Dear HCN, It was with sadness that I read of our loss of Ruth Hutchins, one of the noblest of fighters for a sane Colorado water policy. My first contact with Ruth was a Sunday telephone call to me in my then capacity as a Colorado River Water Conservation District director. She talked at such […]
A tough fighter
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
The information dirt road
Instead of booms and busts brought on by fluctuating demand for everything from gold to coal, rural areas believed that the information age would bring economic stability as educated information workers moved to small communities. No longer would small towns be turned into ghost towns when the ore gave out or commodity prices plunged. So […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Here’s looking at tourism
Tourism is as hotly debated in the West as clearcutting. Some see it as salvation for overworked landscapes and faltering economies; others see it as a more vicious form of extraction than mining and logging. All those perspectives as well as a few from the center will be at the “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Bringing back the small family farm
In their mid-40s and newly married, Bob and Bonnie Gregson dropped out and bought a 13-acre farm near Seattle, Wash. in 1988. When the couple left their corporate jobs and city lives, they dreamed of making a “reasonable, community-oriented, non-exploitive, earth-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing living.” They managed to succeed, after some trial and error, as […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
The burning barrel
The Burning Barrel is worth watching for its prairie shots and for the home movies of filmmaker Tim Schwab’s childhood that will make you nostalgic even though it’s not your childhood. An old oil drum that was used to burn his family’s garbage is the metaphor for wastefulness that narrator Schwab (he made the film […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Tribal force
Tribal Force, a new comic book created by two 28-year-old artists from Arizona, begins in the year 2006 with the usual mega-battle: Native superheroes must stop the U.S. government from bombing the Indians and confiscating their resource-rich reservation land. But the story quickly becomes both more human and contemporary. Basho Yazza, one of the comic […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Desert Conference
An annual rite of spring, the 19th Desert Conference at Oregon’s Malheur Field Station, April 24-27, attracts people from around the country for field trips, networking, a desert rat poetry festival and lots of informative talks. Topics will cover the making of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, cows and their intrusions into streams and the […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cherish and Renew: Restoring Western Ecosystems and Communities
To Cherish and Renew: Restoring Western Ecosystems and Communities is the theme of the second annual Wallace Stegner Center symposium, in Salt Lake City, April 17-19. Revitalizing damaged natural resources and local economies will be the focus of discussion sessions hosted by writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, sustainable agriculture expert Wes Jackson, Ted Strong […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Burning for a buck
It sounds like an easy way to make a few dollars: Gather up coils of old industrial-gauge wire, pile it in the desert, douse it with diesel and burn off the rubber and lead insulation. The raw copper left behind brings 80 cents to a dollar per pound. The trouble is, it’s illegal and a […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cars kill trees
Scientists in California say the evidence is compelling: Air pollution from the fast-growing San Joaquin Valley is responsible for killing thousands of trees in the nearby Sierra Nevadas. The chief culprit is ozone, a pollutant created when exhaust from power plants or cars mixes with hydrocarbons in the presence of sunlight, say federal researchers and […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
BLM ditches law-enforcement rules
With hundreds of millions of acres of federal land sprawled across a sparsely populated West, Bureau of Land Management rangers often legally fill in for state and county law officers. But last fall, when the BLM published “plain English” regulations that detailed the agency’s existing authority over gun use, drunken driving and other matters, some […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Frogs sport too many legs
Eight-legged frogs give biologists the willies. They say the deformed amphibians – like canaries in a mine – indicate environmental problems that could affect the two-legged as well. So when extra-legged Pacific tree frogs surfaced in three westside Oregon communities last summer, researchers took notice. No one knew what to make of the phenomenon until […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
A Utah vendetta
When some members of the Utah Legislature get mad, they try to get even. A rural Utah lawmaker, furious at actor Robert Redford’s support of the state’s new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, introduced a resolution recently to turn Redford’s Sundance resort into a wilderness. “Mr. Redford has made a tremendous amount of money off what […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cows aren’t “wild and scenic’
For the second time in six months, a federal judge has slammed grazing on public lands. Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Ancer Haggerty ruled that grazing was a “non-point source” of pollution, forcing Oregon cattlemen to comply with the federal Clean Water Act (HCN, 10/28/96). Now, he’s ordered cattle off parts of southeastern Oregon’s […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Don’t hail this new lord
Dear HCN, When Jon Christensen writes about the new lord of the West who will replace the old lords of extraction (HCN, 12/23/96), it is clear what the name of this new lord is: Midas! Under the magic touch of the recreation industry, public lands will turn to gold. Nature as ATV commercials, ecosystems as […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Money: the real political organizer
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now about this soft money business. As a descriptive term, “soft money” isn’t. It’s vague, if not downright misleading, considering that “soft money” is no softer than any other money. So let’s approach the subject from another perspective, not as an abstract “issue,” but as a case study of a real, living, […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cars and wilderness collide on a rim
Separating Oregon and Idaho, Hells Canyon is so vast between rim and river it forms two distinct climates. The Snake River that shaped it is gathered from 30 rivers crossing five states; its gorge is the deepest cut by a river in North America. Standing on the wind-carved Oregon side of Hells Canyon eye-to-eye with […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Judge tells feds to list and protect
In a slap at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal judge ordered the agency March 14 to list four species as endangered and to set aside the most important habitat for them and two others already listed. District Judge Roger Strand chided the service for having repeatedly missed congressionally imposed deadlines under the […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
ESA ruling: More sound than fury
Lawyers, get ready: People can use the Endangered Species Act to sue the federal government for protecting species too much, not just too little, ruled the U.S. Supreme Court March 19. Now, ranchers, farmers and developers may be encouraged to do what environmentalists have been doing for two decades – demand their day in court. […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Dear Friends
Plaudits for the Poppers Frank and Deborah Popper are the mom-and-pop Darth Vaders of the Great Plains. The scholars from New Jersey coined “Buffalo Commons” to describe the turn they want the depopulated region to take. Harsh feelings against the Rutgers University-based pair will not be softened by the American Geographical Society, which recently awarded […]