High Country News June 04, 2001
Feature
Tribal Links
In New Mexico, some Indian reservations are jumping on a surprising new economic bandwagon, making use of their land and water rights to build golf courses and resorts to attract golf-playing tourists.
Dear Friends
Dear Friends
Ed and Betsy Marston are back from teaching journalism in Berkeley, Calif.; Jay Knight lends HCN a sculpture of a bison by Tim Shay.
News
Tortoises take on tanks
A proposed expansion of the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert could harm the endangered Lane Mountain milkvetch and the threatened desert tortoise.
Dogs to sniff out grizzly numbers
Zoology professor David Wasser uses dogs to sniff out bear scat in Washington's North Cascade Mountains to help determine how many grizzly bears live there.
Energy plan eyes the Rockies
Environmentalists and land managers are girding their loins to deal with President Bush's energy policy, which calls for more drilling, pipelines, power plants and power lines on Western public lands.
The Latest Bounce
Fallout from Jeffords' party switch; Las Vegas' wastewater poisoning Lake Mead fish; Green party may lose major-party status in N.M.; snowmobile manufacturers fight Park Service ban; Colorado land swap killed.
Takings legislation cracks Oregon's green foundation
Oregon's Measure 7, a recently passed ballot initiative requiring state and county to pay landowners when regulations affect property values, may threaten the famously green land-use codes, which have protected the state from sprawl.
An energy plan as solid as natural gas
President Bush's much-heralded energy plan is extremely vague, but its vagueness may be the document's strong point, the writer opines.
Jackson Hole takes aim at helicopter tours
The Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance is fighting the commercial helicopter tours over Teton County, Wyo., planned for this summer, but it faces an uphill battle.
Lake Coeur d'Alene at stake
The Coeur d'Alene Tribe and the State of Idaho are fighting in the Supreme Court over Lake Coeur d'Alene, with the tribe claiming partial ownership of the lake under a 19th century treaty.
California monument welcomes cattle
Environmentalists, ranchers and land managers are arguing over the future of cattle grazing on the newly designated Carrizo Plain National monument in California, where the BLM has long relied on cattle to help control weeds.
Will the Grand Staircase suffer shrinkage?
Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, is eager to create a new national monument to protect dinosaur tracks near St. George, Utah, but to pay for it he wants to dissolve two-thirds of the existing Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Book Reviews
A high country whodunit
Daniel Glick's "Powder Burn: Arson, Money, and Mystery on Vail Mountain" tells the story of the Vail Ski Area and the fire that destroyed its mountaintop restaurant, in an entertaining way, but ultimately lacks depth and insight.
Intrepid explorer with a cause
Soren Jesperson's five-month, 2,200-mile solo trek around the Four Corners area will raise money for the Center for Humanitarian Outreach and Cultural Exchange, a charity his father directs.
A sand-brown world
"Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest," an anthology edited by Scott Slovic, is a fine and inclusive work that features familiar and unfamiliar writers.
Battling for the Bear River
Utah newspaper photographer Dan Miller helped organize the Bear River Watershed Council to "think globally and act locally" by protecting the watershed in northern Utah.
Essays
Environmentalism meets a fierce friend
Journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee has raised the ire of environmentalists with a new series that attacks the environmental movement for being overpaid, overzealous and "chaotic and shrill."
West braces for Big Buildup II
The Big Buildup on the Colorado Plateau, begun in the 1950s, ended in the 1970s when its environmental impacts became clear, but if Bush's energy policy spawns a Big Buildup II, the Plateau may never recover.
Heard Around the West
Heard around the West
James Watt basking in nostalgia; California's energy woes; Bill Gates is a water hog; Army's new environmentally friendly bullet; Bush confuses Americans; Berkeley Pit has bugs; a beef in McDonalds' fries.
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