As the small, conservative towns bordering Utah’s new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument begin to adapt to the monument they never wanted, a new vision for what gateway communities and preserved areas might be begins to slowly emerge.
Tribal force
Tribal Force, a new comic book created by two 28-year-old artists from Arizona, begins in the year 2006 with the usual mega-battle: Native superheroes must stop the U.S. government from bombing the Indians and confiscating their resource-rich reservation land. But the story quickly becomes both more human and contemporary. Basho Yazza, one of the comic…
The burning barrel
The Burning Barrel is worth watching for its prairie shots and for the home movies of filmmaker Tim Schwab’s childhood that will make you nostalgic even though it’s not your childhood. An old oil drum that was used to burn his family’s garbage is the metaphor for wastefulness that narrator Schwab (he made the film…
Bringing back the small family farm
In their mid-40s and newly married, Bob and Bonnie Gregson dropped out and bought a 13-acre farm near Seattle, Wash. in 1988. When the couple left their corporate jobs and city lives, they dreamed of making a “reasonable, community-oriented, non-exploitive, earth-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing living.” They managed to succeed, after some trial and error, as…
Don’t hail this new lord
Dear HCN, When Jon Christensen writes about the new lord of the West who will replace the old lords of extraction (HCN, 12/23/96), it is clear what the name of this new lord is: Midas! Under the magic touch of the recreation industry, public lands will turn to gold. Nature as ATV commercials, ecosystems as…
Here’s looking at tourism
Tourism is as hotly debated in the West as clearcutting. Some see it as salvation for overworked landscapes and faltering economies; others see it as a more vicious form of extraction than mining and logging. All those perspectives as well as a few from the center will be at the “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism…
The information dirt road
Instead of booms and busts brought on by fluctuating demand for everything from gold to coal, rural areas believed that the information age would bring economic stability as educated information workers moved to small communities. No longer would small towns be turned into ghost towns when the ore gave out or commodity prices plunged. So…
A tough fighter
Dear HCN, It was with sadness that I read of our loss of Ruth Hutchins, one of the noblest of fighters for a sane Colorado water policy. My first contact with Ruth was a Sunday telephone call to me in my then capacity as a Colorado River Water Conservation District director. She talked at such…
Cows aren’t “wild and scenic’
For the second time in six months, a federal judge has slammed grazing on public lands. Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Ancer Haggerty ruled that grazing was a “non-point source” of pollution, forcing Oregon cattlemen to comply with the federal Clean Water Act (HCN, 10/28/96). Now, he’s ordered cattle off parts of southeastern Oregon’s…
A Utah vendetta
When some members of the Utah Legislature get mad, they try to get even. A rural Utah lawmaker, furious at actor Robert Redford’s support of the state’s new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, introduced a resolution recently to turn Redford’s Sundance resort into a wilderness. “Mr. Redford has made a tremendous amount of money off what…
Frogs sport too many legs
Eight-legged frogs give biologists the willies. They say the deformed amphibians – like canaries in a mine – indicate environmental problems that could affect the two-legged as well. So when extra-legged Pacific tree frogs surfaced in three westside Oregon communities last summer, researchers took notice. No one knew what to make of the phenomenon until…
BLM ditches law-enforcement rules
With hundreds of millions of acres of federal land sprawled across a sparsely populated West, Bureau of Land Management rangers often legally fill in for state and county law officers. But last fall, when the BLM published “plain English” regulations that detailed the agency’s existing authority over gun use, drunken driving and other matters, some…
Cars kill trees
Scientists in California say the evidence is compelling: Air pollution from the fast-growing San Joaquin Valley is responsible for killing thousands of trees in the nearby Sierra Nevadas. The chief culprit is ozone, a pollutant created when exhaust from power plants or cars mixes with hydrocarbons in the presence of sunlight, say federal researchers and…
Burning for a buck
It sounds like an easy way to make a few dollars: Gather up coils of old industrial-gauge wire, pile it in the desert, douse it with diesel and burn off the rubber and lead insulation. The raw copper left behind brings 80 cents to a dollar per pound. The trouble is, it’s illegal and a…
Cherish and Renew: Restoring Western Ecosystems and Communities
To Cherish and Renew: Restoring Western Ecosystems and Communities is the theme of the second annual Wallace Stegner Center symposium, in Salt Lake City, April 17-19. Revitalizing damaged natural resources and local economies will be the focus of discussion sessions hosted by writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, sustainable agriculture expert Wes Jackson, Ted Strong…
