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 […]
‘Green’ professor cleared in Wyoming
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 […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Where the saguaros stop
WHERE THE SAGUAROS STOP We know of several copies of the seminal reference book – Biotic Communities, Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico – that have worn out, riding around for years on the dashboards of pickup trucks. The Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum in Arizona, which published the book in 1982, sold out its stock […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Tribes settle for new fishing sites
Half a century after their fishing grounds were flooded by a federal dam, four Northwest Indian tribes will be compensated with replacement sites along the Columbia River. On June 23, the Interior Department and Army Corps of Engineers agreed to spend about $57 million to create access to 31 new fishing areas in Oregon and […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Washington voters win vote on takings bill
Washington residents will decide at the November polls whether to scrap their state’s new takings law – considered the most extreme take on the subject to date. Volunteers fighting the law, known as Initiative 164, gathered more than 230,000 signatures before the July deadline. That’s more than double the amount needed to force a referendum, […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Denver vs. the West
Six months after its grand opening, pricey Denver International Airport continues to shake up air travel around the West (HCN, 1/23/95). First, the cost of building and doing business at the mega-airport helped persuade Continental Airlines to all but abandon the Rocky Mountains. Now, blaming the same unprofitable dynamics, the commuter airline, GP Express, is […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Sign of the times
Jordanelle, Utah’s newest state park, opened in early July with a new mountain reservoir and a good deal of controversy. A park sign that was supposed to educate visitors about the damage cattle can cause in streamside vegetation included pictures of a cow standing next to a damaged stream and a cowpie. The text read: […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Salvage logging reborn
Despite a previous veto, President Clinton has signed a compromise bill that calls for accelerated logging on national forests. The president justified the action to angry environmentalists by claiming that his administration now has Republican backing to implement salvage logging that is “consistent with the spirit and intent of our forest plans and all existing […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
No more water for Aspen – for now
Aspen Ski Co. lost a bid for expansion when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in June that the company could not drain a creek to make more artificial snow for its Snowmass Resort. The court agreed with the Aspen Wilderness Workshop and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund that the Colorado Water Conservation Board had […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Human smolts reach Washington
Five mighty strange-looking salmon ended their 450-mile downstream migration at Washington’s Lower Granite Dam July 25. In fact, they weren’t salmon at all but an unusual swim team that started its expedition 25 days earlier at Idaho’s Redfish Lake. Four men and one woman took turns in the water, following the outward migration route of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
My kingdom is a horse
It was a gold mountain. The gray lodgepoles of the corral sorted it into altitudes: hooves and pasterns, the flaring column of muscle and bone above the knee, the glossy wheatfield of chest, and under a mane of cloud, the great, soft planetary eye. At four, I learned a trick. I would scoop double-handfuls of […]