People have been talking about a plan to build the most expensive spec house in history in the exclusive Yellowstone Club near Big Sky, Mont. The ski resort-home will boast 53,000 square feet of living space, larger than the new public library in Bozeman. It will have a heated driveway, an enclosed chairlift for direct […]
What does a $155 million house reveal about us?
Posted inWotr
Enough winter already
While reading recently about Kit Carson’s role in the settling of the West, I was struck by how mountain men more than 150 years ago dealt with the elements, particularly winter weather. Amazingly, they rode horses huge distances over unknown terrain without wearing Gore-Tex, Thinsulate or other advanced “technical clothing.” They mostly ate bacon, beans […]
Posted inWotr
Forget political labels, let’s think for ourselves
I recently filled out a survey from an environmental group but got stumped by the question about my political affiliation. The right of the scale was labeled “conservative” and the left side was ‘‘radical.’’ I bristled. Compare the two words: Conservative has a pleasant root, conserve, as in not squandering money or resources. Radical evokes […]
Posted inArticles
Help is on the way for the nation’s forest workers
Working in the woods: It’s never been easy or steady. Ethical contractors say they can’t compete because the Forest Service awards contracts to the lowest bidder. And as the low bidders race to the bottom with offers below the true cost of the work, they’re leaving behind a trail of injured workers, labor violations, and […]
Posted inWotr
Delisting wolves won’t change much in the West
When Idaho Gov. Butch Otter said last month he wanted to bid for the first wolf tag offered to hunters in his state, it prompted predictable righteous indignation. Newspapers across the nation, including the New York Times, expressed doubts that the federal government could turn control over Idaho’s remarkably productive wolf population to people like […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Heard around the West
WASHINGTON At the edge of his Soap Lake, Wash., backyard, Rick Froebe has lined up seven toilets and some old bathtubs and water heaters — all to annoy the golfers whose proximity makes his four dogs bark, which, in turn, annoys his neighbors. Froebe has even placed “three scarecrow-like dummies” on the toilets to look […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Winter Prayer
Snowshoeing alone at night in the forest, a woman thinks – and prays – about the friends she loves, and the families they worry about.
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
A tale of shame and glory in the Southwest
Hampton Sides’ latest book, Blood and Thunder, is an expansive treatise on an expansive subject: Manifest Destiny and the opening of the desert Southwest. Sides uses Kit Carson — with his distinctive combination of chivalry, heroism, cruelty and unflinching complicity with inhumane policies — as a sort of thread to weave together the history of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Notes from a place of risk and hope
Writer Kevin Holdsworth copped Wyoming’s tourist slogan “Big Wonderful” to describe a place of both risk and hope, a beautiful, battered landscape rich in myth and fact. He presents it through the complementary perspectives of a mountain climber, family man and friend, describing both Utah, the state of his birth, and Wyoming, the home of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Don’t part out our national parks
When I worked as a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone National Park some years ago, I came to believe that magnificent places like this should remain free from commercial exploitation. Yellowstone and our other national parks belong to all of us as a public commons to be protected for future generations. Park rangers tell visitors to […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
A Western historian and a Western hero
Hal Rothman is dying. You can hear it in his voice — what’s left of it. The historian of the New West, defender of Las Vegas as the poster child for what the region will become as it continues to boom, fights a losing battle. Every day, says Lauralee Rothman, there’s something else her husband […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Enviros: Lose the ‘tude
A story in “Heard around the West” disappointed me. As an avid hunter, environmentalist and military officer, I found that the piece, which derisively described the buffoonery of “hunters” in connection with an anti-poaching operation in a Western state, demonstrated one of the fundamental weaknesses of the increasingly ineffective environmental movement. Attitudes of many environmentalists […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Something’s rotten in the state of user fees
I am shocked when I read letters like Linda Knowlton’s, supporting recreation user fees. The greatest period of public-land recreation-related infrastructure development in the United States occurred during and just after the Great Depression, when the nation was at its poorest. Now that we have experienced huge growth in the GDP and in the number […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Forest management in 3-D
Pepper Trail’s opinion column on salvage logging misses the mark, casting forest management in a one-dimensional, ecological way. Rather, forest management and salvage logging must be driven by sustainability. We live in a three-dimensional world — ecological, social and economic. It’s not a matter of balancing these, for balance implies they are separate. They are […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
New leaders, new future
I was very disappointed in the “Confessions of a Methane Floozy” article. The writer almost sounds like an energy industry hack. Her limited viewpoint and knowledge sound like another propaganda tool from the Bush administration: “You use the energy so accept the consequences.” I’m not sure where the numbers came from regarding the estimated percentage […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Fiddling while oil burns
In a society that reportedly has a per capita resource consumption 25 times larger than the global average, it is not surprising that the gritty piece by Hannah Nordhaus has more than a grain of truth. To some degree, however, Nordhaus’ cozy interviews with the various perpetrators obscure the fact that pots and kettles come […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
The West’s public lands are open for business
The 2003 EPCA report considered five Western regions. The 2006 report looked at 11, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and southern Florida. The difference in scope skews comparison of the reports, especially considering that ANWR’s 19 million acres are (still) off-limits to drilling. But a look at the five Western regions included in both […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Energy illusions
A new report seems to show that more land is off-limits to energy exploration, but appearances can be deceiving
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Red Feather builds homes and communities
NAME Red Feather Development Group HOMETOWN Bozeman, Montana FOUNDED IN 1994 FOUNDED BY Rob Young NOTED FOR Building straw-bale homes on Indian reservations across the West. In recent years, Red Feather has focused on Hopiland in Arizona, and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. FAVORITE FOOD Pop-Tarts. Legend has it that the two-dimensional pastries fueled […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Condemned
Out on the range, old eminent domain laws erode private property rights