Public Lands, Air, Water, Wildlife

Protected: Fingerprints on the Landscape

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

SCOTUS Should Allow EPA to Address Climate Pollution

Recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. EPA, a case challenging Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) long-standing authority to address climate pollution from power plants. Two decades ago, in the Whitman v. American Trucking Association case, Justice Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court affirming EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act (1970) to […]

Returning Sea Otters to Oregon: Repairing a Torn Fabric

The ocean along the Pacific Coast is exhibiting unmistakable signs of stress as the result of a changing climate and pressures from other human activities. Increasingly acidic ocean water, caused by an over-abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in ocean waters, is affecting calcium-based marine life such as very young crab and oysters. […]

An Impromptu on Owning Land

I own some land, in the western foothills of the Ochoco Mountains in Central Oregon. Somewhere or other I have a packet of papers indicating that I have title to it. I pay yearly County taxes on this property; if I stop paying them, the County will claim the property, and eventually auction it off […]

Salmon and the Northwest

There is not much of it left. Of untouched salmon habitat there is almost none. Although salmon once occupied almost every ocean-seeking stream in the Pacific Northwest, the map where salmon go has been shrinking for over a hundred years, sometimes gradually as human forces slowly worsened the habitat, sometimes suddenly when millions of acres […]