VISITORS The snow may have kept some folks from visiting us here, but Rob and Annie Edward stopped by between storms and gray wolf education presentations. Rob is the director of carnivore restoration for the nonprofit carnivore advocacy group Sinapu, which recently merged with Forest Guardians to create WildEarth Guardians. Annie’s “day job” allows her […]
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Posted inMarch 3, 2008: The People of the Sea
The People of the Sea
California’s Salton Sea could dry up and die, or be fixed and developed. Either way, its renegades, recluses, ruffians and retirees will lose.
Posted inArticles
Go blue, save some green
The mountain pine beetle is about the size of Lincoln’s head on a penny. In the last 10 years, it’s devastated 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine in Colorado, a half-million in the past year alone. The swaths of dead trees color the mountainsides a sickly orange-brown. Now, communities in the hardest-hit areas are scrambling […]
Posted inArticles
Sheep station to explore environmental hoofprint
For nearly a century, the Department of Agriculture’s Sheep Experiment Station has grazed over 6,000 sheep on 100,000 acres of public land in Montana and Idaho west of Yellowstone National Park. Yet the research center has never formally assessed its ecological impact on this mountainous habitat for native wildlife species. This month, in response to […]
Posted inArticles
Lakeside City
“I feel like a lakeside city.” She said this as she lay under the worn sheets of my bed and stared out the window. It was hot and if you were still and watched closely, you could see the pavement melt outside. Telephone wires crisscrossed the pale blue sky, the sun was high, and splotches […]
Posted inWotr
President Bush would jettison Indian health for ideology
Is President Bush willing to sacrifice the health and welfare of Native Americans in order to pursue one of his administration’s pet peeves? It sounds as if he is. The White House recently warned that the president may veto long-overdue legislation to improve health care for Native Americans if the bill includes a provision calling […]
Posted inWotr
The West loses a scrappy daily paper
Just as the booming — or busting — West needs her most, the Albuquerque Tribune is no more. The paper published its last edition on Saturday, Feb. 23, after 86 years of rough-and-tumble journalism that included winning a Pulitzer Prize. The paper was owned by the Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co., which decided last August that […]
Posted inWotr
A hunter goes lobbying
A few weeks ago, I set out with a small group to lobby Oregon’s Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. The visit was set up by the national Wildlife Federation, and our goal — a long shot — was to convince the senator to sign on as a co-sponsor of the Lieberman-Warner bill to control greenhouse-gas emissions […]
Posted inArticles
Crying ‘fowl’
Over the past 5 years, one of the West’s emblematic birds, the greater sage grouse, has been batted like a shuttlecock between environmentalists and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At issue is whether the chicken-sized bird, once found in sagebrush plains from Canada to Arizona, should be listed as threatened or endangered. If the […]
Posted inWotr
Gone geese
For the better part of a week, I’ve been driving around with the carcass of a Canada goose in the bed of my pickup. It lies there with the spare tire, the snow, the blue plastic box of emergency clothes, and an assortment of crushed pop and beer cans from last summer. Because of the […]
Posted inWotr
Who will work in the West’s future company towns?
One day last summer, I gave directions to two young Asian women on bicycles who were looking for the grocery store. Further chatting revealed that they weren’t tourists. In scattershot English, they told me that they were from Thailand and had come to Cody, Wyo., on temporary work visas to serve up hamburgers in Wendy’s, […]
Posted inWotr
Why mining reform matters to all of us
With record snows and a robust economy, this has been a season of good fortune for the resort town of Crested Butte in western Colorado. Yet our future hangs in the balance as Congress wrestles with an issue that ought to concern Americans everywhere: reform of the 1872 Mining Law. How Congress proceeds could determine […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Heard Around the West
WYOMING Perhaps in jest, the award-winning Jackson Hole News&Guide wants readers to come up with a new welcome sign for the town. The current greeting at Teton Pass is definitely outmoded: “Howdy, stranger, yonder is Jackson Hole, the last of the Old West.” With the town now urbanized and chock-full of New West bazillionaires, the […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Following the tracks
Walking along the railroad tracks, I never could decide if it was easier to stretch my stride from one tie to the next, or if I should follow my natural rhythm, letting my foot land sometimes in the crushed stone ballast and sometimes on wood. I wanted the walking to be easy, unconscious. It wasn’t. […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Catching a ride in costa rica
It was with extra excitement that I turned to Michelle Nijhuis’ article on hitchhiking, “The Last Ride,” in the Oct. 29, 2007 issue. This means of travel brought me out to explore the American West for the first time 32 years ago, and led to my settling there. I’ve met people, gone places, and done […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Degrees of sacrifice
The degree of one’s patriotism can be measured by what is risked by the individual. Todd Wilkinson’s recent essay said, “Yet how is standing up to battle against landscape destruction any less a patriotic calling than what is being asked of our soldiers in Iraq?” (HCN, 1/21/08) Conservationists rarely risk their lives or even their […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Wake up and smell the newsprint
It seemed as though Todd Wilkinson’s column, “Where do you draw the line?” was really asking, “Where should I draw the line?” (HCN, 1/21/08). I was unable to connect the dots between his reflections upon his own “lame and futile” political agitations of the past to beg the title question for the rest of us. […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Hello, Clinton? Hello, McCain?
Instead of giving us a hypothetical letter, why not call the presidential candidates and ask them where they stand on Western issues, and then tell us (HCN, 1/21/08)? You could have played an important role in informing us about where the candidates stand on the issues. I believe the most important challenge in the West […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Run with it, obama
I thought Ray Ring’s article on a potential national energy policy was excellent (HCN, 1/21/08). It was the sort of piece that made me glad I recently renewed my subscription. Now if only a presidential candidate would take it from here. Robert Fisher Corona, Arizona This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Biofuel won’t do it
BIOFUEL WON’T DO IT Sugar cane’s efficiency in producing ethanol is 800 percent compared with 130 percent for corn, as others have mentioned (HCN, 2/4/08). Currently, our sugar cane lands in Hawaii are fallow or growing eucalyptus trees. But even if we replanted cane to all these lands and also to suitable lands in our […]