For more than a decade, biologist Brian Woodbridge watched hundreds of Swainson’s hawks raise their young in the fields of Butte Valley in northern California. Each fall, the birds headed south, but Woodbridge spotted a strange pattern. “I noticed that some years a lot more adults returned from migration than others,” he says. “That really […]
Crossing borders to save hawks
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
The Wayward West
When membership and funds drop, most nonprofits pinch, prune and make minor adjustments. Greenpeace USA crashed. In early August, the organization announced it would close each of its 10 regional offices, lay off over 300 employees, end its neighborhood canvass and concentrate only on its climate change and logging campaigns. Employees who work on less […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Floods hammer Southwest
A moving wall of water following a severe thunderstorm Aug. 10 forced residents and tourists in a Havasupai Indian village outside Grand Canyon National Park to evacuate. Two days later, thunderstorms southeast of Page, Ariz., near Glen Canyon Dam, pushed a flash flood down a slot canyon, where it drowned 11 hikers. “It was chocolate […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Injunction shakes forests
Federal judges sided with environmentalists in July, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service has failed to make good on its promise to protect endangered species in Southwestern forests and streamside areas. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a six-week ban on over 20 timber sales and barred grazing on 11 Southwestern […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
An Idaho daily breaches the Northwest’s silence over tearing down dams
The Idaho Statesman likes to think its editorials are felt far beyond the modestly populated Boise metropolitan area in southwestern Idaho where the paper is headquartered. We were never sure just how far, however, until recently. That’s when the six members of the editorial board, which includes the publisher, top editors and a community representative, […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Comment on the Idaho Statesman’s editorial series
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to an essay, “An Idaho daily breaches the Northwest’s silence over tearing down dams.” The Idaho Statesman’s July editorial series on saving salmon signals that this long-unresolved issue in Pacific Northwest politics has become critical. The Statesman’s support for a radical […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Heard around the West
Now people all over the country, if not the world, refer to it as the “sunscreen speech”: “Wear sunscreen” it begins. … “Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth … Do one thing every day that scares you … Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly … Get to […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Prairie dogs tunnel their way to a military stalemate
HELENA, Mont. – The Montana Army National Guard has stood ready when called upon to fight any foe. Then it met the prairie dog. The rodents, known for their intricate tunneling, have expanded their stronghold here at Fort Harrison, threatening underground power lines and communications systems. The guard would like to take action, but it’s […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
A nuclear dump proposal rouses Utah
Over the past two decades, Steve Erickson has spent many days in his aged truck visiting the scattered ranches and dry valleys of Utah’s West Desert. “People have an image of this area as a dried-up lake bed,” says the peace activist, but to him, “it’s a beautiful place.” Erickson has fought dozens of schemes […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
One county’s misgivings over not-so-ordinary housing
Taos County, N.M. – Architect and developer Michael Reynolds doesn’t usually lock the gate to his property west of Taos, but ever since county officials drove out to inspect his work site, he’s been viewing outsiders with a wary eye. Recently a county code enforcement officer had red-tagged several houses under construction, and just after […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Greens and cowboys gang up on a mine
TUCSON, Ariz. – Looking south, the Santa Rita Mountains rise dreamlike from the desert floor, a hazy string of stony monoliths peppered with stands of oak and pine. Only a 30-minute drive from Tucson city limits, the range is typically thick with hikers, birders and hunters seeking refuge from traffic, noise and heat. But from […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Utah’s bumbling obscures a valid complaint
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now that government has become show business, one must classify political activities not according to ideology, party or faction but by genre. Is the senator (president, governor, whatever) wearing the smiling comedy face today, or the gloomier mask of the drama? Sometimes, though, there’s little doubt, as is the case with the […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Tribe hopes to dam its way to jobs
For decades, the Uinta Mountains have been seen as a watering can for swelling suburbs and thirsty croplands in northern Utah. Under the Central Utah Project (CUP), a massive, 40-year effort to capture Utah’s share of Colorado River Basin water, snowmelt from the Uintas has been dammed, plumbed and piped to cities along the Wasatch […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
An Indian casino would sit on ancient graves
On Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, some residents want to make money on the ruins of an ancestral village – literally. A year ago, the tribal council agreed to construct a new gambling casino near a freeway exit 10 miles south of Tucson. But there’s a hitch: The site, Punta de Agua, is thought to contain […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
What’s underneath the Staircase?
With a pen stroke last year, President Clinton put to rest a decades-old conflict between extraction and conservation. He established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the threat of coal and oil development on southern Utah’s remote Kaiparowits Plateau blew away. So most people thought. But on June 6, Conoco Inc., the largest subsidiary of […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
BLM gives trespassing farmers a break
Twin Falls, Idaho – When his boss here at the Bureau of Land Management made a personal business deal with a farmer cited for plowing up public land, Mike Austin, 52, thought he was doing the right thing by reporting a conflict of interest. Now he says he’s being punished for it. Austin, a realty […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Dear friends
Corrections Richard Millet, executive vice president of Denver operations at Woodward-Clyde, tells us that Robert (not Bill) Moran was employed as a part-time geochemist at his company, so he was not head geologist, as reported by HCN staffer Heather Abel in her lead story about “mining’s corporate nomads’ June 23. He also says that the […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
RICHLAND, Wash. – Casey Ruud and John Brodeur have always stood out in Hanford’s take-no-risks nuclear culture. The safety auditor and the geophysicist made powerful enemies when they uncovered major safety problems a decade ago at the nation’s largest plutonium bomb factory, located deep in rural southeastern Washington. Then in 1994, at the prodding of […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Don’t blame women
Northwest Environment Watch in Seattle, Wash., isn’t very big at 1,400 members and five staffers, but its reach is ambitious. In less than four years it has published five reports, including The Car in the City, Stuff, and the latest and perhaps most provocative, Misplaced Blame: The Real Roots of Population Growth, by Alan Durning, […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
5.7, 5.7, 5.7 …
The rallying cry “5.7 million acres’ has become well known in Utah as the amount of wilderness pushed by a coalition of environmental groups. But because the proposal for wilderness preservation on Bureau of Land Management land was created 10 years ago, says Kevin Walker, a staffer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a fresh […]