This year, I spent Christmas in Albuquerque lounging on my back porch, reading in a tank top and suffering a fool’s sunburn. Now, in late January, it’s sunny and in the mid-50s. And although two days ago, the local newspaper kept posting updates about a storm system heading into the state, here in the city, […]
Waiting for Rain
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
The many problems of Richard Pombo
This must be the winter of Richard Pombo’s discontent, or it would be if they had winter in California. It isn’t just that his plan to privatize 15 national parks and other public lands went kerblooey, or that he found it prudent to give away several thousand dollars of embarrassing campaign contributions. It isn’t just […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
Dr. Sharon and the lion hunters
NAME Sharon Seneczko VOCATION Small-animal veterinarian AGE 45 HOME BASE Custer, South Dakota KNOWN FOR Educating the public about mountain lions. SHE SAYS “Nobody is looking at the value of wild animals until they’re gone. That’s why I’m stepping up to the plate now. We have to leave a place for wildlife.” Inside a veterinary […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
‘Ghost fleet’ in search of a final resting place
Ship recycler promises jobs, but coastal community decides costs outweigh benefits
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
Tribe brings on the tourists
Hualapai Nation plans ambitious development at Grand Canyon
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
Colorado River states reach landmark agreement
In severe drought, farms could become cities’ life support systems
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
Dear friends
NEW ARRIVALS The HCN family has grown by two in recent weeks. Laura Paskus, HCN’s Southwest editor, gave birth to a baby girl on Sunday, Jan. 29. Lillian Jane arrived at 11:38 p.m., weighing 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and measuring 19 1/4 inches long. Laura and her husband, Hollis Lawrence, report that Lillie is “ridiculously […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
The difficulties of cohabitation
Way back in 1973, when I was a pimply middle schooler living in a Chicago suburb, President Richard M. Nixon signed into law a bill that embodied America’s noblest conservation intentions. The Endangered Species Act set an amazingly ambitious goal: to conserve all of the imperiled plant and animal species in the country. The act’s […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2006: High Noon for Habitat
High Noon for Habitat
In Southern California, a host of imperiled wildlife lies in the path of America’s worst urban sprawl. The battle over the last patches of habitat is ringing through the halls of Washington, D.C.
Posted inWotr
It’s true: Guns don’t kill people
When I was in sixth grade, my entire class was marched into the school gym for Hunter Safety class. There, for several class periods, the public school system helped us understand the difference between the deer we could shoot and the ones we shouldn’t, the ethics of “shooting your wife’s deer” (which always made me […]
Posted inWotr
Idaho seems set on killing wolves
Last week, I was thrilled to find four sets of wolf tracks carved in the snow in our back pasture. Two nights previously, wolves killed a neighbor’s black Lab within 200 yards of the owner’s house. I feel bad about that dog. We have Labrador retrievers, too. When I let them out in the morning, […]
Posted inWotr
Oregon’s academic food fight in the cafeteria of ideas
It isn’t often an academic dean gets up in public and apologizes for participating in an effort to suppress the work of a graduate student. But that’s exactly what Oregon State University College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser recently did. “I profoundly regret the negative debate that recent events have generated,” he wrote in a […]
Posted inWotr
What price New Mexico’s sky?
When I moved back to New Mexico this summer, I did my best to contain my enthusiasm for a long-awaited homecoming. In short, I tried to avoid tangling memory with reality. New Mexico is often easier to love in the abstract. Despite its often idealized history — full of noble American Indians, a stern Georgia […]
Posted inWotr
Is Brokeback Mountain about the West? Sort of
The movie Brokeback Mountain moved slowly through film festivals, winning raves, then on to limited release, and now it’s up for a pile of Oscars and is making wannabe Westerners think twice about wearing that Stetson. In Salt Lake City, theater-owner Larry Miller ramped up the rhetoric by canceling a showing at one of his […]
Posted inWotr
Hunters could free Yellowstone bison
You may have seen news photos of the massive, shaggy beasts that are a national totem, standing more or less complacently while hunters approach. Easy as one, two, three, the animals come crashing down. It’s an outrageous sight, but strangely acceptable — the first hunting of Yellowstone National Park bison in 15 years. The last […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Slaughter in Serene: The Columbia Coal Strike Reader
Slaughter in Serene: The Columbine Coal Strike Reader Lowell May and Richard Myers, ed. 196 pages, softcover: $19.05 Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center, 2005. workersbreadandroses.org, 303-433-1852 Coal mining has played a major role in the histories of most Western states, including Colorado. Slaughter in Serene tells the story of striking miners in the late […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures
John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures Sally M. Miller and Daryl Morrison, ed. 272 pages, hardcover: $29.95 University of New Mexico Press, 2005. This new collection of essays, John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures, manages to break fresh ground in discussing the great naturalist. Historic photographs, sketches and excerpts from letters brighten the sometimes-scholarly essays, […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
The Colorado Plateau II: Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Research
The Colorado Plateau II: Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Research Charles van Riper III and David J. Mattson, eds. 352 pages, hardcover: $35 University of Arizona Press, 2005. Every two years, scientists gather to discuss the history, biology and geology of the vast Colorado Plateau, which sprawls across the Four Corners area. This book presents their […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Urban planning — with a wild touch
Feeling overwhelmed by pell-mell developments that consume the landscape of your community? Two new books suggest a remedy — a variety of innovative planning methods, illustrated with plenty of maps, diagrams and photos. Typical subdivisions are shaped around the “human context” — roads and schools, zoning, and the marketability of the lots and houses — […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
Seeking peace in nuclear times
In Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir, former U.S. Marine Leonard Bird offers a personal account of nuclear war. His story shifts between Japan — the only place atomic bombs have been used in combat — to the pockmarked Nevada deserts that for 40 years were ground zero for the U.S. nuclear test program. Nearly […]