Lakeview, Ore., sounds like a sleepy place. When four of five local lumber mills closed in the late ’80s and early ’90s, wiping out more than 800 jobs, it shrank by a fourth, to 2,750 people. Stranded in southern Oregon’s desert, the town lacks traffic lights and fast-food outlets. Western-style storefronts line its narrow main […]
Rural Oregon timber county seeks economic revival through renewables
Posted inRange
BLM Wild Lands policy deserves praise
By Joel Webster If a misleading statement is repeated often enough, some people will begin to believe it. That appears to be the strategy of those working to overturn the Bureau of Land Management “wild lands” policy that was introduced in December by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Beyond the misleading rhetoric are some hard facts: […]
Posted inGoat
Megaload Magnetism
Last spring, when I saw my first megaload, I thought July 4th had come early. Football dads flipped burgers in the lot where the rig had parked. Hundreds of people crowded the ditches and dangled off guardrails to get a look at the machine. Newspapermen snapped cameras from the center of the road, and sheriffs, […]
Posted inWotr
Walking the dog in a changed community
“Leash your dog, Wilke.” The phone message was innocuous enough. The only problem being I didn’t know the man’s name or phone number, and five minutes earlier he’d threatened to kill my dog. Our first encounter was last spring. I walked my dog, Ricky, through the block of condo subdivisions west of my home, as […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Oregon sculptor turns beach trash into meaningful art
South of Bandon, Ore., along Highway 101, there perches a 12-foot-tall bird with wings made of flip-flop soles and a belly of plastic lids. Its fishing-float feet are held in place by knotted plastic fishing line. The bird, which resembles the love child of an albatross, an eagle and a seagull, is just one of […]
Posted inGoat
The incredible growing shrinking ski resort!
Do you remember those little packets of gel-cap pills? The ones that would, when submerged in water, swell to become little sponge dinosaurs? Only the little sponge dinosaurs were tiny and flat and lame and never came close to the awesomeness promised by the full-sized dinosaurs rampaging across the label? Seems that could be the […]
Posted inRange
Red, white and blue is the new green
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Despite what freshman Republican lawmakers would have us believe, giving a flying finch about the environment is very American. The authors of recent proposals and bills surrounding the federal budget—which have been called some of the most anti-environmental pieces of legislation in recent history—are out of touch with […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Danged ornery critters
MONTANA It’s a Tea Party world in Montana’s Legislature these days, and Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, sometimes can’t believe his ears as newly elected representatives talk blithely of creating armed citizen militias and “nullifying” a slew of federal laws, reports The Associated Press. Schweitzer calls many of the proposals from the new Republican majority […]
Posted inWotr
Botanical barbarians are waging the real “war on the West”
If the phrase “war on weeds” seems over the top, consider this: Noxious weeds infest over 100 million acres of North America — an area roughly the size of Montana. Like it or not, we’re engaged in a battle to win back the Western landscape. Weeds now conquer more than 3 million acres each year, […]
Posted inGoat
Coal still king
When the BLM schedules the sale of coal leases, which give companies the right to mine federal coal, it rarely does so with great fanfare. But this time was different. This time, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar traveled all the way to a high school in Cheyenne, Wyo., and with Gov. Matt Mead by his side, […]
Posted inBlog
The end of the Mojave coal-fired power plant
The most recent thud Big Coal suffered around the West happened on March 11, when the 500 ft tall coal smokestack at the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada was demolished as part of the decommissioning process for the plant. While this was a historic end for the storied legacy of the Mohave coal-fired power plant, […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Pacific chorus frogs make urban comeback
As dusk fell one spring evening in 2003, a small group of volunteers crawled along a creek bank, searching among tall grasses, under piles of decaying garbage and in stagnant puddles for gelatinous clutches of eggs. The Port of San Francisco was about to build a new bridge over Islais Creek Channel on the city’s […]
Posted inGoat
Human health v. economic health
Twenty years after amendments to the Clean Air Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate additional toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants, the agency is finally flexing its muscle. New rules proposed this month would cut mercury emissions along with other dangerous metals like arsenic, chromium and nickel and particulate matter from oil- and […]
Posted inBlog
Wild Lands, bureaucracy and the BLM
I’ve been following BLM Director Bob Abbey’s earnest PR campaign to pacify conservatives on the subject of Secretarial Order 3310, the “Wild Lands Policy,” which was issued by interior Secretary Ken Salazar in December. The policy was immediately attacked by Orrin Hatch and other Western politicians as an end-run by the BLM around Congress (which […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Why bother cooking what nature failed to finish?
Tar sands are no longer a what-if. This water-intensive form of mining may be coming to Utah soon, and what it could turn into is a big deal indeed. Unlike gas wells, extracting oil from sand is neither quiet nor unobtrusive. Despite the industry’s admirable efforts to minimize water use and reduce water pollution, the […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The dark corners of the heart: A review of Volt
Volt: StoriesAlan Heathcock208 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. A good story has the power to divert us from our struggles as well as to help us understand them. This is one reason people turn to fiction, and it explains why Alan Heathcock’s debut short-story collection, Volt, is an ideal book for our times. Characters face […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Teetering on the Edge of the Cedars
Utah museum fights for its life as the state cuts funding
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Spring fever, skipped issue
In mid-March, as the snow melts and the crocus pop up here in Paonia, Colo., the HCN crew will be taking one of our four annual publishing breaks. Look for the next issue to hit your mailbox around April 18. In the meantime, be sure to visit hcn.org for news, blog posts, and other Web-only […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Ruthless economics
I admit it: I sometimes shop in soulless big-box stores like Walmart. I’m not offering this confession as a member of Shopaholics Anonymous. I’m admitting that I’m part of the larger problem that figures in our cover story “Big Beef.” When I buy from big-box stores, I support economic forces that value high volume and […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Lakeview renewable projects proposed and in progress
Since LCRI put this map together in the summer of 2010, more utility scale solar projects have been proposed in the northern part of the county.