Please, please, please The circulation department is mailing 700 requests to subscribers, asking this select group for their “official” addresses. These letters will get to you because we’re sending them – gasp! – first class, but your copies of HCN are now running the risk of being marked undeliverable by the post office because our […]
Ed Marston
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
Dear friends
Spring visitors Subscriber Ed Moreno took the scenic route from Denver, where he was visiting his parents, to Santa Fe, where he is an assistant commissioner in the New Mexico State Land Office. His boss is Ray Powell – one of the West’s most innovative public land commissioners. Freelance writer Peter Shelton, a resident of […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Dear Friends
Big Sky, big stress The March 31, 1997, issue of HCN described the litigious nature of Montana’s Big Sky Resort. We’ve gotten interesting responses to the story. Writer Ray Ring, sitting in Bozeman, says he sees signs that the article may have helped shift the tone of the dialogue. After a recent meeting, Gallatin County […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
The burning barrel
The Burning Barrel is worth watching for its prairie shots and for the home movies of filmmaker Tim Schwab’s childhood that will make you nostalgic even though it’s not your childhood. An old oil drum that was used to burn his family’s garbage is the metaphor for wastefulness that narrator Schwab (he made the film […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
The information dirt road
Instead of booms and busts brought on by fluctuating demand for everything from gold to coal, rural areas believed that the information age would bring economic stability as educated information workers moved to small communities. No longer would small towns be turned into ghost towns when the ore gave out or commodity prices plunged. So […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
Dear friends
Postal P.S. In the good old days, HCN only had to worry about habitat and species and clean air. Today, as the Old West curdles into the New West, the paper also worries about small towns. The Dec. 23, 1996, story on the Red Lodge, Mont., post office by John Clayton had a happy ending. […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
A 1,000-year plan for Willapa Bay
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Alana Probst works for the nonprofit Ecotrust and looks for ways a community can create sustainable businesses. Alana Probst: “When I worked in Eugene, Ore., in the early ’80s, I learned the hard way that recruiting industry can be a nightmare. The whole city […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
A newsman’s overview of Willapa
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For five years editor Matt Winters has followed the efforts of the nonprofit Willapa Alliance for the Chinook Observer, based in Long Beach, Wash. Matt Winters: “Economic development is long-term and hard to nail down sometimes. Groups like the Willapa Alliance can work for […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Dear friends
Out for birds We thought we were in for a noisy Saturday night. The motel parking lot was packed. In a small town like Socorro, N.M., that usually means a basketball or wrestling meet, with celebrating or mourning into Sunday morning. But the Holiday Inn Express was like a morgue, until we got to the […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Ed Marston replies
Ed Marston replies: Dear Professor Power, My review of your book said I absolutely agreed with you about your critique of the extractive economy. Here are some relevant quotes: “Power has done us a great service by describing the economic changes transforming the West … “It is useful and important work, delivered with passion and […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Hunters get standing
Hunters in Colorado recently won a legal victory in a dispute over expanding a state prison. The hunters and their environmental allies challenged Colorado’s use of state park land in Rifle for the prison, charging that money collected from fishermen and hunters through taxes on guns and other equipment had purchased the land. The federal […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Dear friends
Join us in Socorro Do High Country News readers have as good taste in food as in newspapers? Come join us at the year’s first HCN potluck in Socorro, N.M., on Saturday, Feb. 1, at 6:30 p.m. to find out. Potlucks are held following meetings of the HCN board. This potluck will be at the […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Denying the warts on the West’s service economy
Once upon a time, in 18th-century France, the king and his court had pet economists known as “physiocrats.” The nobility liked their physiocrats very much. Not only did they bow and scrape in a very respectful way, but they told the king and counts and dukes that all wealth comes from the ground. The aristocracy […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Belonging to the West
-My pictures concentrate on landscapes that lie between the extremes of wilderness and metropolis.” * Eric Paddock I moved to the West because of spectacle: the mountains, their streams, the canyons those streams cut, the summer flowers in high meadows. I stayed because of the landscapes Eric Paddock shows in Belonging to the West – […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
If politics is a baseball game, I don’t even own a bat
After each election I become the fearful character in a Gary Larson cartoon, peering through window slats to discover that neighboring houses are occupied by large canines, drooling spittle and looking hungrily in my direction. After 12 elections, I ought to have more stomach for the results, but each biennium comes as fresh horror. The […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Meanwhile, on the street
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In the negotiating room, old enemies were trying to get along. But in A-LP’s hometown of Durango, Colo., passions still run high. Jeff Morrissey, a former Durango mayor and present board member of the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District, was cited by police for […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Dear friends
What happened? Unlike you, we don’t have a clue as to how the elections came out. Did Bob Dole come out of nowhere to upset Bill Clinton? Did Walt Minnick pull a similar feat in Idaho? Is it now illegal for cows to pee in Oregon’s streams? Do parents have new rights in Colorado? Did […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Heard around the West
When two grizzlies in Glacier National Park began snuggling up to tourists, the agency brought in a pack of Karelian bear dogs. These black-and-white canines specialize in chasing their fellow carnivores in a very aggressive way. At least one grizzly has taken the hint. A bear biologist told the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
ARVADA, Colo. – It is a more and more common scene in the West. People who are personal and professional enemies, people who let no opportunity pass to say something nasty about each other, are this morning sitting together at tables arranged in a large, hollow square. Behind them are colleagues and supporters who occasionally […]
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
She works to save the past
Longtime HCN subscriber Ann Phillips finds herself drawn time and again back to a place that many experience as timeless: southeastern Utah. There, with one hand, she tries to record archaeological sites before they vanish; with the other, she works to prevent them from vanishing. The educational consultant turned archaeologist came through Paonia recently with […]