Idaho is going to kill 90% of the state’s wolves. That’s a tragedy – and bad policy Kim Heacox
Nothing embodies wildness like wolves, our four-legged shadow, the dogs that long ago refused our campfire and today prefer freedom and risk over the soft sofa and short leash. The dogs that howl more than bark, add music to the land, and – if left alone to work their magic – make entire ecosystems healthy and whole.
Witness Yellowstone, a national park reborn in the 1990s when wolves, absent for 70 years, were reintroduced. Everything changed for the better. Elk stopped standing around like feedlot cattle. They learned to run like the wind again. Streamside willows and other riparian vegetation, previously trampled by the elk, returned as well, and with it, a chorus of birds. All because of wolves.
Exploring the gardening potential of the Last Frontier January 7th |
More than 100 years ago, a man traveled north on a mission most people thought was ridiculous to see if crops would grow in the frozen wasteland known as the Territory of Alaska.
That man, Charles C. Georgeson, was a special agent in charge of the United States Agricultural Experiment Stations. The secretary of agriculture charged Georgeson with the task of finding out if crops and farm animals could survive in the mysterious land acquired just 21 years earlier from the Russians.
When he landed at Sitka 100 years ago, Georgeson set in motion agricultural studies that are still carried on today at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.