Costilla County, Colorado’s attempts to rein in logging and gain access to the Taylor Ranch their Hispanic forebears used as a commons are frustrated by a wave of mostly Anglo newcomers who want no part of any planning regulations.
Rumble in the watershed
The goal was to form a group to manage Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River watershed. But when environmentalists and locals met on the issue last month, things turned sour fast. Hostilities began after a citizens’ group, led by Republican state legislators JoAn Wood and Cameron Wheeler, packed the meeting in Ririe and voted…
Tell it to the judge
The fate of 95 species of Southwestern wildlife is hanging in the balance. It’s been over a year since the species were proposed for listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the nonprofit Southwestern Center for Biodiversity says it will sue if nothing is done by June 13. Seventy-one of these species, including…
Forester retreats on grazing rules
With the Idaho congressional delegation breathing down his neck, Sawtooth National Forest Supervisor Bill LeVere withdrew his controversial grazing rules, which were regarded as the toughest in the nation. In March, LeVere told his district rangers to cancel ranchers’ permits if violation warnings went unheeded. But after a roasting in Washington, D.C., from Idaho Reps.…
The roads less funded
Last year, it was a photo finish. A bill to stop paying for logging roads on national forests fell two votes shy of making it through the House of Representatives. This year, Reps. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., and John Porter, R-Ill., want to see if they can push the measure over the top. A letter they…
Condors soar once more over the Southwest
On a Saturday morning, a small crowd gathers at Arizona’s House Rock Valley, gazing up at big black birds that glide on the thermals. The California condor has returned to canyon country. The last time anyone saw the giant cousin of the turkey vulture in this region was almost 70 years ago. The species nearly…
This land is our land
Dear HCN, I am offended by Louise Liston’s statement, “I love the land, and it’s different from an environmentalist’s love. We have a deep, abiding love; they have a weekend love affair …” (HCN, 4/14/97). It is presumptuous to assume that other people’s enjoyment of the nation’s public lands is any less legitimate than one’s…
Wanted: More road on the rim
Dear HCN, I doubt if you will print this, but I must object strongly to Scott Stouder’s story on the Hells Canyon Rim, a terribly distorted and prejudiced piece (HCN, 4/14/97). The truth of the matter is easy to discern if one merely reads the act creating the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area and Wilderness…
Who’ll run Hanford Reach?
If Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., has her way, the last free-flowing, undammed stretch of the Columbia River – the Hanford Reach – will stay that way under federal management. First, however, Murray has some politicking to do. She and Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., plan a public hearing June 21 in Mattawa, Wash., on the future…
The road to no sprawl
It’s going to take more than a few isolated individuals to put the squeeze on suburban sprawl, according to Colorado Commons, a nonprofit think tank based in Longmont. With that in mind, the group brings together policymakers, environmentalists, developers and academics to address the state’s urban growth problems. They recently sent the first issue of…
Threatened Rivers
The West continues to hold its own in the competition for the nation’s most at-risk rivers. Five of this year’s top 10 endangered rivers are in the West, according to American Rivers’ annual report, North America’s Most Endangered and Threatened Rivers of 1997. This year’s 45-page report focuses on threats more subtle than the untreated…
Solstice Institute
The summer solstice is a time to join in harmony with natural forces – and boogie. The nonprofit Solstice Institute holds a first-day-of summer celebration June 21 in Boulder, Colo., featuring singing, drumming and some dancing in the street. Ben Lippman, who founded the institute in 1995 to promote cooperative housing, hopes the get-together will…
Summer Wilderness Conference
From Missoula, Mont., comes a double celebration as Wilderness Watch’s Summer Wilderness Conference and the annual gathering of the Association of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) converge on the town July 17-20. Poet Gary Snyder will read to a crowd of conference-goers from both camps. Wilderness Watch hosts environmentalist Stewart Udall, who will highlight discussion…
Rising From Tradition
The work of nine Native American artists from Idaho, Oregon and Washington will be on display at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore., for the next nine months. The show, called Rising From Tradition: Contemporary Native Art from the Plateau, features traditional work such as coiled baskets and woven cornhusk belts and pouches, but…
Dear Michael Dombeck
The Forest Service isn’t doing enough to protect fish, wildlife and plants. And this time it’s not environmentalists who say so, but people inside the agency. Biologists and botanists – 170 from 30 different forests – collaborated recently on a letter to Chief Michael Dombeck, warning him that “many forests now find their fish, wildlife…
Hogs and a small town co-exist
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. ALBIN, Wyo. – In this town of just 120 people some 50 miles southeast of Wheatland, hogs have been a part of the landscape for a decade. But the owner of a mini-empire of 11,000 sows, which bear up to 250,000 pigs…
Paul Larmer responds
Paul Larmer responds: Tom Power may be correct in his assertion that the employment numbers I used – and cited by county officials – are exaggerated. I should have been more careful before using them. The economist who has worked on Kane County’s economic plan, Gil Miller, says Power’s information merits a closer look. But…
Heard around the West
“You better run a BIG retraction,” howls Dan Feller, a history professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. What was Heard Around the West’s little error? Informing you that a recent “Darwin Award” to a lawn-chair-flying fellow last year was a netmyth. The story of Larry Walters soaring to 16,000 feet for almost…
Lessons from a rampaging river
It’s obvious from news photos that the city of Grand Forks, N.D., will never be the same after this year’s cataclysmic flood and fire. What’s not so obvious in the scenes of washed-out and burned-out buildings is that the landscape is not all that has changed. Mike Jacobs, editor of the Grand Forks Herald, calls…
Will the bison killing resume next winter?
