Being aggressively into kick-boxing and martial arts, of course I couldn’t resist responding to letter writer C.S. Heller’s taunt about my youth and his convenient implication that I am naive when I insist that the American bison be again allowed their inherent, native and ancient right to be a free-roaming, wild species (HCN, 10/27/97). Age […]
We have no elders, we have no leaders
Posted inFebruary 2, 1998: Looking at dams in a new way
Use this book to get under the West’s skin
There is nothing historian Patricia Nelson Limerick dislikes more than the word frontier when used to describe the “advance of civilization” across the arid, lightly populated 19th century American West. She built her early career debunking the notion that the West was once an empty land settled by brave white men bearing democracy. Nevertheless, the […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 1998: Looking at dams in a new way
Looking at dams in a new way
We float rivers for fun. For adventure. For discovery. We do it for the magic around the bend. The smooth hiss of water and stone. A canyon wren concerto. The slap of a beaver’s tail. The solitary stare of a bighorn sheep. Last spring, I stumbled across something unusual on the Colorado River in the […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
We’re cheap
Dear HCN, As a frequent user of trout streams on public lands, I have been amazed at the reluctance of some of my fellow fishermen to pay user fees. People who use $400 fly rods with $200 reels holding $45 lines, whose $150 vests and $100 boots and $200 waders ride in $20,000 cars, will […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Recreationists are smarter than cows
Dear HCN, Our backyards make up the majority of the nation’s public lands, and yet we Westerners don’t know how to talk about the future of those lands. That was clearly shown by two essays on recreation user fees in the Oct. 13, 1997, High Country News. Terry Anderson and Steve Hinchman both assumed that […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Audubon should have thought it over
Dear HCN, It is more than a little ironic that the arguments of a group – the Audubon Society – trying to enforce the letter of the Endangered Species Act yielded a result contrary to the one that they had hoped for. Their intention was to extend coverage of the act to all wolves, including […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Those ideas aren’t wacky
Dear HCN, As one of the founders of King County Property Rights Alliance (King County surrounds Seattle), I take exception to Ken Toole’s essay on the Far Right and its wacky ideas (HCN, 12/8/97). I endorse the bulk of those “wacky” ideas, even though I haven’t been to church, fundamentalist or otherwise, for a good […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
The landscapes of our dreams
It’s an awful job, but somebody has to do it – register an afterthought to Kathie Durbin’s story on the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, “Cows depart, but can antelope recover?” (HCN, 11/24/97). I have no problem accepting as fact that livestock grazing wrecked the place, that cows broke the cryptogamic crust, that Eurasian cheatgrass […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
State fights nuclear waste shipments
In a measure environmental groups say will put 50 million Americans at risk of radiation exposure, Congress recently authorized storage of 50,000 tons of nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site. Opponent Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., dubbed the bill “Mobile Chernobyl,” because it funds the transportation of spent nuclear fuel rods from power plants in […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Wolf wars enter next round
As the fallout settles from federal Judge William Downes’ decision ordering that nearly 200 introduced wolves be removed from Yellowstone and Idaho, members of the environmental community who have been at each other’s throats are putting aside their differences and preparing to appeal the decision (HCN, 12/22/97: Judge says wolf reintroduction was illegal). Immediately following […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
The Wayward West
Tension over logging the Taylor Ranch in southern Colorado continues. Costilla County sheriff’s deputies and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation haven’t found who sabotaged seven electrical power poles on the property last month. Ranch manager Vic White says someone with a saw severed three poles and cut the others three-quarters through. White calls the action […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A road to nowhere?
For more than two decades, the Utah Department of Transportation has planned to widen the two-lane road that winds through narrow Provo Canyon. Best known as the site of Sundance, a resort founded by actor Robert Redford, the canyon is one of the most spectacular in the Wasatch Mountains. One-third of the “road-improvement” project is […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Protester starts her sentence
On Jan. 5, a former teacher began serving a 30-day sentence for refusing to part from a 400-year-old Engelmann spruce she was trying to protect from loggers. Joni Clark’s sentence of 30 days is the stiffest penalty yet for a tree-sitter in Colorado. She was found guilty of violating the Forest Service’s Special Closure Order […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams
What is New Mexico’s hardrock mining reclamation law? Why was BHP Copper Co. allowed to dump untreated tailings in Papua, New Guinea’s Ok Tedi River, destroying local agriculture and the communities dependent on it? How harmful is chromium to a stream? You can find the answers in Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams, the Mineral Policy Center’s […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
A ‘liberal’ court gets some breathing room
Western conservatives in the U.S. Senate tried to add language to a spending bill last fall to neutralize an old nemesis – the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the senators, facing heavy opposition in the House of Representatives, had to compromise: a commission will review the appeals court system and the San Francisco-based […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Haggling over the Grand Staircase-Escalante
Conoco has turned its back on an oil well in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In December, Conoco engineers “packed up their oil rig and they are out of there,” says Bureau of Land Management spokesman Don Banks. “The hole has been capped without a blade of monument grass or a dollar of taxpayer green […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Dear friends
Reading into 1998 The bad thing about taking a break, which we accomplished by skipping the Jan. 5 issue, is coming back to a towering stack of accumulated papers from Western cities and small towns, as well as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Weekly. As we troll for story leads, […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Heard Around the West
Ski-hats off to 33-year-old Karen Hartley, the stranded Utah skier who kept warm for 18 hours on Christmas Eve by dancing in the dark and singing “old disco songs, show tunes, popular and current stuff, Christmas tunes and even camp songs,” reports AP. She never panicked; she kept her head, and when a helicopter arrived […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
…but let’s not forget about the past
Dear HCN, In your Dec. 22, 1997, issue, I was quoted as saying, “What it might take is for some people to die before people start sitting up and saying, ‘Take that pollution out of rivers.’ “ I didn’t mean by that there will have to be violent confrontations, or even that people will immediately […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Give the mining industry a second chance…
Dear HCN, As a thrice-starved-out Montanan, I have a different take on mining than writer Heather Abel in your Dec. 22, 1997, issue. There are aspects of mining and its politics that High Country News should not have glossed over. A prime example is the so-called Clean Water Initiative, I-122. It failed in the 1996 […]