The development boom in the West’s exurbs is draining public coffers and destroying the region’s last wide-open spaces.
Also in this issue: A judge has thrown out the Bush administration’s salmon protection plan, setting the stage for dramatic changes to the federal hydropower system.
In a run-down neighborhood, there’s lots of love
A Denver activist fights for her community
Conservatives compromised by corporations
Bush conservatives believe America must find a free-market energy future. They also believe in “states’ rights” to refuse federal mandates and chart their own course. Yet these same conservatives are now pushing a new era of nuclear power for the U.S., one that would be subsidized by the $8 billion (and counting) federal waste-disposal facility…
Non-natives deserve to live, too
I would like to respond to Liz Ellis’s letter regarding her position on the cowardly and now infamous “Burns Amendment” (HCN, 5/2/05: Wild horses harm ecosystems). The Burns ploy has nothing to do with flora and fauna. It has everything to do with killing off (literally) the grazing competition, providing further impetus to the horse-slaughterhouses…
Land and water conservation fund vital to wilderness
The Wilderness Act celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, loudly and publicly. This year, the 40th anniversary of the Land and Water Conservation Fund is going nearly unnoticed, and the fund remains under constant threat (HCN, 5/2/05: As threats loom, conservation dollars disappear). This money is vital to the future of public lands in the…
Biscuit Salvage is a losing proposition
Rich Fairbanks can be proud of the work he did in opting for 96 million board-feet to be cut on the Biscuit salvage (HCN, 5/16/05: Unsalvageable). The claim by OSU’s John Sessions that 2.5 billion board-feet could be salvaged was ludicrous. The regional Washington office estimate that 518 million board-feet could be salvaged was also…
Follow-up
Interior Secretary Gale Norton recently took a swipe at environmentalists while hanging out with hunters in Washington, D.C. Speaking to the American Wildlife Conservation Partners — a coalition of 35 hunting groups ranging from the Boone and Crockett Club to the National Rifle Association — Norton accused environmental groups of using lawsuits over endangered species…
Logging is an excuse, not a management tool
I don’t know where HCN editor Paul Larmer lives, but his statement about the U.S. Forest Service that, “Instead of being the primary driver of all management activities, logging has evolved into just another tool — like fire and erosion control — to be employed in maintaining healthy forests” sounds as if the Forest Service…
River tales: The Rio Grande from the headwaters to the sea
Trying to wrestle the Rio Grande into one book is a foolhardy undertaking, not only because of the river’s complexity, but because so many writers have attempted the feat before. But this new collection from Jan Reid is a tribute to the river rivaled only by Paul Horgan’s 1954 masterpiece, Great River. Rio Grande is…
In the nation’s most dangerous park, the desert’s heat still beats
In Organ Pipe: Life on the Edge, author Carol Ann Bassett heeds the advice of her mentor, Ed Abbey: “Learning about the desert takes time,” she writes. “Abbey once wrote the best way to do so was to ‘Pick out a good spot and just sit there, not moving, for about a year — and…
Rural residents split over coalbed methane
In Powder River County on the plains southeast of Billings, a new grassroots group has formed to work on coalbed methane issues. Unlike many other groups around the West, though, the members of the Citizens for Resource Development say, “Bring on the drilling.” “This is coming from our hearts,” says rancher Rick Rice, the group’s…
William Henry Jackson’s ‘The Pioneer Photographer’
William Henry Jackson’s ‘The Pioneer Photographer’ Bob Blair, 248 pages, clothbound: $39.95. Museum of New Mexico Press, 2005. William Henry Jackson was the official photographer for Ferdinand V. Hayden’s survey of the Western territory from 1870-1878. Now, Bob Blair has compiled photos, map sketches, paintings and notes into a fun coffee-table book. Chapters range from…
Pueblo happily hangs on to mustard gas
While most states are eager to see hazardous materials head for the nearest border, Colorado has decided to cling to the aging chemical weapons stored at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot. Federal legislation passed May 12 will keep Pueblo’s 780,000 Cold War-era mustard gas shells on site for destruction, after a tense period when the…
Desire
Desire Lindsay Ahl, 231 pages, paperback: $14. Coffeehouse Press, 2004. If you’ve ever crept around the alley south of Albuquerque’s Central Avenue, you’ll be immediately drawn into this new novel by Santa Fe writer Lindsay Ahl. And even if you’ve never been to the Duke City, there’s good writing and fun action to draw you…
How low will Vegas go for water?
