In 2006, my husband and I moved to a little town in New Mexico called Socorro where he was starting his Ph.D. program. Socorro means help in Spanish. We should have known we were in trouble, but how hard could it be to find an energy-efficient house and a sensible way to live? I was […]
For sustainability, a city beats the country
Posted inWotr
You, too, can overcome cynicism at Christmas
Trolling the Web recently, I found Rick Banyan’s site for “kinder, gentler” cynics. I hoped he’d help me get through this season of jingles and fears that we’re not buying enough stuff to make Christmas profitable for retailers. Banyan says sarcastically that we “emerge from the holidays 10 pounds heavier and several hundred dollars lighter.” […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2007: L.A. Bets on the Farm
Don’t give up on us
My subscription had run out on HCN and several other magazines and I found myself drowning in periodicals. I have always been a huge supporter of HCN, but for the last year or so, I was less and less impressed with the journalism. There were fewer and fewer articles about environmental issues, and lower-grade reporting […]
Posted inArticles
Going Native
Raising teepees isn’t the type of engineering one usually expects from the Army Corps of Engineers. But thanks to a novel training program, more than 150 federal employees have learned firsthand how to build the traditional native dwellings. Participants in the Corps’ tribal training course, which is designed to increase cultural and environmental awareness, spend […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
The Sagebrush Rebels ride again — and again
A decade ago, I caught a scene in one of the West’s longest-running political melodramas: The Sagebrush Rebels Ride Again. I was in a dingy hotel room in Denver, surfing the television for something worthwhile to watch, when I stumbled upon C-SPAN. There was my congressman, Republican Scott McInnis, standing on the floor of the […]
Posted inWotr
Searching for flour where the wheat grows
There are three of us driving down a long gravel driveway. We are just outside Shedd, Ore., in a town too small for most maps. The farmer is expecting us, though he doesn’t know we’re on a mission to restore part of the West’s agricultural past. My companions are part of a group called the […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t let stars wink out all over the West
I’m in eastern Nevada at Great Basin National Park, and it’s pitch black except for a startling sky above. Stars as bright as diamonds sparkle across the black cloth of space. The translucent band of the Milky Way arcs across the heavens, and Perseid meteors streak through the darkness, leaving fluorescent yellow tracers in their […]
Posted inWotr
A deadly Western myth rides toward the sunset
I can see it like it was yesterday: Rugged cowboys in dusters on horseback in a downpour, punching cattle panicked into a stampede by lightning. The theme from the movie “The Magnificent Seven” blared from the background. Finally, the herd calmed, and we saw the cowboys sitting around the campfire smoking cigarettes as the sun […]
Posted inWotr
You can’t stop nature
Why does it have to be so complicated? All we ask of nature is to be able to do what we want to do; no more, no less. We like to think of our impact on the world as controlled and businesslike, with only one variable changing at a time. But no matter how hard […]
Posted inWotr
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong
Let’s start by reviewing the stereotypes: ATV’ers are rowdy environment-hating backcountry ramblers who blow exhaust in the faces of mountain bikers as they pass them on the trail. Mountain bikers are self-righteous trail users always working to get backcountry access closed off to all-terrain vehicles, right? If only it were that simple. On a recent […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
A snake in the grass
In Zero at the Bone, Tucson writing instructor Erec Toso describes how his brush with death reveals the poison in our daily lives – complacency. Summer rains wash over the desert; life stirs, and snakes wait for prey. When vacation ends, Toso dreads returning to work at the University of Arizona – the traffic, the […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
The hidden history of a sneeze
In 1966, a severely asthmatic child named Gregg Mitman was one of an estimated 12.6 million allergy sufferers in the United States. Today, allergic asthma and hay fever affect more than 50 million Americans – roughly 20 percent of the population. In Breathing Space, Mitman, now a medical historian, traces the causes and effects of […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
A water racket
Missing from Matt Jenkins’ article about Metropolitan Water District’s “kinder, gentler” approach to acquiring agricultural water is the fact that irrigation districts are profiting by reselling water they got for next to nothing from federal taxpayers (HCN, 11/12/07). An Environmental Working Group investigation found that in 2002 – the same year Jenkins reports that the […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
‘An unwinnable fight to save clueless people’
Christine Hoekenga writes that Neal Hitchcock says that the Forest Service has to “borrow money from other programs to cover emergency costs” (HCN, 11/12/07). That’s not actually true. The 45 percent of budgeted fire suppression and any “budget overruns” are, if you will, stolen from other programs. They do not get repaid, thus starving the […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
Burned again
Decades of fire suppression had nothing to do with Southern California’s wildland fires this past October. I am extremely disappointed that you would ignore the past 20 years of scientific research and instead repeat the same old tired assumptions about wildfires “in general” as being driven by “unnatural” fuel loads and apply them to California […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
Two weeks in the West
A few days before Thanksgiving, about five dozen employees of Vail Resorts were hard at work. The Colorado ski resort had staffed up for a mid-November opening, but these workers weren’t running ski lifts or grooming the slopes. Instead, they were picking up trash; the snow had not arrived, the opening was delayed and they […]
Posted inArticles
Carpe Noctem
I pledge devotion to the stars of the majestic Milky Way Galaxy and to a dark night sky in which they shine; one cosmos, overhead, clearly visible, with liberty from light and dark skies for all. — Jack Troeger, Dark Sky Initiative In 2001, Florida developer and amateur astronomer Gene Turner came to southeastern Arizona […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
Heard Around the West
WASHINGTON Given the number of accidents and attacks against bicyclists in Seattle, riders may want to don flak jackets. In September, a cyclist was hit by a truck and killed, and in October, a rider accused the driver of a sport utility vehicle of trying to intimidate or even hit him, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
In Montana, a festival of light
Turn off all the other lights!” my almost-3-year-old son, Andrew, hollered, once we had kindled the candles in our Hanukah menorahs. It was the last night of the eight-day holiday, so we had eight candles, plus the shamash, or helper candle, in three menorahs. This made for 27 candles glowing in our otherwise pitch-dark living […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2007: Rebels with a Lost Cause
Wake up to the West, wannabe presidents
The Democratic presidential debate in Nevada this November was promoted as a chance for candidates to engage with the West and its concerns, but it might as well have been held in Anywhere, USA. The moderator, four journalists and most of the audience ignored every critical issue that’s central to our region. The first issue, […]