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 […]
Summer Wilderness Conference
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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. […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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, […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
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 […]