Imagine a Republican leader who racked up the following achievements: He fought smog by regulating vehicle emissions, kept dams from choking free-flowing rivers, set aside big chunks of wild backcountry for permanent protection, and supported a strong treaty to prevent harmful gases from mucking up the atmosphere. Democratic operatives might just invite this candidate to […]
Let’s hear it for a bipartisan-minded Republican
Posted inHeard Around the West
Deer assaults
CALIFORNIA There’s no doubt about it, says Connie Jenkins: A deer suddenly assaulted her small Honda while she was driving along a winding canyon to her home high above Malibu. Yet the suggestion in a letter from an expeditor for Farmers Insurance that she seek damages from the “third party” — which in this case […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Reviving Custer: Re-enactment and revision at the Little Bighorn
Rick Williams always bore an uncanny likeness to George Armstrong Custer. It was the nose, beakish and narrow, and the plush, platinum mustache. This was fortunate for a Civil War re-enactor. One day in 2002, a tailor outfitted Williams in a red tie and Union general’s coat. “It was scary,” he recalls. “Everyone was saying, […]
Posted inGoat
2012 in numbers
Dear Readers: I have grim and terrible news to share with you. I was taking a look at my trusty wall calendar, the one put out by local electric coop, to see what kind of photo of a lineman playing with high voltage lines was on the next page, when I noticed there was no […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A mining rush in Canada’s backcountry threatens Alaska salmon
Last summer, John Grace, one of the world’s elite kayakers, traveled more than 3,000 miles from his North Carolina home into the wild northwest corner of British Columbia, to explore the Iskut River. It’s the biggest tributary of the Stikine River, which flows all the way to the Alaska panhandle coast, and together they’re the […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
An underwater forest reveals the story of a historic megadrought
A curved tree saw in his gloved hand, a scuba tank on his back, Phil Caterino worked quickly to slice through a pine branch 100 feet below the surface of a small tarn south of Lake Tahoe. Bubbles streamed from the regulator in his mouth, rising through the blue alpine water and green flecks of […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
You get what you pay for
I have farmed vegetables for the past couple years and know that weeds are a challenge and profit margins are usually tight. But I do not currently support GMOs (“Weed wars,” HCN, 11/26/12). I believe in the benefits of crop rotations and trying to outsmart weeds rather than soak them in chemicals. I was really […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Western water, in poetry and policy: A review of Dam Nation
Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and WillDetermine its FutureStephen Grace360 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Globe Pequot, 2012. To snatch a moment from the wild and capture it in words that pulse with life is quite a feat. Stephen Grace, author of the 2004 novel Under Cottonwoods, makes it seem effortless. When he describes sandhill cranes […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Techno-eco-literacy
Jim Robbins’ article “Wildlife Biology Goes High-Tech” is an excellent exploration of the explosion of technology used by wildlife biologists these days (HCN, 12/10/12). As someone who has first-hand experience with some of these technologies, I agree that we can now ask critical ecological and conservation questions that we couldn’t have approached a decade or […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Scott Groene on the Washington County land bill
Editor’s Note: In our interview with former Utah Sen. Bob Bennett (“Bob Bennett after the fall,” HCN, 10/29/12), Bennett said of his 2009 Washington County land bill: “The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s board was split 7-7 over the bill. So they took no position, which effectively let it move forward.” SUWA Executive Director Scott Groene […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
HCN takes a holiday break
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas here in Paonia, Colo. Actually, it’s mostly been bone-dry and weirdly warm, like most of the West, but at least HCN‘s hometown has put up some lights and decorations, and over the weekend we got a slight sprinkling of snow. It’s also time for another publishing break […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
BLM plans for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska
On a chilly June afternoon several years ago, I sat for hours on a muddy sandbar, entranced as a seemingly endless procession of migrating caribou swam across a northwestern Alaska river. The air was filled with splashing, the grunting of cows, the answering calls of their calves. Perhaps some 2,000 animals passed by. You might […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
At home with the oil rigs
Coming down from Gaviota Pass, it’s the ocean I see first. But I look past the waves and ignore the distant Channel Islands, searching for the landmarks that tell me I’m really home. When I fly, my eyes search for these other islands, too, as we bank and straighten out, bound for the runway. They […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A review of Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A cultural and natural history of Tinajas Altas
Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A cultural and natural history of Tinajas Altas Bill Broyles, Gayle Harrison Hartmann, Thomas E. Sheridan, Gary Paul Nabhan, Mary Charlotte Thurtle 240 pages, hardcover: $49.95. The University of Arizona Press, 2012. Last Water on the Devil’s Highway is the story of a waterhole that, for centuries, has kept […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Canadian government cuts pollution research that’s crucial in the U.S.
EXPERIMENTAL LAKES AREA, ONTARIO To reach Lake 658, you leave the Trans-Canada Highway in the moose-ridden backwoods of western Ontario, creep down a teeth-jarring gravel road, follow a trail to a different lake, hop onto a motorboat and then take a short hike to 658’s granite shoreline. The water is crystal-clear, and yet a sign […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A sampler of U.S. environmentalists working in British Columbia
Mitch Friedman, head of Conservation Northwest, a Washington-based group whose advocacy reaches into British Columbia, has an unusual way of estimating the strength of the environmental movement: by the number of “activists per square mile.” In B.C., he says, that number is “very low — there are whole mountain ranges without a single citizen watchdog, […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
A different borderland blues
(This editor’s note accompanies a story exposing a British Columbia mining rush that threatens salmon rivers flowing through Southeast Alaska.) When I first ventured into environmental journalism in the early 1980s, one of the hottest Western controversies was coming down in the temperate rainforests of the Alaska panhandle, bordering Canada’s westernmost province, British Columbia. Two […]