The Obama Administration is expected to roll out its Columbia-Snake River salmon and dam plan Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge James Redden gave the administration another month to seek a consensus on its modifications to the two biological opinions on the dams that was done at the end of the Bush Administration. There have been talks between the two sides and even though a lot of people know some of the details of the plan, they have honored the administration’s request for confidentiality, at least with me.

The Obama administration today announced Thursday its intention to nominate Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department Natural Resources, as undersecretary of natural resources and the environment for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The job would place Sherman over the U.S. Forest Service, which administers more than 191 million acres of national forests and grasslands. Sherman choice is especially interesting in light of the litmus test some environmental groups have with the Clinton Roadless rule.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula gave the Obama Administration, the states, sportsmen and environmentalists all a partial victory in the Rocky Mountain Wolf case today. Only Wyoming, which has been unwilling to meet the minimum management standards Idaho and Montana did, is a short-term loser.

The fears that Idaho wolf hunters would run into the woods and decimate the Idaho wolf population are proven unfounded.

Those fears have come true almost as much as the fears that wolves would decimate the elk population.

After a week of wolf season only four wolves have been reported killed. The fourth was reported shot in the Sawtooth Zone Sept. 8.

Here is the latest data that shows the climate is changing and that human activity is causing it.

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities has reversed a 2,000-year cooling trend in the Arctic, Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post.

Montana Sen. Jon Tester’s 677,000 acre wilderness bill would unravel a carefully crafted compromise that leaves one of the most popular alpine snowmobile areas in Idaho open.

The heroes of the wilderness movement tended to be people who spent their lives wandering through wild landscapes, wrote historian William Cronon in his introduction to the biography of activist Howard Zahniser, "Wilderness Forever".

These heroes, from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Olaus and Mardy Murie, Rachel Carson and Sigurd Olson wrote of their own special wilderness places, the spiritual, scientific and natural connections they experienced and of the values of preserving them.

Idaho is getting criticized nationally for allowing a wolf hunt.

But only a few angry western voices are talking about the sheep that have been killed by wolves lately including 39 in the last few weeks, at former Idaho Sen. John Peavey’s ranch near Carey recently. The increased killing of livestock from the successful return of wolves is not simply a western phenomenon.

I can’t get the night of March 23, 1995 out of my head these days.

For most of the environmental community the historic day for the return of wolves to Yellowstone was Jan. 11. That was the day the wolves passed through the famous arch into the park that had been dedicated by President T.R. Roosevelt in 1903.

Yellowstone’s wolves were placed in what biologists called enclosures and I have always called kennels. It’s like calling a nuclear waste dump a repository.