Very high on my bucket list is to see a California condor in the wild (Figure 1), ideally over Oregon. If my timing is good and the condors cooperate, this could happen.

The Forest Service is proposing to mechanically push over at least thirty perfectly healthy and very tall and very large old-growth Douglas-fir trees into the uppermost Calapooia River, in the name of steelhead habitat enhancement. So-called tree-tipping is purported by some fish biologists to be helpful and by other experts to be harmful—or at best to be a distraction from getting the real restoration work done.

We live in a polarized nation divided between rural and urban with the suburbs and exurbs swinging toward the Democrats, allowing that party to retake the House.

The protracted battle for the Izembek is now before a US District Court judge. At stake is whether the designations of national wildlife refuge and wilderness actually mean anything, at least in Alaska and/or under a Trump administration.

As state fish and wildlife agencies get shorted for funds, the bureaucratic tendency is often to double down on the traditional support base of hunters and anglers. However, for a multitude of cultural, social, economic, demographic, and other reasons, doubling down on a declining user base will not likely be an effective long-term strategy.

Why is it that public lands conservation (and other environmental) issues always poll well, but our movement is regularly getting its ass kicked in Congress (and now by the administration as well)? It’s because we’re not political enough.