Patricia Mulroy, the manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, has acquired a certain notoriety among Western water groupies for her hard-nosed approach to Colorado River water politics. But now, she may be winning new renown for setting records in a sort of how-low-can-you-go aquatic limbo. The Water Authority currently pumps water to 1.7 million…
Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park
Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park Peter Nabokov and Lawrence Loendorf, 400 pages, hardcover: $39.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. There’s plenty of talk about keeping bison and wolves in the nation’s flagship national park, but few people realize that American Indians were evicted from the area to make way for tourists,…
Soaring home prices spur changes to environmental law
California’s main environmental protection law is slated for reform in the name of affordable housing. With the median home price in California now over $500,000, developers and real estate agents say the best remedy is to build more homes fast. But the California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1970 as a more stringent supplement to…
So far, Oregon land-use measure is more bark than bite
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “How dense can we be?“ Thanks to a set of strict, generation-old land-use laws, Oregon has escaped much of the scattered “exurban” development common in other Western states. But sprawl fighters feared the worst last November, when voters passed a ballot measure that could…
How dense can we be?
Living the good life in the ‘exurbs’ is draining our tax coffers and devouring the West’s open spaces, but large-lot development continues to explode
Beyond the exurban dream
Across the West, people are buying up small (and sometimes not so small) pieces of the countryside, and transforming them with roads, cars and pets into sprawling replicas of the places they just left. It’s an all-too-familiar story, and it has become all too easy to ignore. Another alfalfa field converted into a mall? So…
Dear friends
HEADING WEST The High Country News board of directors joined the staff in Paonia in May for the spring business meeting. Some of the more lively — and frank — discussion came when small groups of board and staff members took turns riffing on what they think of the paper, and how it needs to…
For salmon, a crucial moment of decision
Ruling could set in motion dramatic changes on Northwest rivers
Idaho gets smart about water
Science helps state juggle water rights during dry times
I say: Good riddance to bad billboards
For four years in the 1980s, I lived in Vermont, and then left it for the West after tiring of the state’s busybody politics. But I certainly admired one aspect of life in the bucolic yet politically correct Green Mountain State: No billboards. Back in 1968, the Vermont Legislature passed a law banning billboards. Since…
Uranium miners go back underground
With prices high and support from the president, the yellowcake rush is on
Navajos put more than 17 million acres off-limits
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Uranium miners go back underground.” From 1947 until 1970, thousands of Navajos worked underground on and off the reservation, mining uranium for use in nuclear weapons and power plants. As a result, hundreds have been diagnosed with…
The brief but wonderful return of Cathedral in the Desert
It looked almost exactly like Phil Hyde’s photograph taken in 1964, a year after Glen Canyon Dam began backing up the Colorado River in a process that would take seven years. Hyde’s photo revealed a stunning waterfall in a giant amphitheater with a narrow, almost slot-like opening at the top, perfectly named “Cathedral in the…
Heard around the West
IDAHO Travis Steele, a 31-year-old college student, was a pizza-delivery man in Lewiston, Idaho, until someone’s complaint to his boss cost him his job. Steele’s offense? His bumper sticker read, “Darwin loves you,” a play on the slogan, “Jesus loves you.” In a letter to the Lewiston Tribune, Steele said he was given a “choice”…
The best of both worlds
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “How dense can we be?” George Abramajtis is a man of extremes. He grew up at sea level in the New York borough of Queens, and even after he got married, the view from his bedroom window was of a brick wall six feet…
The end of exurbia: An interview with James Howard Kunstler
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “How dense can we be?“ James Howard Kunstler has made a reputation for himself as a critic of America’s auto-dependent suburbs, first with his 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere, and then his 1996 book, Home From Nowhere. Now, he is taking aim at…