Under increasing political pressure from the Bush administration and its appointees, some agency scientists are finding it difficult to keep both their jobs and their integrity.
Also in this issue: The omnibus appropriations bill just passed by Congress contained more than a few anti-environmental riders, but not all of them survived for the president’s pen to sign.
Oregonians didn’t know what they were voting for
Measure 37 was not a referendum on Oregon’s land-use laws (HCN, 11/22/04: In Oregon, a lesson learned the hard way). The ballot measure was designed to make it impossible to have those regulations in place. However, that is not the question that was asked. The measure asked voters whether they would approve compensation to private…
Oregon votes for fairness
Oregonians still have a reverence for Oregon’s features and future. What they signaled by passing Measure 37 is that they demand a government that is fair (HCN, 11/22/04: In Oregon, a lesson learned the hard way). Part of the problem is that land planners and environmental activists are never satisfied. The result is incrementally increasing…
Take back the wilderness movement
The exchange between SUWA Director Scott Groene and HCN Associate Editor Matt Jenkins is a fine example of the strategic dialogue which should be taking place within all Western wilderness campaigns (HCN, 9/27/04: Utah’s wilderness warriors reply). Those campaigns increasingly favor what is best described as a “Let’s make a deal” wilderness strategy. The price…
‘Paying for wilderness’ undermines environmental goals
In covering wilderness campaigns, HCN has invited us to party with Nevada “wilderness warriors” (HCN, 3/3/03: Wild Card); watch a rancher in Owyhee County, Idaho, kill a rattlesnake (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the middle path); and learn the personal philosophies of the central players in Idaho’s Boulder-White Clouds proposal (HCN, 11/22/04: Conservationist in a Conservative Land).…
Moab uranium tailings: should they stay or should they go?
The U.S. Department of Energy is calling for public comment on its plans to clean up a 130-acre pile of uranium tailings and contaminated soils currently leaching ammonia and radioactive materials into groundwater — and the Colorado River — just three miles upstream from Moab, Utah. The Atlas Minerals Corporation had operated the Moab uranium…
Follow-up
So much for Homeland Security. In November, voters in Washington state voted by a 2-to-1 margin to prohibit the federal government from sending any more nuclear waste to Hanford Nuclear Reservation (HCN, 11/22/04: Election Day surprises in the schizophrenic West). On Dec. 2, in response to a request from the U.S. Department of Justice, a…
Calendar
Do you care about Colorado’s Roan Plateau? The BLM has released its amended draft management plan for the area — which would allow gas drilling on the edge of the plateau but delay drilling on top for approximately 20 years — and is collecting public comment until March 4. www.roanplateau.ene.com 970-947-2800 The Wilderness Medical Institute…
Crimes against workers
Environmental crimes are among the hardest to prosecute. That’s the message authors Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni dramatically deliver in The Cyanide Canary, the true story of chemical contamination in southeastern Idaho. In the summer of 1996, 20-year-old Scott Dominguez, an employee at Evergreen Resources — a company that produced fertilizer from mining waste —…
City slaps back at property-rights measure
Residents of Bend, Ore., might want to think twice about where they put that new pig farm or high-rise condo. A provision in a recently approved ordinance in the central Oregon city of 62,900 allows people to sue their neighbors if nearby development reduces property values. Adopted on Dec. 1, the new rule is a…
The little bill that… can’t
For 13 years, the Ojito Wilderness Study Area — a 24,000-acre patch of semi-arid land just 40 miles from Albuquerque — has awaited full-fledged protection under the Wilderness Act. But despite the support of Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, ranchers, miners, city folk and local American Indian tribes, the land has not been designated wilderness — because…
Lawsuits swarm around Yellowstone snowmobiles
As predicted, after seven years of lawsuits, contradictory plans and court rulings, the National Park Service announced on Nov. 4 that it will continue to allow hundreds of snowmobiles per day into Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks for the next three winters (HCN, 11/8/04: Judge vaporizes Yellowstone snowmobile ban). The new rules will allow…
Anasazi outpost dodges the drill
In early December, Hovenweep National Monument, in the remote southeast corner of Utah, narrowly escaped an attempt to lease nearby land for oil and gas drilling. The monument’s 400-acre Square Tower unit was created in 1923 to protect the remains of an almost 800-year-old Anasazi settlement, where as many as 500 people once lived. From…
Protecting the people’s right of way: Public-access advocate Bill Calvert
The Yuba Goldfields in California’s Central Valley is one of the more bizarre and intriguing landscapes in the state — a swath of moonscape, wetlands, and sagebrush that stretches along both sides of the Yuba River. Huge piles of rock tailings, left by gold dredgers in the early part of the last century, loom over…
Nevada BLM cleans out cleanup project manager
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Conscientious Objectors.” Earle Dixon was in for a surprise this fall, when he showed up for a meeting at his office in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Carson City Field Office. Over the previous year, Dixon had overseen the cleanup of the Yerington…
Fisheries agency rewards a loyal bureaucrat
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Conscientious Objectors.” People who worry about the Pacific Coast’s endangered salmon runs are likely to recognize James Lecky’s name. In 2002, Lecky, an assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Region in Long Beach, Calif., reworked his agency’s flow recommendations for the Klamath River. The…
Conscientious Objectors
Public employees and their allies on the outside fight against Bush’s war on science
Buy them some body armor
During a recent visit with troops in Kuwait, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a rare, unchoreographed moment, opened the floor to questions. He got a zinger. Why, asked one serviceman, are troops forced to scrounge through dumps in search of scrap metal, so they can outfit their vehicles with makeshift armor? The question, and Rumsfeld’s…
Dear friends
HAPPY HOLIDAYS This will be the last issue of High Country News that you receive for a month. The staff will take an issue off to spend time with family and friends, and to frolic in the white stuff that’s been falling consistently for a week now. The next issue should hit your mailbox Jan.…
Go West, Democrats, in the path of Harry Reid
Can a teetotaling Mormon from a busted mining town in Nevada lead Democrats to the Promised Land of national power? This much is certain: Democrats rallied behind Harry Reid in the hope that he can take them safely through purgatory — or is it hell? — as minority leader of the 44-member Democratic caucus in…
Riding high on political inappropriations
Appropriations bill is stuffed with pork — and some horse meat, too
The road to nowhere
Utah’s backcountry road takeover comes apart at the seams
Rulings keep the West open for business
Decisions not to protect sage grouse and prairie dogs could mean more development in sagebrush and grasslands
An artist’s residency, unplugged
The Aspen Guard Station is a log cabin in an aspen grove in the San Juan National Forest, 12 miles north of Mancos in southern Colorado. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, the guard station once housed fire crews. Today, the cabin is home to another kind of seasonal worker: writers and…
Heard around the West
NEVADA AND THE WEST Some call it pork, the 11,000 or so local projects stuffed into the $388 billion spending bill just passed by Congress. Others, such as the Democrats’ new minority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, call it money well spent and brag about it. Thanks to Reid’s clout, Nevada was awarded nearly $200…