Chuck Neal is a retired ecologist whose nickname, “Wild Grizzly Stalker,” says it all: For more than 25 years, Neal has followed grizzlies around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — 28,000 square miles in and around Yellowstone National Park. Eschewing bear spray, bells and just about everything else, he has seen more than 3,000 grizzlies, and […]
Book Reviews
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Another roadside detraction
Next time you’re cruising the open highway or ambling along a backwoods two-track, be wary of hitchhikers with barbed seedlings and spiky thistles. New studies from the University of California, Davis show that roads significantly promote the spread of invasive weeds. Noxious weeds such as cheatgrass, leafy spurge and knapweed already occupy over 133 million […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Digging through the dust of Libby
For decades, the best jobs in Libby, Mont., were to be found at the local vermiculite mine. The work was tough and dusty, but it paid better than anything else in northern Montana. In the 1970s, however, mine workers, their families, and their neighbors started dying of respiratory diseases and rare, painful cancers. Libbyites didn’t […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
A peek over the edge
In the endless arguments over public land, it’s healthy to seek the boggy middle ground. But it’s also worthwhile to stroll out to the edge, out where the arguments define right and wrong. For readers ready for such a stroll, Richard W. Behan has written a provocative travel guide, Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
NEPA gets short shrift in the courts
For more than a year, environmentalists have been warning that the Bush administration is attempting an unprecedented rollback of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). A recent study of NEPA court cases by the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife indicates that such warnings have merit. Supporters of NEPA describe it as the Magna Carta […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
A tale of tough women walks out of the past
Why do we take this trip? Well, to make money … I have simply got to make a stake some way, for I don’t want to lose the farm and it is the only way I can see of saving it. — Helga Estby, quoted in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, May 5, 1896 In 1896, when […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
Calendar
The 16th annual Arizona Hydrological Society’s Symposium will be held in Mesa on September 17-20. This year’s theme is “Sustainability Issues of Arizona’s Regional Watersheds.” To register, call Pete Kroopnick at 602-567-3850 or log onto www.azhydrosoc.org. The Water Education Foundation is holding a tour of Northern California’s water facilities and fisheries from September 24-26. Participants […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
Film sheds light on sacred spaces
Many Americans look for divinity inside a church, temple or synagogue. But for American Indians, places of worship exist beyond the confines of walls, in the landscape itself. Now, a film by Christopher McLeod exposes the obstacles American Indians face when they try to protect their sacred places. In the Light of Reverence features the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 2003: Where the Antelope (and the Oil Companies) Play
A fire maverick is resurrected
The work of Omer C. Stewart reminds us just how far we’ve come in our thinking about fire. In Forgotten Fires, Henry T. Lewis and M. Kat Anderson have resurrected Stewart’s 1954 manuscript, outlined the events of his life, and critiqued his research based on current knowledge of fire. Stewart wrote at a time when […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Red Earth: desert poems resurrected
I’ve seen her pass with eyes upon the road — An old bent woman in a bronze black shawl, With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy’s, As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar. And I have fancied from the girls about What she was […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Project puts tribal lands back on the map
Speak of maps, and most people think of lines drawn on paper. But American Indians have navigated the land for thousands of years using mental maps created from generations of stories and oral history. For them, the landscape is a fusion of familiar landmarks and mythical or real events that happened there. Since 1999, the […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Sustainable forestry for beginners
While most how-to forestry guides are tailored for Eastern landowners, former HCN intern Bryan Foster has brought the issue west in his new book, Wild Logging. Foster introduces readers to Western landowners, foresters and loggers, describing the physical work of marking timber sales, cutting trees, performing prescribed burns and removing felled timber. As he tells […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
There is no better guide to fire in the West than Stephen Pyne, who spent 15 years fighting fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and has written 16 books on fire. The 32 essays in his most recent book, Smokechasing, are a mixed, uncoordinated group, but so brilliant and thoughtful that they […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Have no doubts, go higher
To have lived in the highlands has rendered the lowlands incomplete. My intellect rebels at such thoughts, but in my heart I feel it to be true. I am inflated by the mountain. Tendrils of perfection reach out from my past, usurping the present. Randy LaChapelle When In Doubt, Go Higher I opened When In […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
An inside look at the hardscrabble plains
An image comes to mind at the mention of the High Plains: an empty but picturesque farmhouse, roof sagging like the back of an old horse, porch falling off the foundation, and screen door swaying in the wind. There’s a wide, exposing sky, and an old windmill tilting toward the West. But what happens when […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Women take the wheel
In the 1990s, the bumper sticker “Thelma and Louise Live!” sprouted on mini-vans driven by mothers in suburbs across America, proclaiming a craving for a journey beyond the kids’ soccer fields. The 19 women writers who contributed to A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West have peeled out of the daily commute, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Look before you eat
Surely, we would feel better if we knew that food companies were doing everything possible to minimize food hazards, and that the government was looking out for our interests and making sure food companies were doing what they were supposed to. In the absence of such reassurance, we lose trust. — Marion Nestle, Safe Food […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Inside HCN
New from Writers on the Range “The jacket of a popular author’s book says that she lives on a ‘40-acre ranch.’ No real rancher would care to make that statement. Similarly, only uninformed journalists could write, ‘Sen. Jones lives on his 10-acre emu ranch.’ The correct way to write that sentence would be, ‘Mr. Jones […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Gulf of California Dreamin’
No river in the United States has been as aggressively seized for human use as the Colorado — and shelves of books have been written to tell the story. But what becomes of the river once it flows out of the U.S. and into Mexico has received considerably less print. Now, Defenders of Wildlife has […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Barren, wild and worthless? Anything but
For naturalist Susan Tweit, moving to New Mexico meant learning to love the harsh beauty of a landscape that one haggard 19th century surveyor dismissed as “barren, wild, and worthless.” That bitter phrase became the title of Tweit’s eloquent 1995 memoir on life in the Chihuahuan Desert. Taken in by her masterful prose, readers, too, […]