Because of the Bush administration’s poor environmental performance, and because High Country News reports regularly on the environment, we are occasionally accused of having it in for the president. That’s not true, of course; the Bush environmental record just isn’t very pretty. It’s darn difficult to put a positive gloss on, for example, a Clear […]
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Posted inArticles
One of Interior’s departed returns to D.C. (for a short while)
On April 17, 2007, Ann Morgan got to do something that few Western conservationists have done since 2001: testify before a congressional committee. The subject before the Energy and Minerals Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee was the BLM’s ongoing push to open up as much of the public domain as possible to oil […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
The case for filet of filly
Imagine a proposal to scatter millions of pounds of poisoned meat around the United States, close to human populations. Much of it would be accessible to scavengers — including eagles, hawks, coyotes, foxes and badgers, as well as dogs and cats. Any animal feeding on the poisoned meat would probably die. This scenario is likely, […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Dear friends
VISITORS It’s not often that we get an international visitor. A journalist from Tokyo, Japan, dropped by in late March. Takashi Kikuchi, who writes for Festival magazine, was in western Colorado to cover The String Cheese Incident, a bluegrass/calypso/funk jam band from Boulder, Colo., that has toured in Japan. Takashi came to Paonia to see […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Rural Education 2.0
SPRINGFIELD, COLO. — The man in the Sodbuster Bar walks with a slight limp, the result of old injury. “I was operating a seismograph rig when it went off a hillside outside Meteetsee, Wyo.,” he said. “It fell 382 feet with me inside. I wasn’t supposed to make it, but I did. I eventually got […]
Posted inArticles
Getting the salt out
For 14 years, a huge desalination plant has sat quietly, out of operation, on the banks of the Colorado River just north of the Arizona border. And just south of the border, the Cienega de Santa Clara, a manmade wetland of over 14,000 acres, has provided critical habitat for migrating birds. The wetland and the […]
Posted inWotr
Life and breath in the West
My brother is dying. He lives in a small town in the West, a village really, and he moves from room to room with an air hose in his nostrils constantly filling his lungs with a steady stream of oxygen. The sun warms the south side of the house and tulips bloom in the flowerbeds, […]
Posted inWotr
Water is definitely for fighting in Montana
One constant in the fierce debate over the public’s access to Mitchell Slough in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley has been the complaint that generous landowners are being vilified despite their considerable efforts to restore the waterway. It’s instructive that one of the arguments used by supporters of the landowners is this “heroic restoration” tack. It’s instructive […]
Posted inWotr
Flying with Cowgirls all over Wyoming
Decibel levels in the arena were so loud the day the University of Wyoming Cowgirls won the Women’s National Basketball Championship, no other sound could be heard in all of Wyoming. House finches couldn’t hear their would-be mates entice them to nests. Antelope couldn’t hear the crunch of truck tires on gravel roads and were […]
Posted inWotr
Why do we keep driving ourselves crazy?
This winter. my family discovered that Oregon’s Mount Hood is known for more than dramatic mountain rescues. Would you believe it could also be called the mother of all traffic jams? Tail lights for as far as the eye could see, gridlock for nearly an hour: That’s what the highway through the Mount Hood National […]
Posted inWotr
Wilderness is the place that can make or break you
Beyond the end of most any road in southern Utah rests the crucible for my soul –? the beauty, ecological abundance and sanctuary of our public lands. With the Bunsen-burner intensity of its noontime sun, desert wilderness burns off the ephemera of my life, and there remains only the essence of emotion — awe that […]
Posted inWotr
They shoot horses, don’t they? Not any more
Imagine a proposal to scatter millions of pounds of poisoned meat around the United States, close to human populations. Much of it would be accessible to scavengers including eagles, hawks, coyotes, foxes and badgers, as well as to dogs and cats. An animal feeding on the poisoned meat would probably die. This scenario is likely, […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA There’s nothing like a bunch of twitchy-tailed rodents to annoy some people. The squirrel population in a Santa Monica park has mushroomed to 1,000, even though the city has tried poison and gassing to knock down the numbers and reduce any risk of the animals spreading disease. But nothing slows the animals’ reproduction rate […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Imagine
Freshmen are staring at a poem. This is a strange and frightening thing. Through the windows, we are painted briefly in changeable light. Late-winter weather swirls up the Columbia Gorge, reminding Portland of its place in this big world. It’s a beautiful moment, somehow poignant. Should be good for poetry. Yet I know that some […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
The hidden costs of our coal habit
Sometimes ignorance feels like bliss. When you’re stowing your breakfast eggs and sausage, you don’t want to think too much about their origins. But ignorance is also dangerous. Take, for example, the electricity that powers the stove and coffeepot behind your morning breakfast. Today, more than half of U.S. electricity comes from burning coal. This […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
You ain’t from around here, are you?
Jim Stiles, the itinerant publisher of Moab’s venerable Canyon Country Zephyr, knows that the rural West is in danger. He also knows who’s to blame: city folk. That’s the gist, anyway, of Brave New West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed. Stiles is obviously a man of character and passion. You want to agree […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Wealthy landowners and locals wade into the ditch
Does a trout know who owns the body of water it lives in? This is not a Buddhist riddle. All a trout, elk or black-footed ferret cares about is whether the water or land can sustain it. Some of us have forgotten that unadorned fact. Motivated by laudable concerns over social change, some Westerners have […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
The enemy is us
It was like suddenly discovering the face or object hidden in a maze, a “find Waldo” sort of experience. Here I was, reading with growing concern and despondency one more article alerting me to yet another assault on the environment, this one posed by an “extraordinarily prolific and costly invasive species” — the quagga mussel. […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Bee Anatomy 101
“The Silence of the Bees” incorporated one tiny error. Hannah Nordhaus writes: “… microscopic tracheal mites that set up shop in a honeybee’s feeding tube and shorten its lifespan.” I’m no honeybee biologist, but I was trained as an entomologist. “Tracheae” are the abdominal tubes that insects use to breathe. So it’s more likely that […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Three decades of BLM inaction
Poor Lynell Schalk: I share her frustration. In 1979, I was a seasonal Grand Gulch ranger when Turkey Pen Ruin was being systematically looted. At the time, nobody knew who was doing it, and my repeated reports to the BLM Monticello office went unheeded, even after I pulled a hidden shovel out of the ruin’s […]