In arid areas where streams run only during the spring or during storms, deer, elk and bighorn sheep can have a hard time finding a drink. Now, an artificial water hole called the “Wildlife Saloon” lets animals drink their fill. On the surface, all you can see is a small, mostly buried stock tank. The […]
Book Reviews
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Ranchers offer hospitality
In Park County, Colo., ranchers who want to maintain their traditional land uses are saying “no, thank you” to housing developers. Instead, they’re welcoming tourists. Seven years ago, several ranchers and county officials formed the South Park Heritage Area Board. The board, along with six partner organizations, aims to protect ranchers with conservation easements, and […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
For the love of spoons
What does frilly Victorian flatware have to do with Navajo silversmithing? More than you might imagine. In her new book, Navajo Spoons, Cindra Kline uncovers the unlikely convergence of Victorian America’s obsession for commemorative spoons, love of tourism, and the “classic period” of Navajo silversmithing. In the late 1800s, when the railroad reached the West, […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Saving tired tires
Ernest Cordova is “burning rubber” to come up with new ways to put old tires to use. His family-owned business, Cordova and Sons of Cuba, N.M., collects and recycles used tires to make bales for landscaping and building projects. Americans discard 270 million tires each year, says the Department of Environmental Quality, a huge burden […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest is Mary Sojourner’s timely and occasionally quirky reckoning of loss and resilience. Throughout these 50 vignettes, some new, some previously published, the Flagstaff, Ariz., author and High Country News contributor weaves personal stories into a compelling history of her hometown’s growing pains. Bonelight’s intimate musings on environmental […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Wire Song sticks in your mind
Mark Todd’s often lyrical poems are about the reality of the work, the moments of recognition, and even the reveries of an everyday, outdoor life on a ranch. As such, they may have an innate appeal to those of us who recognize both the romance and the tough reality of a life in those parts […]
Posted inApril 15, 2002: Raising a stink
Salmon poison
Ten years after Pacific salmon were first given federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, the fish are still swimming in pesticide-laced water, and the Environmental Protection Agency is ignoring the problem, says a report recently issued by the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides and the Washington Toxics Coalition. Besides directly killing the fish, […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Protests from the (tree)top down
During the late ’90s, dozens of activists camped out in the treetops of Northern California’s Headwaters Forest, protesting clear-cutting by Pacific Lumber. Their months – and even years – above the ground didn’t save the entire forest, but they managed to protect a few of the oldest groves. The tree-sits also drew intense media attention […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
Letting their lights shine
They have stayed quietly in the background for decades, watching as their men vainly tried to pound the round peg of European governmental tradition into the square hole of tribal culture. But no longer: The women of Indian Country are speaking up, taking charge, and making things happen, according to a recent series by Montana’s […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
A blueprint for better communities
Westerners who are fed up with polluted water and air, strip malls that eat up open space, and automobile-dependent lifestyles can look to a new book by the Natural Resources Defense Council for guidance on how to counter the poorly planned patterns of growth we now know as urban sprawl. In a series of 35 […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
How to handle the big cats
It’s a typical, sunny Western day, and you’re outside gardening when you notice a big cat eyeing you intently and slinking slowly towards you. What should you do? Don’t act defenseless, says Jon Rachael, regional wildlife manager in Idaho. “Almost invariably, mountain lions attack for food, so if you play dead, that only makes the […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
Will the real Gifford Pinchot please stand up
Char Miller has written a book intended to rescue Forest Service founding chief Gifford Pinchot from the battering he has taken over the flooding of Northern California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. In almost all accounts of that fight, Sierra Club founder John Muir is the defender of the beautiful valley while Pinchot wants to flood it […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
Cactus Ed revisited
In the West, few names elicit as much veneration or revilement as that of Edward Abbey. But those of us who weren’t around during Abbey’s heyday, or never got to meet him, can only turn to books. Thirteen years after Abbey’s death, two new books add depth to the story of Cactus Ed. James Cahalan’s […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
The Natural West
Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond Professor of History at the University of Montana, in Missoula, lives on a 25-acre ranchette some miles outside that small city, in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains. To walk from those foothills to the nearby Forest Service wilderness areas, which he does often with Wily, a canine hybrid that […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
A wing and a genius grant
After 11 years of quietly helping researchers and environmental activists carry out their projects from the air, Tucson pilot Sandy Lanham was awarded a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation on Oct. 23. Other pilots bill $300 an hour for similar services. But Lanham’s Environmental Flying Services, with the help of charitable foundations, only […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
BLM’s coalbed methane plan disappoints enviros
The federal government wants to allow gas companies to drill nearly 40,000 new coalbed methane wells in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin over the next 10 years. That many wells would quadruple the number currently in Wyoming and increase the nationwide tally by almost 70 percent. The plan is outlined in the draft Powder River Basin […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
Bush administration wall hanging
Many environmental organizations send their supporters calendars of desert cacti in bloom, lynx lunging through powder snow or fly fishers casting into roaring mountain streams. Not Earthjustice. This year, the environmental law firm’s 2002 calendar profiles 12 Bush administration appointees in Technicolor rhetoric. Each month features a not always flattering color photograph of a different […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Looking for the Language of Red
Even in its hardcover form, Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, is small enough to fit easily into your backpack, the one you might carry if you happened to be taking a trip through, say, the redrock country of southern Utah. The book’s size is no accident. A collection […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
The West can govern itself
Democrat Daniel Kemmis has been the minority leader and the speaker of the Montana House of Representatives. He has been mayor of the university town of Missoula. He is an environmentalist. Yet in This Sovereign Land, Kemmis, now head of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, argues that the national government must transfer power […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Alternative development goes mainstream
A good hard rain in the Pacific Northwest’s urban areas can be bad news for the environment. Storm water draining off rooftops and through gutters can carry pollutants, damaging streams and wildlife habitat. Now, a group of planners may have a solution. Called low-impact development (LID), it focuses on innovative ways to manage storm water […]