California’s Mono Lake has been saved from Los Angeles’ thirst, but a new local battle is brewing over the water in the lake’s streams, and the question of how far to take restoration of the area.
The Wayward West
The Quincy Library Group Bill is tangled in holiday traffic, after flying through the U.S. House of Representatives last July (HCN, 9/29/97). Sens. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., put holds on the bill, stalling it in the Senate. But proponents like Sen Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., are confident it will move quickly when Congress…
Termite tenacity
Termites build their homes to last. The evidence is in New Mexico, where a team of University of Colorado scientists have identified termite mounds dating back to the Jurassic period, 155 million years ago. More than 100 sandstone pillars, some as high as 20 feet and six feet in diameter, were found over the last…
Tribe doesn’t dig it
The remains of an ancient village on the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Arizona are going to stay buried. After spending almost $1 million on plans and studies, the tribe’s council has decided not to build a casino on the ruins (HCN, 9/1/97). The decision came after officials from the Sells…
One dam falls, another rises
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – A dam proposed for the Diamond Fork River near Provo, Utah, all but died this October. The Central Utah Water Conservancy District backed off in the face of financial concerns and rising public opposition, pulling the dam from the “preferred alternative” in an environmental impact statement. One of the last…
Ancient cedars get a life
Environmentalists have always said that old-growth trees are worth more alive than logged. Recently, the Forest Service seconded that thought. In October, after five years of negotiations, the agency allowed Idaho sawmill owner Mark Brinkmeyer to swap his 530-acre grove of 1,200-year-old trees at the headwaters of Idaho’s Upper Priest Lake for 2,200 acres of…
No kudos for Tortolitans
Dear HCN, I can remember when Tortolita near Tucson was undeveloped land, raw and ruggedly beautiful. Now it’s a suburb. So I was surprised and a little disappointed by the one-sided way that Tony Davis reported on the incorporation of the town of Tortolita (HCN, 9/29/97). I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when…
Cheers for Mr. Chairman
Dear HCN, Ed Marston’s remarks about Wayne Aspinall and his allies demonstrates that Marston lived in another world during Mr. Aspinall’s tenure as chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee (HCN, 11/10/97). Theocracy, indeed! Mr. Aspinall may have been Mr. Chairman, but his accomplishments came about because of his ability to forge political compromise…
Bye-bye, Glen Canyon Dam
Dear HCN, Draining Utah’s Lake Powell isn’t such a silly notion (HCN, 11/10/97). The river is filling the reservoir with sediment, and in the not-too-dim future much of the reservoir will become little more than a muddy plain. Once the reservoir contains more mud than water, the dam’s contribution to power production also will dwindle.…
Firefighters embody skill
Dear HCN, In the article, “Wet summer a bust for firefighters,” Thomas Power, an economist with the University of Montana, said, “These are some of the best-paying jobs for unskilled labor in Montana” (HCN, 9/15/97). Calling forest firefighting an unskilled job is condescending as well as untrue. Anyone who has worked on a hot-shot crew…
On Wyoming’s peculiarities
Dear HCN, The Wyoming stories by Paul Krza, Jeffery Smith and Hugh Jackson were insightful (HCN, 7/7/97). Having lived just north of the Wyoming border, in Billings, Mont., for many years, I used to watch those license plates from Wyoming pull into shopping malls and stores, load up the trunk and head home without paying…
Expose the developers early
Dear HCN, Thanks for the Sept. 29 article on the “green” subdivision in Springdale, Utah, but it’s too bad the article did little more than lament a done deal. I propose you inaugurate a column of insensitive subdivisions and list names and phone numbers of unscrupulous developers, and local planning/elected officials who can alter or…
Salvage law haunts Utah
Salvage law haunts Utah When Forest Supervisor Janette Kaiser announced plans for a huge salvage timber sale on central Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest in August, environmentalists thought they’d seen a ghost. The sale was approved under a law they thought long dead: the salvage logging rider. Now, they hope a recent agency decision will…
Turn rice straw into homes
Dear HCN, Writer Marc Reisner, in “Deconstructing the age of dams’ (HCN, 10/27/97), notes that rice straw needs a market outlet. Perhaps straw bale construction is not popular in California, but it is catching on in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. It is inexpensive, kind to the environment, and a substitute for adobe construction, which…
The greening of Mount St. Helens
Dick Ford didn’t think it possible. Weyerhaeuser Co.” s timber lands near Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in Washington state 17 years ago, are turning green. “I remember thinking that it would never be a normal forest,” says Ford, who managed Weyerhaeuser’s replanting operations around the volcano through the 1980s. In the months…
Adding a height surcharge
Dear HCN, To add a user-fee note from California: On Mount Shasta, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is charging climbers $15 each to go above 10,000 feet, plus $5 per day to park at backcountry trailheads. The information officer at the ranger station told me that the fees were being put in place to avoid placing…
Is the Park Service too timid?
