I find it ironic that Chad Roberts’ letter appears in the same issue of HCN that features an article about how the environmental movement’s single-minded campaign to close down ranching, mining, and timber cutting in the West helped create the economic vacuum into which Industrial Tourism has poured (HCN, 5/29/06: Clinging hopelessly to the past). According […]
Water for farms, not urban sprawl
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Enough real-estate bashing
Re: David Oates’ essay “Empty pods and pleasant graveyards”: It’s just great to read yet another screed published in HCN railing on the real estate industry (HCN, 6/12/06: Empty pods and pleasant graveyards). How original and refreshing. Why don’t you scrape the rust off of your imaginations and try focusing on good real estate projects that […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Beating extinction for Gunnison grouse
Thanks for airing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s dirty laundry. Not listing the Gunnison sage grouse as an endangered species is mind-boggling (HCN, 6/12/06: On a wing and a prayer). This is an administration that wouldn’t have listed the passenger pigeon as endangered, if they’d had the chance. San Miguel County, home to the most […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Recreation is just another boom
Let me make something clear: I do not like backcountry mountain biking, white-tablecloth-and-fine-wine river adventures or any of the rest of New West’s industrial recreationism. But Jim Stiles’ idea that New West recreationism is just as destructive as Old West extractionism is just plain hogwash (HCN, 5/29/06:Clinging hopelessly to the past). Industrial logging and ranching […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Stiles fights corporate environmentalism
For my money, Jim Stiles, along with a small handful of others like Charles Bowden and Doug Peacock, is one of the leading fresh, outside-the-box voices in the American West since Ed Abbey’s death (HCN, 5/29/06: Clinging hopelessly to the past). We need more of them. Unfortunately, prophets like Stiles (here meaning not smitten-by-gawd predictors, but […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Two Weeks in the West
Autumn in the West may be more brown than gold this year. Aspen trees are dying in large numbers throughout the region, especially in Colorado, home to half the West’s quakies. Researchers are baffled; there’s no discernible pattern to the die-off, and the rate seems to be increasing. In southwestern Colorado, up to 60 percent […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
‘There was just some hard hittin’ going on’
LIND, Washington — In New Mexico, people tend to sort themselves by red and green, based on the kind of chile they prefer to eat. On the wheat farms of eastern Washington, folks divide into red and green camps, too. But here, they do it according to the kinds of combines — the giant machines […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Heard around the West
UTAH Lake Powell, now at just 52 percent of capacity, might as well be called The Incredible Shrinking Reservoir: Its twice-extended boat launch at Bullfrog “resembles a tilted airport runway — a concrete slab more than a quarter-mile long,” reports The Associated Press. Multiple bathtub rings are visible everywhere along the shore, and when the […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
There was no green in this Rainbow gathering
When we tell folks that we became the unwitting hosts for the Rainbow Family’s annual gathering, the first response is “the who?” The Family’s Web site, welcomehome.org, styles the Rainbows “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” At the beginning of July, more than 17,000 of them gathered in Big Red Park, north of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
A few scientific definitions
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Is It or Isn’t It (Just Another Mouse)?“ When people think about the creatures protected by the Endangered Species Act, they tend to picture gray wolves, grizzlies or spotted owls. But the act draws finer distinctions than that, providing protection for subspecies and even […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Where there’s fire, there’s global warming
“I think there was a tendency to think that the overwhelming factor (driving forest fires) was short-term weather. There’s this idea that drought matters, and it does. But it’s taking time and a lot of research to show that climate plays a big role as well.” — Anthony Westerling Six years ago, climate scientist Anthony […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Worlds converge in energy’s shadow
Located on a dusty mesa above the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico, Alice Benally’s home on the Navajo Reservation sits less than a mile away from the massive smokestacks of the Four Corners power plant. For four decades, the electrons generated by the plant’s steam-propelled turbines zipped past her lantern-lit home on their […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
‘You’ve got me wrong’: A Conversation with Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth
This June, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth flew into Delta, Colo., to meet with the local staff of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests — “GMUG” in local parlance. Bosworth, who became the chief in 2001, told a crowd of Forest Service employees, retirees and local conservationists that the agency he runs has […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Why did Norton really leave Interior?
It seemed so swift and sudden, the way Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned back in early March. It wasn’t like the other resignations from President George Bush’s Cabinet. Everyone in town knew that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was the administration’s foreign policy odd-man-out before Powell announced he would leave at the end of the […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Hollywood heads east
Western states compete to get a piece of the action
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Dear friends
MORE BANG FOR YOUR BUCK Readers have been calling for more content and a greater diversity of stories in High Country News. We’re happy to deliver: We’ve added four pages with this issue. To help cover the additional costs of printing and mailing, we’ve added an extra page of advertisements — but not to worry: […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Playing God in suburbia
For the past six years, I’ve been a volunteer medic on our local ambulance service. In each ambulance, we keep a stack of 4-by-8-inch cards. I’ve treated victims of everything from stomach flu to mine cave-ins, and I’ve never had occasion to use those tags. I hope I never do. Here’s how they work: Faced […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
Is It or Isn’t It (Just Another Mouse)?
Why science alone will not settle the West’s endangered species dilemmas
Posted inWotr
Lake Powell gets an A for boating and a D for water storage
It’s fun in the sun as usual at Lake Powell, as this summer follows another in a pattern of drought in the 21st century. But though the reservoir has plenty of water for boating, its primary purpose is to store water for the American Southwest. By that criterion, Lake Powell is a bust at 52 […]
Posted inWotr
Watch out for hijackers in national parks
Yellowstone National Park, spring last year. Marypat and I have stopped for a picnic break on our annual April ride through the Yellowstone. We prop the bikes against a bridge railing, take our sandwiches and stroll to a grassy patch near a creek. It is quiet and tranquil in a way it never is during […]