With half of Yellowstone’s bison now hanging in meat lockers or filling the bellies of grizzly bears, the spring of 1997 was supposed to end the “buffalo war” outside America’s oldest national park. But though the guns are silent following the largest slaughter of wild bison in the 20th century, a bitter debate continues. The…
The slaughter of bison reopens old wounds
When Rosalie Little Thunder first heard about last winter’s slaughter of bison outside Yellowstone National Park, she asked her father what it meant. “He said, ‘It’s an attack on our culture again. It is us they have feelings toward and they’re taking it out on the buffalo,’” said Little Thunder, a Lakota Sioux who lives…
Chaos comes to Costilla County
SAN LUIS, Colo. – For now, the mornings are quiet again in this oldest of Colorado towns. The air is clear, and the jagged Sangre de Cristo Mountains seem to leap from the 8,000-foot valley floor. But just a few weeks ago, this isolated small town, which boasts three restaurants, a gas station, church, bar…
‘I saved Jack Taylor’s life’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Among other things, the mayor of San Luis, Colo., runs a bar he named after himself. Joe Espinoza: “Did you know I am the oldest mayor in Colorado and this is the oldest town in the state … how old do you think I…
The last undiscovered place in Colorado
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Twenty minutes south of San Luis, Colo., large road signs tell you Wild Horse Mesa is nearby. Evan Melby is the owner of 25,000 acres here; his billboards announce you can buy a five-acre lot for $4,990, or $750 down and monthly payments of…
Dear Friends
Please, please, please The circulation department is mailing 700 requests to subscribers, asking this select group for their “official” addresses. These letters will get to you because we’re sending them – gasp! – first class, but your copies of HCN are now running the risk of being marked undeliverable by the post office because our…
The system cuts a new chief down to size
Four months ago, environmentalists thought incoming Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck made a promise to do things differently. “The unfortunate reality is that many people presently do not trust us to do the right thing,” he told Congress in February of 1997. “Until we rebuild that trust and strengthen those relationships, it is simply common…
How the West was destroyed
The Lochsa Story: Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains Bud Moore. Mountain Press Publishing Co., Box 2399, Missoula, MT 59806, 1996. $20, paper. Illustrated. Many boys grow up dreaming of becoming a mountain man, to hunt, fish and trap in a wild country. Bud Moore lived the dream. As a boy in the 1920s, he…
The Cowboy State gets shook up by 100,000 hogs
WHEATLAND, Wyo. – Scott Taylor looks down into a pit designed to contain 31 million gallons of liquid hog waste, and he sighs. Except for three yellow bulldozers scraping away at the dirt, it’s empty. “I can’t wait to get some pigs in this place,” says Taylor, 35. The production manager of Wyoming Premium Farms,…
Sierra Club Foundation vs. Ray Graham III: the case that won’t die
In 1853, Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House, about a lawsuit so long pursued that the principals were dead and the original issues lost in the mists of time. Ray Graham III vs. the Sierra Club Foundation is no Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, but it may be on its way. The multimillion-dollar fight between the two began…
The West’s lax rules draw hog factories
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Factory hog farms have followed the same trail blazed more than a century ago by American pioneers. The farms started nearly a decade ago in the heart of pig country – Iowa – and in the heart of chicken country – North…
Two tales of a single county
Dear HCN, In your recent article (“Beauty and the Beast,” HCN, 4/14/97), Paul Larmer painted a rather bleak picture of the Kane County, Utah, economy. That negative economic portrait was part of an effort to explain why it was “no wonder everyone was hopping mad when the president took that hope (of the Andalex coal…