Thank the squawfish, say community activists in Moab, Utah. In the latest round of a long controversy, the endangered fish may be the lever that moves 10 million tons of radioactive uranium tailings away from the banks of the Colorado River. Last spring, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ruled that Atlas Minerals could leave the […]
News
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
Military wants to grow its Western empire
Imagine a giant spider – a creepy crawler 10 times bigger than King Kong – that could spin a web across the West’s great open spaces, linking every military training range in eight states. That’s how some citizens and environmentalists view a bevy of proposals by the U.S. Department of Defense to enhance combat readiness […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Wildlife dollars fund prison
A recent federal audit of Colorado wildlife funding has gotten some people upset. Among other violations, the audit has revealed that license fees intended for state wildlife programs were spent on land for a prison in Rifle, Colo. Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reimburses state agencies for a portion of their wildlife […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
The secret’s out
Despite a court order, a grand jury’s “secret” report on the Rocky Flats bomb factory in Colorado is out of the closet. Anti-nuke activists have had copies for years, and the full report has been posted on the World Wide Web at www.downwinders.org/rocky_fl.htm. Nevertheless, few have been privy to what the so-called runaway grand jury […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Groups sue over microbes
WYOMING, MONTANA Groups sue over microbes Three environmental organizations are suing the National Park Service over plans to allow private “bioprospecting” in Yellowstone National Park. Charging that the park has conducted “closed-door dealing with a part of our national heritage,” the Edmonds Institute of Edmonds, Wash., the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C., and […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
The Wayward West
Idaho is not a hotbed of white supremacists and neo-Nazis (HCN, 3/16/98), says Idaho Gov. Phil Batt. His campaign to restore the state’s image has taken him to the slopes of Sun Valley, where the 70-year-old onion farmer told 2,600 members of the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an all-black group, that Idaho has been tarnished […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Locals protest Vail expansion
A long-debated expansion at Colorado’s Vail ski resort gained a go-ahead from the Forest Service, but some locals aren’t so sure they need more ski runs – or the trophy homes they say are sure to follow. Critics charge Vail Associates is using the ski area expansion to make way for profitable base area development. […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Mined-over region resents EPA scrutiny
For 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has removed mine tailings, covered contaminated lawns and monitored people’s blood for lead and other dangerous heavy metals found within the 21-mile-long Bunker Hill Superfund Site in northern Idaho. Now, with the work nearly done, the federal agency has set its sights on something much bigger – the […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
A giant plume into the air
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to a back-page opinion piece, “We can have electricity, jobs and clean air.” Hard by the Colorado River at Laughlin, Nev., Southern California Edison’s controversial Mohave power plant began generating electricity in 1971. Its 500-foot stack throws a giant plume into […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
River heritage plan sent downstream
PAONIA, Colo. – When water engineer Jeff Crane learned about a new program called the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, he thought he’d found something his community could rally behind. Over the past three years, Crane has been working to build consensus among landowners, fruit farmers and gravel miners along western Colorado’s North Fork of the […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
‘Ecotourism’ – a gold mine for ailing agencies?
STEAMBOAT, Ore. – They huddled under the massive rock overhang, sheltered from the rain, trying to imagine the Native American shaman who painted these pictographs 150 years ago. On the rock’s belly are drawings of riders on horseback and strange ghostlike people. Some are clearly visible, but many are not, due to years of vandalism […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Some tourists opt for a dose of reality
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”‘Ecotourism’ – a gold mine for ailing agencies?“ While many of us bolt to the beach or head for the hills when vacation time rolls around, a few groups around the West have discovered that some crave a […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
The New West spawns a new kind of range war
DURANGO, Colo. – The lawyers outnumber the sheep in the Shenandoah sheep war. It started one morning about three years ago, when Edward and Adalou Dunne woke up to find eight sheep grazing in the yard next to theirs in Shenandoah, a subdivision of large lots where green pastures roll and dirt roads unwind in […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
The mouse that roared “Preble”
Naturalist E.A. Preble, who bagged a nondescript mouse on the bank of an irrigation ditch near Loveland, Colo., in 1895, might be surprised at the ruckus he’s caused. The meadow jumping mouse named for him – a subspecies restricted to the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range – is now at the center of a controversy […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
The Wayward West
In Santa Fe, N.M., one-term Mayor Debbie Jaramillo lost her re-election bid March 3 to a retired state highway engineer. Larry Delgado won with 8,517 votes to the mayor’s 2,176. Jaramillo drew criticism for nepotism when she appointed her brother to the city manager’s job and he in turn appointed Jaramillo’s brother-in-law police chief (HCN, […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Elk are the battleground
The state of Wyoming wants to give 2,000 elk a shot in the rump and has asked a federal court for permission. Each winter as many as 10,000 elk migrate down from the deep snows of Yellowstone National Park and surrounding lands (HCN, 9/15/97). They spend the winter on the National Elk Refuge just outside […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Tribes protest Ward Valley dump site
Since early February, protesters from five Native American tribes have camped out near a proposed nuclear waste storage site in Ward Valley, Calif. The Bureau of Land Management, which wants to finish studying the site, ordered the 30 or so people off the land by Feb. 19. But on Feb. 25, the BLM stopped policing […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Lawmakers struggle to rewrite the Endangered Species Act
For six years, the federal Endangered Species Act has been on probation, limping along on a budget renewed in Congress every year while lawmakers try to come up with a new law that pleases conservationists and conservatives alike. What’s new this year is legislation introduced by Sen. Dirk Kempthorne, R-Idaho. Although no environmental group fully […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Feds will re-examine rail service in the West
The U.S. Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency that approved the 1996 coupling of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, may take another look at that decision. In approving the 36,000-mile system that connects the Great Lakes, the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas to West Coast ports from Seattle to San […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
The Park Service takes a hard look at itself
The portrait of the National Park Service that Richard West Sellars paints in his new book is not especially flattering: Entrusted by Americans to preserve natural wonders, the agency instead prefers to develop recreation and promote tourism. Such criticism is nothing new – writer Edward Abbey loved to rail against “industrial tourism” and the “National […]