When Washington’s Mount Rainier blew its top 5,600 years ago, a massive mud flow buried much of the Puget Sound under hundreds of feet of mud and rock. Today, smaller mudslides from the volcano, called one of the world’s most dangerous, threaten Mount Rainier National Park. In the past decade, slides have destroyed a bridge…
Get to work
The Student Conservation Association is offering 1,200 interns an opportunity to put rhetoric into action. The SCA is seeking applications from people who want expense-paid internships in places as diverse as Alaska and Puerto Rico. Interns usually work with conservation projects in national parks and on forests, as well as on private land, doing everything…
Heard around the West
What, me worry? That’s the question Alfred E. Neuman has been asking ever since his creation in 1950 by Al Feldstein, a Brooklynite who recently moved to the Paradise Valley, near Livingston, Mont. Sacred cows from political pundits to the pontiff were all fodder for Feldstein’s Mad Magazine, which encouraged kids to question authority and…
A visit with the River People of Hanford Reach
“In time to come the white men will build dams which will close the Columbia River to the salmon. At Priest Rapids, there is nothing the white people want in our little life, and there we may live unmolested.” – Prophecy of Smowhala, founder of the Dreamer Religion of the Wanapum people in the mid-1800s,…
Completing a prairie ecosystem
Ranchers say the cost of recovery is exorbitant
Saving species: A guide for the perplexed
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Policy is complicated. The goals of policy – a strong economy, peace (or war, depending on circumstances), clean air – are simple. But in a diverse, sometimes disagreeable society with conflicting institutions, a sprawling government and an intricate legal system, achieving those goals requires gobs of … well, process, and process can…
Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Note: an essay by Charles Wilkinson about Mono Lake accompanies this feature story. LEE VINING, Calif. – Mono Valley hovers at the western edge of the Great Basin on the Sierra Nevada range, a majestic place of stark horizons and haunting skies. In autumn, Lombardy poplars and cottonwoods blaze golden along the highway and seem…
A court deems a lake worthy of water
Note: This essay accompanies this issue’s feature story. The water developers of Los Angeles and their lawyers knew from the first paragraph that they were in trouble. Court opinions about Western water invariably carried a pragmatic, detached, utilitarian tone. This case was supposed to be about the needs of a thriving but thirsty metropolis -…
Dear Friends
Looking back Each year in the fall we take stock of our work over the last 12 months and ask you to do the same. About the time you receive this issue, you should also find an annual report from us in your mailbox. You may also find a request for help in continuing the…
How the far right spreads its ‘wacky’ ideas
I’m standing at a podium in the back room of the Elks Lodge in Libby, Mont., in front of about 40 Democrats. The event is their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fund-raising dinner. I’ve been invited to speak at several of these things over the last several months, and it occurs to me that somewhere along the…
Amax returns with a vengeance
Twenty years ago it was a classic David vs. Goliath battle. Helped by a drop in the worldwide molybdenum market, residents of the ski-resort town of Crested Butte, Colo., chased the world’s largest mining conglomerate out of their valley. But now, Amax is back, locals are crying “blackmail!” and the town council is building a…