High Country News examines the Bush administration’s effects on the Western environment and considers what can be done to heal the damage.
Life during wartime
Refresh, RefreshBenjamin Percy256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2007. In Refresh, Refresh, his second collection of short stories, Benjamin Percy examines the fallout of the Iraq war on the people at home. Set on Oregon’s high plateau, these tales are shaped by the tension between the banal and the bizarre. The collection’s eponymous knockout story describes…
For the love of stuff
I don’t find most theistic versions of the afterlife compelling, but over the last few weeks I have become convinced that if there is a hell, it surely involves shopping for a car. After an epic quest, my wife and I finally decided on a 2-year-old Subaru, which will allow us to travel Wyoming’s wintry…
Change we could believe in
The federal deficit is already gigantic, and there’s serious talk of making it even bigger in order to stimulate the plummeting economy. But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. This is the perfect chance for the Obama administration to improve the way the federal lands are managed. At the moment, increased budgets for…
(Un)clearing the air
Westerners will breathe the legacy of Bush’s BLM
As Interior Turns
An eight-year soap opera in which federal officials screwed the environment, the taxpayers, and each other.
Trashing the earth, and the truth
This is the last time I will ever tell this story. For an environmental reporter, the past eight years have produced a jungle of topics to explore at will, but the lessons learned there could not have been more unpleasant. This is the story of one of those lessons. In April of 2004, Field and…
Fighting for forests
Arthur Carhart: Wilderness ProphetTom Wolf294 pages, hardcover: $34.95.University Press of Colorado, 2008. A fiery conservationist who came of age in the late 1910s, Arthur Carhart had a penchant for highlighting the contradictions in the environmental movement, not to mention the conflicts of interest at the U.S. Forest Service, which employed him at a young age.…
Western wish list for Obama
The hopes and worries of 11 key Westerners
Fa-la-la-la
We’re taking a two-week publishing hiatus in late December, like we do every year. We’ll be working on new stories, saying farewell to our latest excellent crop of interns, and singing carols. Our traditional Open House won’t be held this year, though — another victim of the economic meltdown. Enjoy the holidays and look for…
The Bush legacy: It’s not all bad
I was once a skeptic when it came to politics. Sure, I voted, but I never thought that it made much difference. Once politicians got to Washington, they were all dragged into the middle anyway and ended up virtually indistinguishable from one another. So why bother? The first months of the Bush administration had a…
The sick and tired West
Bush weakens public health
John Daniel: A good animal, too
Ourselves When the throaty calls of sandhill cranesecho across the valley, when the rimrock flaresincandescent red, and the junipersare flames of green on the shortgrass hills, in that moment of last clear lightwhen the world seems ready to speak its name,meet me in the field alongside the pond.Without careers for once, without things to do,…
Dodged bullets
How the Bush administration shot — and missed — on some Western issues
Up in smoke
Obama administration will inherit a beleaguered Forest Service
Down on the farm
Valley (HCN, 12/8/08). When I climb to the top of our pasture and look towards the Blue Ridge mountains, I cannot see even one new house built after we moved here 30 years ago. Remarkable reprieve! Cropland, pastures and small forested patches still dot the sloping hillsides. Julene Bair’s poignant writing reminds me of the…
Sticks and stones
As the mother of biracial children who chooses to live in the “redder” places, I have a simple solution that has worked — learn to not be offended by racial remarks and jokes (HCN, 12/8/08). If met without anger, bigotry has a way of melting under patient persistence. At least most change their outlook, and…
Banish bigotry
I read “The persistence of bigotry, Western-style” with a chill crawling up my spine, and I don’t think it was the flu virus I’m battling (HCN, 12/8/08). I’m left with the strange feeling that some regional socialization patterns stopped evolving sometime around the 1950s. I doubt the children and parents telling those “jokes” have been…
Bowling for westerners
Where did the paranoia come from among some hunters and “gun rights advocates” that their right to own guns is seriously threatened (HCN, 10/27/08)? The NRA and its sympathizers make gun ownership an issue of such centrality that they spend millions of dollars on a wild campaign to ensure that any attempt to enable a…
Hal’s red herring
Hal Herring’s “Why we all need the Democrats to abandon gun control” deserves our derision (HCN, 10/27/08). Herring may share some values with most Democratic voters, but proselytizing for gun addicts of the Palinesque variety is not one of them. I learned as a boy on a western Montana ranch that the thoughtful and competent…
Midnight cowboying
As the Bush administration prepares to step out the back door of history, it’s following a time-honored tradition — shoving through hundreds of last-minute rule changes. Outgoing President Clinton slammed out 26,000 pages of new rules, many of them meant to protect land or public health. But President Bush’s “midnight regulations” are mostly gifts to…
Not so dead on arrival
The unlikely success of the Clinton Roadless Rule