Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. Excerpts from a free-ranging interview with two of the most effective critics of Denver International Airport. PAUL EARLE: We have to keep buying new file drawers, shifting them around to make room for more. We’ve got more […]
Plucky ‘Batman and Robin’ make an airport their case
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Ambition becomes a megamess
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. “To our despair, (megaprojects) often develop lives of their own, and their lives sometimes defy control by us mere mortals.” – An unnamed Exxon engineer, quoted in the Rand Corp. study, Understanding the Outcomes of Megaprojects When […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
The West sings the Denver airport blues
It was billed as a black-tie gala: Denver’s finest coming together to celebrate the grand opening of the city’s new international airport. Nearly 4,000 people were trying to breathe life into the cathedral-like terminal building, where banquet tables had been set on a granite floor meant for the footsteps of millions of air travelers. A […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Forest Service may finally evaluate grazing
As the Clinton administration backpedals in the nation’s capitol from grazing reforms, an environmental lawsuit is moving ahead in Montana. A federal judge will soon decide whether the Forest Service must do analyses for 150 allotments where ranchers run livestock on the Beaverhead National Forest. Last March, the National Wildlife Federation and its Montana affiliate […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Bidding war shakes up Idaho grazing leases
Jonathan Marvel, the feisty head of the Idaho Watersheds Project, kicked off a flurry of conflicting bids for Idaho state grazing leases in December. Marvel forked out $1,430 to prevail as the high bidder in three auctions involving a total of 1,320 acres of state land. But the largest sums were bid in auctions that […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Babbitt cedes grazing reform to Congress
Every time Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood at a podium in the West during the last two years to talk about grazing reform, it seemed he faced a sea of cowboy hats. Now, with his Rangeland Reform “94 program failing in a Republican Congress, the West’s 28,000 public-lands ranchers are riding taller in the political […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
White Mesa Utes beat back Superfund tailings
BLANDING, Utah – The small band of White Mesa Utes, who live on a reservation about 10 miles south of here, hadn’t scored any big victories since the 1920s, when the U.S. government recognized their need for a homeland. But the Utes won a big one in December, when Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbly decided […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Yellowstone bison guts pile up
On the day after Christmas, bison migrating downhill from Yellowstone National Park’s northern range once again met gunfire in Montana. Caught in a power struggle between the National Park Service, whose policy of “natural regulation” has allowed their numbers to grow to an estimated 4,300, and the livestock industry, which is worried about disease, more […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Feds targeted by louder thunder from below
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Met Johnson worried that no one would show up for the two-day Western Summit of conservative state legislators, county commissioners and public-land users he organized here in January. Johnson, the leader of the so-called “Cowboy Caucus” in the Utah House of Representatives, feared the “steam might have gone out of […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Developer paralyzes Jackson’s new plan
JACKSON, Wyo. – Jackson officials thought they were in the clear when they adopted the town’s new zoning master plan in November. They had spent an agonizing three years writing and revising the document. A small army of consultants and lawyers finally sanctioned it. Thousands of hours of public hearings had been logged. At the […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
So far, wolf reintroduction survives legal challenge
Wolves arrived in central Idaho and Yellowstone last week after evading enemies in courtrooms and legislatures around the region. The frenzy of last-minute legal maneuvering preceding their return has fragmented opinion on both sides of the issue and bewildered onlookers. Five months ago, to block the wolves’ return, the American Farm Bureau and the Mountain […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Imported wolves lope off into Idaho wilderness
Editor’s note: After being trapped, caged, tested for disease and analyzed by genotype by having blood and tissue taken, inoculated, ear-tagged, radio-collared and tranquilized, they were loaded up for a plane ride south. This was a trip more than a decade in the making – restoring wolves to the West. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, on […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Dear friends
A special issue Usually, 16 pages every other week is all it takes to report the news from our million-square-mile West, this being the sleepy region it is. But because we skipped an issue, and because writer Ray Ring has a lengthy report on Denver International Airport, and because of what we call the “wolf […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
Easy does it: A sport to make your blood run slow
Even a pudgy mammal like myself knows better than to hibernate all winter, but choosing a winter sport is tricky. Downhill skiing is out; standing at the top of a steep hill with slippery little boards strapped to my feet gives me the fantods. This spell-checker doesn’t know that word, but I do. Cross-country skiing […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
No development is justified in the Methow Valley
Dear HCN, Beauty has definitely not eluded the Beast, and this Beast does not turn out to be any Prince Charming … In the past I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated the journalism of HCN. The Nov. 28 article on the Methow Valley, however, was exceedingly optimistic. The idea of development based on compromise and […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
A close-up look at user fees
Dear HCN, Last summer my partner Lynn and I did some backpacking in Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies, a couple of months after Canada instituted their backcountry usage fee of $5 per person per day. After we got over the initial shock, and headed back into Radium Hot Springs to pull more cash […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
Especially expensive agents
For the fourth time in five years, the BLM’s law enforcement division has been blasted for shenanigans that were at best imprudent. An audit prepared by the Department of the Interior found that during 1991-92 the division’s 69 special agents misrepresented their case loads and misused their $27 million two-year budget. According to the report: […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
The education of a scientist
Edmund Wilson tells us he wrote his autobiography, Naturalist, to learn more fully “why I now think the way I do … and perhaps, to persuade.” The Harvard University professor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, can’t really convey what made him a consummate biologist who taught the world the significance of biodiversity. But he can […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
Delay again for R.S. 2477
In a surprise move, the Interior Department extended its comment period a third time on R.S. 2477, a law adopted in 1866 to spur colonizing of the West. R.S. 2477 granted a right-of-way to rural counties for the construction of highways on public lands (HCN, 3/21/94). When Congress repealed the law in 1976, pre-existing claims […]
Posted inDecember 26, 1994: Albuquerque learns it really is a desert town
Grim reading
A consortium of six scientific groups reports that the Eastside forests of Washington and Oregon are in perilous ecological shape. According to the scientists, who did their work at the request of seven U.S. representatives, the forests are almost completely fragmented or debased, and streams are in such bad shape that “large numbers of fish […]