Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. Private conservation efforts in places such as the Elk River Valley may be able to preserve the look of the land. But if ranchers become tenants on property owned by wealthy people from somewhere else, what happens to the culture? “There’s […]
Rancher’s new cash crop will be scenery
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
John Fetcher
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Saving the ranch. John Fetcher started his working life as an engineer in Philadelphia before buying a ranch with his brother in the Elk River Valley in 1949. In the 1950s he and three partners began developing the Steamboat Ski Area, which they sold […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Saving the ranch
Can private conservation stave off ski-town sprawl?
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Preserving open spaces
PRESERVING OPEN SPACES Colorado Open Lands works to preserve large stretches of undeveloped land across the state. So it’s only fitting that the nonprofit group’s quarterly newsletter, which includes photos and descriptions of recently completed projects, is laid out on big, airy pages. The group’s projects, detailed in past issues of Landscape, include acquisition of […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Yearning for balance
YEARNING FOR BALANCE Americans find simplicity complicated. According to a recent survey conducted for the Merck Family Fund, a foundation that promotes environmental sustainability, the majority of people questioned said they want to simplify their lives, spend more time with loved ones and consume less. But they have found it’s easier said than done. Although […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The Snake runs through it
THE SNAKE RUNS THROUGH IT Lewiston and Idaho Falls stand like bookends at either end of the Snake River’s path through Idaho. Those two ends will converge Nov. 28-29 in Boise, Idaho, at Snake: the River Between Us, a conference about the future of Idaho’s largest river. The meeting grows out of a series of […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Helping hand isn’t
Helping hand isn’t The best way to help wildlife live through a bitter winter is to leave them alone, says the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Free food can accustom deer and elk to human hand-outs and erode instincts that protect the animals, says the group. If the ration suddenly disappears, the animals may descend […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Untangling Washington
UNTANGLING WASHINGTON When the 1994 Congress cut funding for its research groups, the Environmental and Energy Study Conference didn’t die, it reorganized as the for-profit Congressional Green Sheets. As a part of Congress, the conference had provided information about House and Senate actions on environmental issues. With the same staff and its new name, Green […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Defending the desert
Defending the desert In the minds of far too many people, says former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, the Southwest’s public lands are a wasteland. “Indestructible because there is nothing to destroy; unworthy of protection.” Now, a new handbook by the Environmental Defense Fund provides activists and educators with the tools to tackle this myth. Defending […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Environmental Activism 101
Environmental Activism 101 The University of Montana will train activists as well as scholars during a new 16-week joint venture with the federally funded Green Corps. Called the Environmental Organizing Semester, it will teach 26 college juniors and seniors from around the country how to run petition drives, investigate environmental abuses, write press releases and, […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Writers for Utah wilderness
We are not, of course, in dire need of roads, transmission towers, dams, reservoirs, and gas pipelines. We are in dire need of courtesy. We are in dire need of a broadly intelligent conversation about human fate. We are in need of a thorough and piercing review of our plan for economic development, a plan […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Rural reality check
RURAL REALITY CHECK Four years ago, economist Ray Rasker began touring towns in the Greater Yellowstone region with a slideshow. His message: New growth in local economies comes mostly from high tech and service industries, not resource extraction like mining or grazing. Rasker, with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont., says, “Most people told me, […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The butterfly and the golf course; and the widow’s story
The butterfly and the golf course The Allegation: In a cover story titled “The Butterfly Problem,” in the January 1992 issue of The Atlantic, the authors portrayed an Oregon developer whose lifelong dream of carving fairways on a section of the Oregon coast was snuffed out in the morass of Endangered Species Act protection of […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Guy Pence leaves Nevada
The Forest Service has ordered Guy Pence off of the front lines in Nevada. The district ranger in Carson City has been the target of two bombings this year (HCN, 10/30/95). The agency is reassigning him to a staff position at the regional office in Boise, Idaho, out of concern for his personal safety and […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Clinton says: Stop logging
President Clinton says he’s distressed because the salvage rider he signed in July opened up the wrong ancient forests to logging. Faced with growing civil disobedience in the Northwest, the president said last month that he wants Congress to change the law. As interpreted by a federal judge, part of the salvage law mandated the […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…
Note: this article appears in the print edition as a sidebar to the news story titled “Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes.” The continuing question of where to bury nuclear waste has high stakes for the West. Federal officials have focused on permanent burial of the waste in two locations: Yucca Mountain, Nev., for commercial […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Idaho’s new crop: nuclear hot potatoes
Just before dawn on Oct. 24, police officers from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe in Fort Hall, Idaho, parked a patrol car across railroad tracks at the border of the reservation. Then they waited. Hours later, the engineer of a train hauling six casks of radioactive nuclear waste from Navy ships spotted the car and slowed to […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The anecdotal war on endangered species is running out of steam
Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth stepped up to the podium at the Wise Use Leadership Conference in Reno, Nev., this summer and charged the Endangered Species Act with a series of assaults: Californians lost homes to the 1993 fire because they were not allowed to clear weeds where endangered kangaroo rats live. Snails smaller than a […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Dear Friends
A near visitor He was probably looking for the High Country News office. Where else would a bear go in Paonia? But it got distracted by its stomach and began lunching on discarded produce at neighboring Don’s Market on Oct. 14. The bear temporarily eluded the town’s entire police and public works departments – all […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Sinclair Lewis’ George Babbitt would be at home in this Congress
When I read recently that a couple of Republican congressmen were still fighting an impending ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), I was overtaken by a literary obsession: I had to re-read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Let me explain. About a year ago, while still gainfully employed, I wrote a column about Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who […]