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 […]
‘You’ve got me wrong’: A Conversation with Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Booming anger
I find myself waving vigorously at faces I recognize these days. I wave hard at people I know like we’re close friends who’ve found ourselves in a big, unfriendly crowd. I’m happy to see them, and often they wave back just as vigorously. I live five miles out of Pinedale, Wyo., this town booming with […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
‘I call (regulations) land stealing …’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Taking Liberties.” During the campaign pitching Oregon’s Measure 37 to voters in 2004, Dorothy English starred in statewide radio ads. Now a 93-year-old widow living on 20 acres on a hillside overlooking Portland, she has been fighting for three decades for permission to slice […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Taking Liberties
The salesmen say ‘yes’ is a vote to stop government from taking your land, but this stealth campaign would do far more than that
Posted inWotr
Camping: We get grimy, look funky and love it
“What a hassle,” my husband complains as he wedges the camping table into the overloaded bed of our pickup truck. “You know, we’re going to spend less time in the mountains than we spent packing all this stuff. Why was it we wanted to go camping?” he asks half-seriously. That started me thinking. Why do […]
Posted inWotr
A resident responds to a plaintive question from Wolf Creek developer Red McCombs
“All my life, I have always wondered why there is antagonism toward developers,” said billionaire developer B.J. “Red” McCombs recently during a forum on his proposed resort atop remote Wolf Creek Pass, in southwestern Colorado. I can answer Mr. McCombs, but first, some history: At issue is a massive project on an inholding (private land […]
Posted inWotr
Stealth campaigns threaten our democracy
This election season in the West already looks as hot as a wildfire running on a dry wind. High-profile campaigns target congressional seats and governorships. But beware: The most important campaign runs in stealth mode. It’s the campaign by libertarians who want to cripple your state and local governments. They’re doing it with ballot initiatives, […]
Posted inWotr
Denial grips the Republican fringe
It’s a sad thing to see the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party skew its values to line up with those of the money-driven Wall Street wing when global warming is at issue. But it is even sadder to see even the non-religious side of the GOP adopting true-believer doublethink to sustain these monetized values. […]
Posted inWotr
Garage sales lead to déjà vu all over again
At a friend’s garage sale several years ago, I saw a copy of Ivan Doig’s book, This House of Sky. I bundled it with my other purchases, but when she went to ring it up, I said, “Jean, I’m not going to pay for this one.” “Why not?” she demanded. I opened the front cover […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Dust in the wind
On Sept. 14, 1930, a strange dirt cloud swirled out of Kansas into the Texas Panhandle. Weathermen dismissed it as an oddity, but it marked the beginning of the worst long-term environmental disaster the United States has ever known — the Dust Bowl. That bleak period is chronicled in The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan’s […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
A world built on groundwater
The entire West is headed for a much drier future. Ogallala Blue provides a good sense of the bleak realities of a life of scarcity. Author William Ashworth focuses on the Great Plains states, which have for decades thwarted a notorious lack of rain by reaching into the massive Ogallala Aquifer. Today, those states grow […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
The merry — and meditative — farmer
In Blithe Tomato, California farmer Mike Madison writes about whatever strikes his fancy: neighborhood dogs, old tractors, and what it’s like to tangle with the local gophers for control of his tulips and olive trees. (He admits to losing 25 percent of his net income to the pests.) Madison’s collection of short essays makes it […]
Posted inJuly 24, 2006: Taking Liberties
Che Guevara was no saint
I was appalled, even within the context of a book review, to read an uncritical and glowing assessment of Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a “secular saint” whose “ideas of social justice and democracy unite Latinos throughout the Americas” (HCN, 6/26/06: Nuestra America). High Country News has lost my sympathies forever. If all you know of […]