Recreation-based businesses like canoe guiding rely on continued protection for national monuments.
Missouri River
Posted inMay 15, 2017: Prison Town
Latest: Dam on Yellowstone River moves ahead
The effects on the pallid sturgeon remain uncertain.
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Can pallid sturgeon hang on in the overworked Missouri River?
Chrrrrp, chrrrp: Our headphones echo with the tinny peeps of a radio-tagged pallid sturgeon (Scaphyrincus albus). Dave Fuller, a Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries technician, maneuvers the jet boat up and down the Missouri River on a beautiful October day. The sapphire sky has yet to succumb to winter’s haze, and the […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Pallid’s PR problem
For a large, ancient and extremely endangered species, the pallid sturgeon receives remarkably little respect. The fish is nobody’s poster child. Unlike trout and salmon, it has no real champions among environmental groups; it occasionally gets passing mention, but little direct advocacy, and few are actively engaged in the recovery effort. Pallids spend their entire […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
The Bakken oil play spurs a booming business — in water
The first thing you notice in North Dakota’s oil patch are trucks. They dominate a landscape defined not long ago by cattle and wheat, and not long before that by bison and grass. Trucks groan through Watford City all night. They pile up traffic on highways designed for the occasional car or combine and whip […]
Posted inWotr
Anatomy of a disaster
The hydrologic havoc playing out in the Mississippi Delta is not a freak of nature. This slow-motion, manmade disaster is our inheritance from a previous generation of politicians, farmers and ranchers, who made bad decisions to correct short-term problems even as the best available science warned of long-term consequences. Like it or not, we will […]
Posted inApril 28, 2008: Pillaging the Past
Rolling on the rivers
In Adios Amigos: Tales of Sustenance and Purification in the American West, Page Stegner revels in striking juxtapositions: the fragile beauty of rivers contrasted with their staggering power to destroy; people working to preserve forests and wildlife alongside a younger generation bent on using nature for self-serving purposes. This absorbing collection of essays stems from […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Follow-up
Is that sound science, or the sound of science being strangled? For years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has pressed the Army Corps of Engineers to operate its Missouri River dams to mimic natural river flows and help endangered fish and birds (HCN, 11/11/02: Corps stands behind status quo). But the Corps has consistently […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Extinction – by the clock
It isn’t easy being a cheerleader for a bottom-feeder, but I’m feeling up for the task. Montana’s two varieties of sturgeon — a miraculous, prehistoric fish that feeds at the bottom of lakes and rivers —have recently been given an expiration date, an official prediction of when they’ll become extinct. A doomsday clock all their […]