Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. After spending nearly two years in the early 1990s scouting Washington’s Willapa Bay for entrepreneurs with plausible ideas for sustainable businesses, Alana Probst of Ecotrust found more than a dozen. But few local financial institutions were willing to make high-risk loans, and the chances […]
A Chicago bank will try to invigorate Willapa Bay
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
An optimistic man
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Spencer Beebe is the founder of the nonprofit Ecotrust, based in Portland, Oregon. Spencer Beebe: “To think that we can destroy the planet is a kind of backhanded pride. It reflects an inflated sense of our own importance and a contempt for the power […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Defender of fish
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Les Clark has fished the lower Columbia and Willapa Bay for 52 years. He is a third-generation gillnetter and his sons are the fourth. Les Clark: “When we first moved here, paper mills dumped everything in the Columbia River. It finally got so bad […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
A newsman’s overview of Willapa
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For five years editor Matt Winters has followed the efforts of the nonprofit Willapa Alliance for the Chinook Observer, based in Long Beach, Wash. Matt Winters: “Economic development is long-term and hard to nail down sometimes. Groups like the Willapa Alliance can work for […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
A 1,000-year plan for Willapa Bay
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Alana Probst works for the nonprofit Ecotrust and looks for ways a community can create sustainable businesses. Alana Probst: “When I worked in Eugene, Ore., in the early ’80s, I learned the hard way that recruiting industry can be a nightmare. The whole city […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Working the Watershed
Washington’s Willapa Alliance melds science, economic development and plenty of time to plot the restoration of a battered coastal ecosystem
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Let ranches equal water
Dear HCN, I want to offer what I hope people will perceive to be a constructive alternative to the controversial Animas-La Plata dam project. The solution is simple: Purchase ranches in southwest Colorado and give them to the two Ute tribes and their members (HCN, 11/11/96). Most ranches come with significant, high-priority water rights. The […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
We should be making public lands whole
Dear HCN, I’m fed up with members of Congress who claim that the government doesn’t have the money to do right by our national lands. Steve Stuebner’s story on the threatened subdivision inside Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area is a prime example of how our elected leaders are letting us down (HCN, 12/9/96). Each year […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Condos, in any case
Dear HCN, The report by Steve Stuebner on subdivisions in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho (HCN, 12/9/96) included one remark that requires some commentary. Stuebner said reducing cattle grazing along streams to protect salmon habitat may result in the subdivision of private ranchland, and condos are worse than cows – aren’t they? I […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Let’s stop blaming
Dear HCN, I read with interest Sam Hitt’s “Green Hate” opinion (HCN, 2/3/97) regarding New Mexico forests. Until he, the environmental special interests who invoke his name, the timber interests and the poor families burning nine cords of wood per year stop pointing fingers at each other, we’re doomed to this seemingly unsolvable war. As […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
They’re off the team
Dear HCN, Someone’s getting some wires crossed about the Teaming With Wildlife proposal. One letter writer (HCN, 1/20/97) interpreted your article to find opposition only from the far left and the wacky right, while claiming off-highway vehicle producers supported it. As far as we know, none of the off-highway vehicle manufacturers has taken a position […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
It was too many Republicans
Dear HCN, Columnist Ellen Miller posits that U.S. Senate candidate Tom Strickland lost the support of western Colorado because he supported Clinton’s recent declaration of a new national monument for Utah and consequently lost the race to Wayne Allard (HCN, 11/25/96). Her reasoning is wrong. Strickland lost simply because there were 105,000 more registered Republicans […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Tarnished trophies
Safari hunters are bringing home exotic and endangered loot through a loophole in the Endangered Species Act, says a report by the Washington, D.C., group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Worse yet, PEER says, agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are greasing the process rather than policing it. By law, no permit can […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Caretakers wanted
Taking care of other people’s property for a living is taking off, says Gary Dunn, publisher of Washington state’s eight-page newsletter, The Caretaker Gazette. The bimonthly newsletter, first printed in 1983, lists some 90 caretaking opportunities in the United States and nine foreign counties. Interest is equal on either side of the equation, Dunn says: […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Wanted alive
Bewildered by declining numbers of boreal toads, the Colorado Division of Wildlife is hoping the “help wanteds’ will yield some clues. The agency is displaying colorful posters at trailheads and outdoor equipment stores, describing the small toads and asking for the public’s help in finding them. Since the boreal toad is uniquely adapted to the […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Severed at the hip
Western lore often portrays rural communities adjacent to public lands as joined at the hip with the federal government. Many people assume that if federal land managers reduce logging or curtail mining on public land, the tax base of the neighboring communities will plummet. Not true, says a new report by the Wilderness Society. After […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Big sky or big sprawl?
Montana, the state that rejected speed limits, is heading toward a lot more traffic. According to a recent report, the number of miles traveled by car in Montana grew twice as fast as population from 1970 to 1990 and is projected to double again by 2015. With 1.7 cars per licensed driver, Montana residents already […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
No more cheap thrills
How much should we pay to play in the great outdoors? More than we do now, say government auditors. A report by the federal General Accounting Office finds that the Forest Service loses millions of dollars each year by not charging enough to private and commercial recreationists. Investigators say the outdated permit fees charged to […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Pictures and politics`
From the stale world of coffee-table books, Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau offers a jolt of caffeine. The quality of the reproductions is top-notch and the text is worth reading, though this is hardly surprising given photographer Jack Dykinga and writer Charles Bowden, both of Tucson. Their subject is the slickrock country of southern […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Is Hanford back in the bomb business?
With the Cold War over and plutonium production halted at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, the federal facility seemed destined only for intensive and expensive cleanup (HCN, 1/22/96). No longer. Outgoing Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary has announced that Hanford’s research nuclear reactor, named the Fast Flux Test Facility, will remain on standby for […]