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Locals win awards

Two women from Paonia travelled to Austin, Texas, on March 5 to receive awards from the National Wildlife Federation at its annual banquet. Betsy Marston, the editor of High Country News, accepted the communications award - a statue of a whooping crane - on behalf of the paper. Theo Colborn, who was once a pharmacist in Paonia and still has a home here, received the NWF's science award. She is now a senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C. Another award recipient was from just over the hill - Aspen songwriter Joe Henry, who received a special achievement award.

The other award recipients were not from Paonia, or even from Colorado. They included Gov. Ann Richards of Texas, former president Jimmy Carter, Vice-President Al Gore, and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt who did not receive an award (he received an NWF special achievement award in 1982), told 450 NWF stalwarts of his "special sacrifice" - he had left Washington, D.C., to come to Texas, where it was a balmy 80 degrees. Appearing relaxed, but not wasting a word, Babbitt recounted the Senate filibuster over grazing reform, which he thought had been prodded by a "resurgent right gathered in the tent of the wise use agenda."

After the battle had bloodied him, Babbitt said, he had "cravenly gone out West, to the governors, to ask: "Can you help me out?'" After eight meetings in Colorado with environmentalists and ranchers, he said, he had become committed to a consensus approach to grazing reform and to public scrutiny of the process.

Asked whether he enjoyed administration support for reform in the West, Babbitt said he got "a lot of support." He also reminded the group that Clinton "was not elected president on a platform of detailed knowledge of grazing reform."

A hot reporter

New intern Roland Giller comes to us from Keno, Ore., a town on the dry side of the Cascades that is even smaller than Paonia. For the past seven fire seasons, Roland worked for the Forest Service as a hotshot and smoke jumper, fighting fires in 10 Western states while pursuing a journalism degree from the University of Oregon.

He graduated in 1990, and continued to work seasonally for the Forest Service until last year. "It was really fun, but I guess I'm now ready to start a newspaper career," he says. Roland hopes his tenure at HCN will help him find a job with a small paper in the West.

Correction

We got a new sense of just how hard grazing reform is when several readers told us we'd given them a bum steer. The Department of Interior address in the Jan. 24, 1994, issue was incorrect. If you're depending on that address to bring you a copy of the revised grazing regulations, which will be published in the Federal Register the last week of March, you're going to be disapointed.

Tim Salt, Interior's project manager for Rangeland Reform "94, suggests that you get one of the 30,000 to 40,000 copies that will be distributed to Bureau of Land Management offices around the West.

If, let's say, you live in Michigan, and that's not convenient, try writing to: Rangeland Reform '94, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Department of Interior, P.O. Box 66300, Washington, D.C. 20035-6300 (202/653-6753). We think that's the right address.

Congratulations

Former High Country News board member Michael Clark has been named executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, based in Bozeman, Mont. Clark has been head of the Washington, D.C.-based Friends of the Earth and the Montana-based Northern Lights Institute. Most recently, he was with Management Assistance Group. Clark succeeds Ed Lewis, who served as GYC head for seven years.

* Ed Marston, for the staff

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