The Bureau of Reclamation is now building the nation’s first boondoggle tourist stop. Thanks to cost overruns and management neglect, the Hoover Dam visitor center in southern Nevada will cost $119 million instead of an estimated $32 million. Scheduled to be finished in 1995, the 44,000-square-foot center, which sits on the side of a cliff, […]
Five star visitor complex
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Same old DOE?
U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary may be displaying unprecedented candor by disclosing her agency’s sordid history of radiation experiments on humans. But two reports by the General Accounting Office suggest that the agency remains an old boys’ club. According to one report, the DOE has yet to investigate what happened to $30 million of goods […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
The Chapman saga continues
The U.S. Forest Service, with approval from Secretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons, has signed a deed of trust with Colorado developer Tom Chapman. The deal gives Chapman 105 acres of federal land near the Telluride Ski Area in return for Chapman’s 240 acre inholding in the West Elk Wilderness near Paonia. Chapman must also remove […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Vandals destroy desert tortoise dens
As a vacation and retirement destination, southwestern Utah boasts a mild year-round climate and the world-famous Zion National Park. It’s also home to the most viable population of the Mojave desert tortoise, a creature threatened with extinction. For years biologists and environmentalists have been studying ways to keep the prehistoric reptile from succumbing to new […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Of buffalo thoughts and amethysts
I’ve grown up and moved away. I live in a city now instead of a little town. My grammar is better, my table manners hardly offend at all and I’ve been seen at art galleries and concerts. Yet still there are people who patronize me when they find out where I grew up. That was […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Don’t try to improve grazing; abolish it!
My greatest fear about grazing reform is that it will substitute for substantive reform. The grazing fee will increase from one-quarter to one-half of fair market value, but government will kick back even that increase to those ranchers who talk the range reform talk. The increased fee will go to range developments to mitigate livestock […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Yellowstone gets new superintendent
In a shuffle of top national park managers, Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Bob Barbee in late May found himself reassigned to the job of director in the agency’s Alaska region. Barbee, who had presided over Yellowstone for 11 years, had just finished building a house near Bozeman, Mont. As superintendent of one of the most […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Old guard may beat new chief
JACKSON, Wyo. – A retired U.S. Forest Service supervisor urged agency personnel to move swiftly to transform an organization that has historically resisted change. Tom Kovalicky, who began his Forest Service career in Wyoming, said that Jack Ward Thomas, the controversial new Forest Service chief, “wants to change bad practices,” but may already be in […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Low-tech ants give a high-tech Idaho lab fits
It’s nature’s equivalent of David versus Goliath. In this instance David happens to be 7 mm long and Goliath is the U.S. Department of Energy and the scientific community. Their battleground is the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in southern Idaho where harvester ants are stymieing waste disposal efforts by doing what ants do best […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
The Great River becomes a great sewer
FORT HANCOCK, Texas – Red-headed Jimmy Frank Rogers, a junior and an agile receiver on Fort Hancock High’s six-man football team (school enrollment: 102), straddled some spindly salt cedar on the steep banks of the Rio Grande and surveyed what was once the Great River. “I’d guess maybe 20 yards across,” offered Rogers, tugging at […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Group vows to head off the ‘New West’
GLORIETA, N.M. – About 500 members of People For the West, a Pueblo, Colo., group that supports traditional multiple use of public lands, concluded a three-day conference with vows to become more organized and politically active. Bill Grannell, the executive director and former Washington, D.C., lobbyist for the National Association of Counties, said the goal […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Grazing combatants vow to keep feuding
The day after he didn’t get appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt dove back into grazing reform. At a U.S. Senate hearing in Albuquerque, N.M., on May 14, Babbitt told several hundred ranchers and environmentalists that he expects to “stay in the middle of this grazing issue until we work out […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Dear friends
1984 Redux A decade late, High Country News has caught up to George Orwell’s 1984. With the help of a grant from the Surdna Foundation, a team here has begun to create an electronic index and archive of back issues. Almost certainly we will introduce new errors as we transfer information from print to electrical […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Northwest forests hit by new lawsuits
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, A doomed species? The fate of Northwest forests has been tied up in the courts since 1987, when the Portland Audubon Society sued the government for failing to address the possible extinction of the northern spotted owl. Although the suit was later thrown out of […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
A doomed species?
Spotted owl may be losing its long fight for survival
Posted inMay 30, 1994: Can mining come clean?
About lycra and denim
Dear HCN, As a sometimes cross-country ski racer and mountain biker who occasionally dons lycra, I must say that I think T.M. Power misses the point when he examines the “caustic humor” that traditional Westerners seem to have for the newly arrived urban “services’ people (HCN, 5/2/94). Ranchers, loggers and miners produce real goods which […]
Posted inMay 30, 1994: Can mining come clean?
A Neanderthal mentality in Silver City
Dear HCN, I would like to commend you for excellent coverage of the problems plaguing the Gila National Forest in southwest New Mexico (HCN, 5/2/94). For too long, battles have been raging between environmentalists and wise-use proponents there without anyone sitting up and taking notice. Three years ago, my wife and I bought property in […]
Posted inMay 30, 1994: Can mining come clean?
Is “natural regulation’ leading to unnatural results?
Karl Hess Jr., in Rocky Times in Rocky Mountain National Park – An Unnatural History, raises ethical questions about the future of Rocky Mountain National Park, “a unique, irreplaceable wonder, a shimmering blue strip of hope on the prairie horizon.” Combining eloquence and detailed research, Hess calls for drastic changes to ensure that good stewardship […]
Posted inMay 30, 1994: Can mining come clean?
For rangeland reformers
The Western Legislative Conference is hosting a conference on “Rangeland Reform and Watershed Management in the West” June 24-25 in Denver. The event will profile collaborative efforts among federal and state government officials and ranchers and environmentalists to restore rangeland and watersheds in Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington and Arizona. Speakers include Mike Penfold, an Interior […]
Posted inMay 30, 1994: Can mining come clean?
Techno-weenie resources
Grass-roots environmental activists and community organizers who have to deal with nuclear issues are often accused of compensating for lack of scientific knowledge with emotion. Now the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research has put a physicist at the disposal of groups that work in the shadows of the nuclear complex. Its president, […]