Desert Conference
An annual rite of spring, the 19th Desert Conference at Oregon’s Malheur Field Station, April 24-27, attracts people from around the country for field trips, networking, a desert rat poetry festival and lots of informative talks. Topics will cover the making of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, cows and their intrusions into streams and the…
Heard around the West
Spring is here. We know, not because our boots sport two-inch mud platforms after a step outdoors or because sunny mornings tend to mutate into dramatic whiteouts, but because news from around the West seems to zero in on the human body: in the classroom, in the buff and in the rough. The student story…
Yellowstone’s ‘geyser guy’ was one of the park’s best friends
In the spray of Old Faithful, in the shimmer of heat within Yellowstone’s turquoise pools, in the steam rolling through the pines, Rick Hutchinson looks back at us. Rick was Yellowstone’s geyser guy, a geologist who was the foremost authority on the world’s foremost collection of geysers and hot springs. I say “was.” But I…
Dear Friends
Plaudits for the Poppers Frank and Deborah Popper are the mom-and-pop Darth Vaders of the Great Plains. The scholars from New Jersey coined “Buffalo Commons” to describe the turn they want the depopulated region to take. Harsh feelings against the Rutgers University-based pair will not be softened by the American Geographical Society, which recently awarded…
ESA ruling: More sound than fury
Lawyers, get ready: People can use the Endangered Species Act to sue the federal government for protecting species too much, not just too little, ruled the U.S. Supreme Court March 19. Now, ranchers, farmers and developers may be encouraged to do what environmentalists have been doing for two decades – demand their day in court.…
Judge tells feds to list and protect
In a slap at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal judge ordered the agency March 14 to list four species as endangered and to set aside the most important habitat for them and two others already listed. District Judge Roger Strand chided the service for having repeatedly missed congressionally imposed deadlines under the…
Beauty and the Beast
The president’s new monument forces southern Utah to face its tourism future.
A proud and defiant native
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Though as a child she lived in Idaho and for a while in Tooele, Utah, Garfield County Commissioner Louise Liston has always considered her birthplace, Escalante, home. Before becoming a commissioner 10 years ago, Liston taught in a one-room school in the town of…
Cars and wilderness collide on a rim
Separating Oregon and Idaho, Hells Canyon is so vast between rim and river it forms two distinct climates. The Snake River that shaped it is gathered from 30 rivers crossing five states; its gorge is the deepest cut by a river in North America. Standing on the wind-carved Oregon side of Hells Canyon eye-to-eye with…
‘This monument was just plain stupid’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Roger Holland, 52, is a Kanab town councilman, a part-time rancher and a mining consultant. He has done geological surveys on the Kaiparowits Plateau within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Roger Holland: “This monument was just plain stupid; the president did it to keep…
Money: the real political organizer
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now about this soft money business. As a descriptive term, “soft money” isn’t. It’s vague, if not downright misleading, considering that “soft money” is no softer than any other money. So let’s approach the subject from another perspective, not as an abstract “issue,” but as a case study of a real, living,…
Let’s ‘work with the situation’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Gerry Rankin moved from Salt Lake City to Big Water, Utah, pop. 350, more than six years ago. When she isn’t teaching at the town’s only school, she is the mayor of the town, which lies just a few miles west of Lake Powell.…
A miner turns host
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. Jerry Freeman, owner of the tiny town of Nipton, population less than 50, is one of the few residents of the East Mojave poised to benefit from a tourist economy: Jerry Freeman: “I first came out here in the 1950s to stake some claims when…
The Mojave National Preserve: 1.4 million acres of contradictions
Note: this story accompanies another, similar feature story in this issue. CIMA, Calif. – Like most of her neighbors, Irene Ausmus never wanted the East Mojave Desert to become a national preserve, let alone the national park that environmentalists first wanted. “We live out here because we don’t want people bothering us,” says the 64-year-old…
This rancher wants to stay
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. Although other ranchers in the preserve have said they might sell their land and grazing allotments to a land trust or foundation, Rob Blair says he won’t. His family first settled here in 1913, and he hopes that one of his three children will someday…