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 […]
Wild Lands, bureaucracy and the BLM
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.
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Finding reassurance in change: a review of Wild Comfort
Wild Comfort: The Solace of NatureKathleen Dean Moore256 pages,softcover: $15.95.Trumpeter Books, 2010. Writer, editor and activist Kathleen Dean Moore was settling in to write her next book when a series of personal tragedies changed everything. After several people close to her died within a few months, Moore abandoned her plans to create a book about […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
The Big Four Meatpackers
Related story: Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes About 35 million cattle are slaughtered in the U.S. annually by 60 major beef-packing operations processing around 26 billion pounds of beef. Four firms control over 80 percent of all the beef slaughtered. [NEWSLETTER] **** Tyson Foods Springdale, Ark. Daily slaughter capacity 28,700 U.S. market […]
Posted inMarch 21, 2011: Big Beef
Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes
‘This situation is what I call economic waterboarding.’
Posted inRange
Wyoming uranium has uncertain future
By Julianne Couch, 3-18-2011 On the other side of the Pacific Ocean from our position in the Rocky Mountain West, an earthquake and tsunami have triggered a catastrophe in Japan that officials say is the worst event in that country since World War II. In the last week, it has been impossible to miss seeing […]
Posted inWotr
Marry me, marry my town
I am not just marrying a man; I am marrying a town. In my first, brief marriage, my husband and I were both newcomers to the Alaskan town where we spent our married life. The locals weren’t particularly invested in us. Instead, they waited with the patience of the seasoned to see if we could […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
Unheard stories, unseen lives: A review of Southern Paiute, A Portrait
Southern Paiute: A PortraitWilliam Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler208 pages, hardcover: $34.95.Utah State University Press, 2010. In all of Native America, few people have been less understood or more maligned than the Southern Paiute Indians and their desert cousins. Mark Twain denounced them as “inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California.” Except […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
The power of the lowly dirt particle
Soon after I moved to western Colorado from the humid Midwest 20 years ago, I learned that a reservoir is not a lake. My family and I were eager to test our new canoe on the local reservoir, which I’d driven by a month earlier. Its dark waters beckoned to me, lapping against a thick […]
Posted inMarch 7, 2011: High Tension
Montana transmission lines draw opposition from all sides
Whitehall, MontanaGeologist Debra Hanneman lives with her husband, geophysicist Chuck Wideman, in a modest, rambling house on the outskirts of town, a mile or so off Interstate 90. On a blustery morning in mid-January, the view through her glassed front door takes in an expanse of private and federal land, with dun-colored foothills rising toward […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Are you on the endangered species list?
THE SOUTHWEST Nikki Cooley is a Colorado River guide for Arizona Raft Adventures who also “happens to be Navajo,” reports the boatman’s quarterly review. So it must have struck her as particularly odd when a tourist on one of her Grand Canyon trips casually asked, “Are Indians extinct?” No word on her reply. THE BORDER […]
Posted inWotr
Christo can wrap anything, but why bother?
The debate over the artist Christo’s latest scheme – he wants to canopy part of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado in 2014 — shouldn’t simply be about art. Rather, it should be viewed as a jobs proposal, and on that ground I’d say, Why not? Certainly, Christo is an artist, maybe even the century’s […]
Posted inRange
Confronting scofflaws
There are some places I don’t like to write about, since in my experience, that’s a quick way to trash the scenery. People read about it, decide to visit for themselves, and whatever solitude and splendor the spot offered has vanished. That’s one reason I seldom mention an arid valley named Castle Gardens or Castle […]
Posted inGoat
Nuclear Disaster Reverberates in the West
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded on April 26, 1986 and heaved plumes of radioactive dust across the Soviet Union and Europe, the United States’ domestic uranium market slumped into hibernation for nearly two decades. It should come as no surprise, then, that uranium stocks are falling rapidly as Japan’s own nuclear disaster unfolds. […]