Like many Americans, Evelyn and Don Irvine enjoy camping out on public land. Evening after evening after evening, they sit by their small trailer on the banks of the Green River in Utah, watching the water and rafters flow by. Thus far, they’ve been camped on the Green for 20 years, ever since a doctor […]
Heard around the West
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Tom Bell: outraged by the outrageous
If I were a consultant to the West’s energy and mineral companies and ranchers, and to their politicians and bureaucrats, I would give them one piece of advice: “Don’t get crosswise with Tom Bell. Early on in your ‘process’ tell Tom your plans. If he reacts with a strong no, change them. It will save […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN’s tough underbelly
The first intern landed on the paper’s doorstep sometime in the mid-70s, starting a train of 117 short-timers now scattered throughout the West and beyond. The intern program came with the paper from Lander – literally. It was an intern who drove the truck from Wyoming and helped haul boxes into the cramped Paonia office. […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN interns: city kids meet gritty rural life
As word filters in from former HCN interns, I’m beginning to understand my place in a long and distinguished line of grunt laborers. I see now that I’m riding a wave’s crest, benefiting from past intern suffering. Compared to bygone days, my time is a cakewalk. One change is that the town of 1,400 is […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
The little paper that could
Like one of those gravity-defying trees that grows horizontally out of a rocky mountainside, High Country News has found its niche. Its beat is 10 Western states – the 1 million square miles where so many of the nation’s wild things live on mostly public lands. How do you cover this world from a small, […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Is Altamont historic, too?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, HCN’s founder fights his last fight, yet again. “We’re part of history, too,” says Cathy Purves, Altamont environmental consultant in Lander. Making it clear that she’s not speaking for the company, she continues, “I think it’s presumptuous of us to say that history stops […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
HCN’s founder fights his last fight, yet again
“This is my last big fight,” says Tom Bell. The founder of High Country News, spare and energetic at 71, hasn’t lost the fiery voice that boomed out of the little town of Lander, Wyo., in the early 1970s. During four years of running HCN, Bell took on not just ranchers for shooting eagles and […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Festering Idaho mine to be cleaned; others remain
SALMON, Idaho – Four mining companies have agreed to pay the $50 million cost of cleaning up toxic runoff from a defunct copper and cobalt mine. The complex deal between the companies, three federal agencies and the state of Idaho, addresses acid runoff at the Blackbird Mine, about 21 miles west of here. Since the […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
A Western senator hears from his constituents
Six months ago, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s two-year effort to rewrite grazing regulations for public lands seemed in full retreat. Enthusiasm for the watered-down Rangeland Reform package had ebbed to an all-time low among environmentalists. And Western Republicans, emboldened by the 1994 elections, easily wrested from Babbitt a six-month delay on its implementation so that […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
‘Green’ professor cleared in Wyoming
In a decision that rankled officials of Wyoming’s extractive industries, the University of Wyoming has cleared one of its law professors of allegations that his work with environmental groups amounted to misuse of university facilities. University president Terry Roark said that Mark Squillace’s work with Friends of the Bow, the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Dear friends
Thank you, Ray Ring To avoid a fight, we waited on this column until senior editor Ray Ring was out of the office. Not that Ray has been argumentative while here. Far from it. But he is a man who has never heard a compliment he liked. If we were writing this just for Ray, […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Population problem is implicit
Dear HCN, I was saddened to read recently that one of your supporters, Kathleene Parker, dropped her subscription (HCN, 5/29/95). I share Ms. Parker’s concern about the impact of a growing population on our bounded world, and I respect her desire to put her finite resources where she feels they will have the most impact. […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Don’t give up
Dear HCN, During the last 15 years of my 27 years as a fish and wildlife biologist, I came to realize that good range conservationists in the Bureau of Land Management can do more for our public lands than all other disciplines combined. For reader-clarity sake: A “good” range con is one who constantly and […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
New Mexico’s senator’s grazing bill is out of touch
Dear HCN, The controversy over livestock grazing on public lands is not merely a contest between ranchers and environmentalists. Any substantial changes in federal grazing policy affect us all. And that is why I’m afraid that our senior U.S. senator has misplaced his priorities in his Livestock Grazing Act (S. 852). I say this reluctantly […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Tilley was a Westerner
TILLEY WAS A WESTERNER In the United States, weather moves from west to east, while culture generally travels from east to west. But in the case of The New Yorker, culture moved with the weather. The New Yorker was created by a Westerner – Harold Ross, a Coloradan from Aspen, when Aspen was a mining […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
New prints on wolves
New prints on wolves It’s not the O.J. trial, but for environmentalists, wolf recovery in Idaho and Yellowstone Park warrants almost as much press. Now come the books. In Wolf Wars, Hank Fischer tells the sometimes compelling, other times snoozy, inside scoop on two decades of political maneuvering that led to the release of the […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
We don’t crack the whip
WE DON’T CRACK THE WHIP Global capitalism and not rugged individualism shaped the West from its start, writes William G. Robbins in Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West. Building on the work of historians William Cronon and Patricia Limerick, Robbins charts the loss of local economies across the West and the […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
A vanishing breed
A VANISHING BREED Roping the Wind: A Personal History of Cowboys and the Land is a eulogy on the life of the cowboy, written by Lyman Hafen, a fifth-generation Utahn and editor of St. George Magazine. Narrated in a down-to-earth style, the book takes a personal and nostalgic look at the cowboy’s vanishing legacy while […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Four-cornered falcon
FOUR-CORNERED FALCON In his book, The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene, Reg Saner ruminates on everything from the power of wind to the naming of plants and animals. As varied and thought-provoking as the terrain, Saner’s essays meander through familiar landscapes of the interior West, fusing details of the […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
The spoken word
THE SPOKEN WORD If you haven’t heard Page Stegner, the son of Wallace Stegner, read the long story, “Genesis,” from Wolf Willow, you are in for a wonderful three and one-half hours. (Or seven hours, if, like me, you listen twice.) The same is true of another father-son combination, as John Maclean reads Norman Maclean’s […]