small group of young Boy Scouts up there on a camping trip. Refuge Valley, the West Fork of the Sanctuary River, is beautiful, an easy…
The Greater Sage Grouse is in big trouble. AS WC has written here before, populations of the iconic bird have plummeted from an estimated 16 million to less than half a million. The primary cause of the population crash has been habitat loss. Back in 2015, a painfully negotiated settlement among the stakeholders would have…
Among birders, at least, one of the most famous individual birds in the world is Wisdom. Wisdom is a female Laysan Albatross, a species that spends almost all of its life at sea. Wisdom comes to shore on Midway Island, near the center of the Pacific Ocean, only to breed. Wisdom is the oldest banded…
As WC has written before, the Hawai’ian Islands are ground zero for extinction of species. Introduced species, invasive species, habitat loss, climate change and human folly have combined to make the 50th state a killing ground for Hawai’i’s native species, especially birds. Since the arrival of Europeans in 1778,1 28 bird species and at least 10% of the…
But at the same time, you have to wonder if visiting Brazil is the right thing to do. Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro is a far-right politician whose campaign promises included destroying the Amazon, repealing environmental protections and removing protections for Brazil’s indigenous peoples. He spews misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, and racist statements. To the extent that taking a…
In the holiday frenzy and year end wrap up, there was some good news on the conservation front. At least in the legal arena. Here’s a quick recap. Western Watersheds v. BLM. Dwight Hammond and his son Steven Hammond were convicted of committing arson on their grazing allotments back in 2012. Donald Trump subsequently pardoned them and then-Interior…
It seems increasingly likely that humanity’s inaction in the face of the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change means we are going to have more than than the 2° Celsius of global temperature increase that climatologists regarded as manageable. So, without in any way diminishing the urgency that humanity’s CO2 emissions be reduced, it’s time…
As recently as this week, WC has been criticized because “conservationists won’t compromise.” WC admits he is loath to compromise, because it never seems to end well. An example: WC is just one of hundreds of other conservationists who have fought to preserve the remaining old growth trees in the Tongass National Forest. For decades, trying…
Mark Kiessling is the General Manager of Kensington Mine, the underground gold mine north of Juneau, operated by Coeur Mining.1 The mine he manages has been in the news lately because it paid a fine of more than half a million dollars under a settlement agreement recently. The Anchorage Daily News has published an opinion piece…
WC is an admitted, unapologetic conservationist and environmentalist. For most of his adult life he has been actively involved in conservation organizations. As a contributor, as a lawyer, as a member and even as a member of boards of directors. WC understands the issues and challenges conservation organizations face pretty well. And the recurring issue,…
It’s hardly news that water in the West, especially the intermountain west, is scarce. Whether it is the seriously over-allocated Colorado River, the freshwater streams flowing in to the Great Salt Lake, or the salmon wars of the Klamath Basin, water is scarce, a limit on most kinds of western development and, in the face…
All of the salmonid species in Idaho’s Salmon River are either endangered or threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Chinook and Red Salmon; Steelhead. No to mention Bull Trout. Some of the best spawning habitat is in the headwaters of the Salmon River, in the Sawtooth National Forest, and especially the Sawtooth National Recreation…
Good news for Alaska conservationists has been scarce the last two years. Too many old fights have come back. So when on a single day, Friday, March 29, 2019, there are two different wins, well, it’s worth a blog post. The first win came for Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. Disgraced former Secretary of the Interior…
WC’s dad worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers a couple of times in his career in the construction industry. At one point, after reading about some Corps debacle or another, he told WC, “The Corps tries hard, but never live downstream from a Corp of Engineers project.” And now we have before us…
The Pan-American Highway, as most folks know, runs from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope to Ushaia, on Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America. Near enough to 18,000 kilometers. Except there is a gap. The Darien Gap. Between Turbo, Columbia on the east and Yaviza, Panama, on the west. In Yaviza, the…
The last two Mountain Caribou in Idaho were live captured last year and transported to Canada. The Mountain Caribou are now extinct in Idaho. Don’t confuse the Mountain Caribou – a subpopulation of the Woodland Caribou – with Barren Lands Caribou, the big herds on the North Slope of Alaska. Mountain Caribou are an ecotype, a…
There otter be a law. All sea otters in California sea otters are the descendants of a single colony of about 50 sea otters located near Bixby Creek Bridge in March 1938 by Howard G. Sharpe. The recovery is remarkable. From those 50, there are now about 2,650 sea otters in California. But the news is…
By the colored number tag, this is an 11-year old male, born in captivity and released at Pinnacles National Park. One of 35 wild condors in Pinnacles.
It’s hard to be outdoors in the Western United States right now. It seems as if we have been in a cloud of wildfire smoke for months. Your eyes water and the back of your throat burns. Your clothes smell like a a drowned campfire. And thousands of fires have reduced too much of Western…
The Northern Idaho Ground Squirrel is an Idaho endemic; Spermophilus brunneus is found only in west-central Idaho. This area consists of five counties which have an elevation between 1,150 and 1,550 meters. It requires forest meadows for habitat. Intensive forestry management – some would say mis-management – and extreme wildfire events have destroyed much of that…
Some years ago now, WC got to tag along when Mrs. WC went to Camp Denali, near the end of the Denali Highway. The purpose of the trip was to set up a bird banding station along Moose Creek, below Camp Denali, for a couple of years. But the owners treated us like paying guests…
WC attended Wild Idaho recently. Among the many excellent speakers was Connie Myers, the founding director of the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center. The Center is an inter-agency training facility for the four federal agencies with a stake in wilderness: the Forestry Service in the Department of Agriculture; the National Park Service and the…
The image most of us have of Idaho – when you think of Idaho at all – is a cowboy ridin’ the range, herding cattle in the sagebrush.1 Never mind that cattle ranchers today use pickups, 4-wheelers and drones, not horses. But cattle grazing on the range, under the big, western skies, isn’t where the…
WC watched thousands of migrating Snow, White-fronted and Canada Geese along the Snake River last weekend. They are on their way to the northern edge of North America to breed. They stop in southwest Idaho to rest and forage. Those Geese are exactly the kind of bird the Migratory Bird Treaty is intended to protect:…
WC just wrapped up ten years as a Trustee for Alaska Conservation Foundation. One of the great pleasures of serving on the Board of Trustees was meeting and working with my fellow Trustees. Today’s guest blog post is a letter Trustee Michelle Ravenmoon wrote that nicely captures some of the reasons WC gave a decade…
WC wants his fellow coffee junkies to understand just how serious this is: coffee, the single best reason for getting out of bed in the morning, is at grave risk from climate change. Coffee, especially arabica coffee, is fussy about where it will grow and what climatic conditions it will tolerate. The other species, robusta, is a…
If WC is to make the stream of falsehoods pouring out of the Trump Administration manageable, he’s going to have to parse them somehow. At least for a whole, we’ll try breaking them down by source. And we’ll start with Trump’s lead man on destroying 47 years of environmental recovery, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Chlorpyrifos…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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