Bruce Newcomb, the powerful Republican speaker of Idaho’s House of Representatives, has a radical idea for the conservative, business-friendly state: He’s threatening to draft a law that would require Wal-Mart to either provide health insurance for its Idaho employees, or pay the state for providing coverage through the Medicaid program. Around the country, several studies […]
Conservative legislator takes on Wal-Mart
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Agency slashes critical habitat for salmon
Salmon-lovers think there’s something fishy about a recent NOAA Fisheries’ decision to strip protection from four-fifths of the salmon’s designated critical habitat. The change eases the way for development along 134,200 miles of previously off-limits rivers and streams. The agency says that the habitat’s biological importance to salmon is outweighed by the potential economic gain […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Judge leaves Front Range cities mile-high and dry
For more than 20 years, a private company has wanted to move water from Colorado’s Western Slope to sprawling Front Range cities hundreds of miles to the east. Now, a judge has put a kink in those transmountain water diversion plans. In 1984, a state water court granted Natural Energy Resources Company conditional rights to […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Western military bases still reporting for duty
New Mexico’s Cannon Air Force Base won’t be shut down — at least not for the next few years (HCN, 8/22/05: Leavin’ on a Jet Plane). It and four other Western military installations narrowly escaped the base-closure ax. The nine-member federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission finished its hearings on Aug. 26, voting against […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
The Latest Bounce
If a protected tree falls in an Oregon national forest, the Forest Service makes a sound — oops. The agency accidentally included about 15 acres of a designated botanical area when it marked the boundaries of the Fiddler timber sale, part of the controversial Biscuit Fire salvage project (HCN, 5/16/05: Unsalvageable). Loggers cut nearly 300 […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Heard around the West
MONTANA Fourteen intrepid ranch women of Big Timber, Mont., ranging in age from 45 to 77, posed semi-dressed for a 2006 calendar called “I See By Your Outfit.” The women don’t take it all off, though sometimes their chaps lack jeans underneath; they mostly tease by standing in front of strategically placed hay bales or […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Dam breaching gets a surprise endorsement
When a longtime consultant for the hydropower industry suddenly announced that four dams in Washington needed to be breached to save Idaho’s salmon, he shook the region. For decades, Don Chapman, the “guru” of fisheries biologists, had staunchly defended technological fixes for the imperiled fish, recommending hauling salmon past the dams from their spawning grounds […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Yellowstone’s Grizzlies: Not out of the woods yet
Yellowstone: Grizzly bears and geysers. People have been coming from around the world to see the national park’s main attractions for decades. But the grizzly’s future is by no means assured: The Bush administration wants to remove the Yellowstone grizzly from the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act. Such delisting is premature. […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Yellowstone’s Grizzlies: A success story
The federal government’s proposal to take grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem off the Endangered Species Act’s threatened species list represents a tremendous achievement. It also demonstrates America’s enduring commitment to wildlife conservation. The National Wildlife Federation — one of the nation’s largest conservation groups at 4 million members and supporters — has decided […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
‘Tributary issue’ could force a seven-state showdown
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Squeezing Water from a Stone.” Pat Mulroy has a problem: Las Vegas only has enough water to sustain its phenomenal rate of growth until 2013, and the Basin and Range groundwater project likely won’t come online until at least five years after that. To […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Dinosaur tracks on a desert shore
NAME Martin Lockley VOCATION Paleontologist KNOWN FOR Tracking dinosaurs in Glen Canyon HOME BASE Denver, Colorado HE SAYS “Some people go to Lake Powell to eat, drink and be merry, but we go to sweat, toil and bust our knees on the rocks.” On a warm summer evening in southern Utah, paleontologist Martin Lockley is […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
In the orchards, questions about immigration reform
Washington state offers a cautionary tale for would-be reformers in Washington, D.C.
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Revealed — secret changes to park rules
Critics say the Bush administration is again subverting the public process
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Dear friends
High Country News recently helped host Forest Service whistleblower and sustainability advocate Gloria Flora, who spoke at the Paonia Town Hall on Aug. 26 during a tour through the West. Flora is best known for banning oil and gas leasing on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front in 1997, when she was a forest supervisor (HCN, 10/13/97: […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Weighing our water options
My minuscule slice of the Colorado River Basin’s flow dried up yesterday. When I opened the plug on our 6-inch pipe, a trickle of brown water dribbled out, followed by a black glob of sediment, writhing with a half-dozen crawdads. And that was it. The local ditch company usually stops delivering water in mid-August, when […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2005: Squeezing Water from a Stone
Squeezing Water from a Stone
Damned with a tiny share of the Colorado River, and running dry, Las Vegas sets its sights on the driest part of the driest state in the Union.
Posted inWotr
Alien grasses are finding new homes in Arizona
By the end of June, some 20 wildfires had reduced large patches of Arizona’s desert scrublands to ash. The blazes eventually burned over 200,000 acres and killed many huge and venerable saguaros, along with smaller cacti, trees and shrubs. “Invasive” grasses carried these fires, those species from somewhere else that are increasingly blamed for environmental […]
Posted inWotr
RVs R Us
Living in a western Colorado mountain town that panders to tourists, vacationers and white-knuckled early retirees driving Greyhound buses converted to homes nicer than I live in, I, too, have suffered. I have been damned, dammed behind these tin-can condos as they’ve labored up passes like mastodons running a marathon. I’ve watched with a perverse […]
Posted inWotr
The Endangered Species Act is a roaring success
The Endangered Species Act — which is being reviewed by Congress this week — is a soaring success. Just look up. Look skyward for a while and you might spy an American bald eagle. Hundreds of them live in my home state of Montana. Across the United States, the bald eagle is a living, flying […]
Posted inWotr
Be a patriot — get your hands dirty
While foraging through my backyard garden the other day for cucumbers, peppers and hot-to-touch chilis, a slogan occurred to me: “Support Our Troops – Plant a Garden.” A garden would demonstrate patriotism because each backyard Eden lessens our dependence upon imported oil. Of course, by itself, imported oil isn’t bad, but an addiction so intense […]