Legislatures boost wildlife and clean energy, while bucking the nuclear and oil industries
As Washington waffles, Western states go green
Posted inWotr
Why I pedal past the pump
This summer, it’s been hard for me to react to all the fuss about high gasoline prices. I never have sticker shock at a gas pump because I haven’t owned a car for 30 years, and far from being a liability, my life has been all the richer for it. It has certainly enriched my […]
Posted inWotr
In a small town, the police blotter can be big news
The biggest deterrent to crime in a small rural town may be the newspaper’s police blotter. With so little crime news, every infraction makes it into print. Worse, since everybody knows everybody, even your tiniest speeding ticket goes into a gigantic Gossip Database, to be recalled by little old ladies at the least appropriate moments. […]
Posted inWotr
Stubborn people appreciate the ‘barren’ Great Plains
When people who don’t live here write about the Great Plains, they usually use the words “bleak,” “empty” and “wasteland” to describe it. The writer often suggests that our economy and people are “depressed” because their “lifestyles” are “vanishing.” Photographs show sky and clouds above miles of windblown, rolling — not flat — grass. Prairie […]
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A lesson from the old ones at Mesa Verde
A green-tailed towhee is down in the canyon, hidden amid the green leafy oaks, singing his heart out as all male towhees do. I am in Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, gazing at the spectacle of Cliff Palace. Just then, a ranger appears announcing some spare tickets to Cliff Palace; someone, it seems, has reconsidered […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Complete History of New Mexico
Complete History of New Mexico Kevin McIlvoy, 174 pages, paperback $15: Graywolf Press, 2004. This collection of short stories from a Las Cruces-based writer is published by the independent Graywolf Press. Kevin McIlvoy’s stories are written from a variety of perspectives — from 11-year-old Chum telling the history of the state as he sees it, […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Pueblo Indian Agriculture
Pueblo Indian Agriculture James A. Vlasich, 384 pages, hardcover $34.95: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. James Vlasich explores the American Indian farms along New Mexico’s Rio Grande. The 19 pueblos there have endured — despite Spanish conquistadors, land and water disputes with Anglo settlers, and the vagaries of U.S. Indian policy. Now, the Body […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures Lester R. Brown, 272 pages, hardcover $27.95, paperback $15.95: W.W. Norton, 2005. Lester Brown, the environmental world’s leading prophet of doom, brings us his latest nonfiction disaster thriller. As world populations boom, farmers reach deeper and deeper underground […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Head games in the hot, hot desert
No matter how well-mapped the world seems to be, explorers remain intrepid. In The Way Out, Colorado writer Craig Childs writes about how he and his traveling companion, Dirk Vaughan, found their way through a desert on the Navajo Indian Reservation in southern Utah. Both Childs and Vaughan seem to crave the harsh truths of […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Tales of Colorado’s high-elevation tailings
In 1983, an anonymous caller warned Doc Smith that “his river would turn red.” Sure enough, the next day, the rancher and veterinarian watched toxic mining metals surge through the Arkansas River as it crossed his property. This wasn’t the first time: His grandfather had fought the effects of mining on his ranchlands and livestock […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Time for new thinking on the Snake River
After decades of deadlock, it is time to reframe the debate about salmon recovery and the four lower Snake River dams (HCN, 6/13/05: For salmon, a crucial moment of decision). We must stop thinking about this issue in terms of “fish versus energy” or “environmentalists versus farmers.” There is a solution here — but it […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Warming climate shrinks conifer habitat
In “A glimpse of the past in a grain of pollen,” Cathy Whitlock comments that lodgepole pine probably has a bright future due to its ability to adapt to a warming climate (HCN, 5/30/05: A glimpse of the past in a grain of pollen). The question is: How warm? Since all high-elevation conifers (including lodgepole […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Visiting a desert cathedral
As a lover of Glen Canyon, I persuaded my husband to make a special trip out from Los Angeles to see Cathedral in the Desert before the waters rose again (HCN, 6/13/05: The brief but wonderful return of Cathedral in the Desert). On May 1, our anniversary, we paddled our boat in. Across from the […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Living lightly in exurbia
Regarding Allen Best’s provocative story on exurbia, I think he paints with too broad a brush (HCN, 6/13/05: How dense can we be?). There are those of us living in paradise who try to do so with environmental consciousness, and who are not a drain on our county treasuries. My husband and I live on […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
HCN real estate ads smack of hypocrisy
In “How Dense Can We Be?” HCN decries large lot development in exurbia (HCN, 6/13/05: How dense can we be?). The article says that buying large lots away from the city is bad: Exurbs are a fire hazard, require more infrastructure, and residents have to drive long distances to get anywhere. Then, in the Unclassifieds, […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Let them eat comment letters
The comment in your latest issue from the bureaucrat, saying 50,000 petition signatures have no effect on policy-making, sounds exactly like the last public expressions of Marie Antoinette before they cut her head off (HCN, 6/27/05: Writing a comment letter? Better make it good). When the French peasants were starving for bread in the late […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Mining waste dumped in streams — and now lakes
The Bush administration tweaked Clean Water Act regulations to reclassify mining waste as “fill.” Now, that revised definition has been applied to metals mining for the first time — allowing a gold mine to put its tailings directly into an Alaskan lake. The 1972 Clean Water Act prohibited dumping waste into streams and lakes. But […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Follow-up
Southern Arizona’s San Pedro River, the Southwest’s last free-flowing desert river, dried up for the first time since the U.S. Geological Survey started tracking flows in 1904 (HCN, 8/30/04: A Thirst for Growth). Beginning on July 4, river flows fluctuated between zero and 0.3 cubic feet per second. But when the river dried on the […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Heard around the West
IDAHO “It’s the ultimate in recycling,” says Victor Bruha. He and a friend, Daniel Hidalgo, have begun turning large mounds of bison poop into high-quality art paper. The idea isn’t really new: An Australian company sells kangaroo-dung paper, and in Thailand, elephants supply the needed material in super-sized quantities. But it took months for Hidalgo […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2005: The Many Faces of Richard Pombo
Life rises from the ashes, in the form of a humble toad
Change can be good — even violent, earth-shaking change. Just ask Charlie Crisafulli. Twenty-five years ago on May 18, at 8:32 in the morning, Mount St. Helens erupted, blasting ash, steam and superheated gases 80,000 feet into the atmosphere high above southern Washington. The north end of the mountain collapsed in the largest landslide in […]