Sea lice are on the move — and they’re spreading, courtesy of fish farms (HCN, 3/17/03: Bracing against the tide). According to a study published in the British Proceedings of the Royal Society, wild seaward salmon passing a fish farm in the Pacific were 73 times more likely to contract sea lice, a parasite that […]
Follow-up
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Reid Rosenthal Responds
Editor’s Note: Mr. Rosenthal had a lengthy response to our story, Write-Off on the Range. In the interest of allowing him to fully express his thoughts, we include below a letter from Mr. Rosenthal and the edits that Mr. Rosenthal would have made to the story if he were the editor. High Country News stands […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
How to Examine Conservation Easements
How to learn more about conservation easements and land trusts in your area
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Heard around the West
UTAH Some snowmobilers have been known to skim their machines over water, striving for distance. Not surprisingly, sinking happens, not to mention at least one drowning. But how about vrooming a snowmobile over dirt? How far could you get? A 35-year-old man found one answer recently, when he gunned his snowmobile down an unpaved parking […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Ego gates get my goat — and that’s just the beginning
So my neighbor finally got a ranchette. Whether it’s five acres or 40, the next step is apparently the perfect entrance gate. Rancheteers have made these huge gates the latest symbol of affluence in the West. They boast uprights bigger than my house, flanked by imported decorative boulders. The crossbar seems sometimes to be a […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Colorado tax credits make easements work for working people
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Write-off on the Range.” Colorado farmers Dorothy and Norman Kehmeier have raised more than $500,000 in cash, simply by donating conservation easements on about 200 acres of their land. And they’d like other landowners to hear about it. “It’s wonderful,” Dorothy Kehmeier says. She’s […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Congress looks to reform a system with no steering wheel
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Write-off on the Range.” When a congressional think tank proposed overhauling the tax rules surrounding conservation easements in January, it hit private-land conservationists like a thunderbolt. As part of its 435-page report on reforming many aspects of the federal tax system, the Joint Committee […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Conservation Easement Statistics
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Write-off on the Range.” 1.1 billion Total private acres in United States 2 million Number of acres of “development sprawl” consuming landscapes per year 800,000 Number of acres of land protected by local and regional land trusts per year, either in new conservation easements […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
A glimpse of the past in a grain of pollen
NAME Cathy Whitlock VOCATION Montana State University paleoecologist AGE 51 HOME BASE Bozeman, Montana NOTED FOR Discerning ecosystem changes over the last 20,000 years SHE SAYS “It’s a great puzzle trying to figure out how an ecosystem works.” “For me, it’s about solving a big mystery,” says Cathy Whitlock, describing her work as a paleoecologist […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
A massive restoration program may have nothing left to save
Food chain collapsing in the California Delta
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Learning from Moab’s example
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Moab: On the horns of a recreation dilemma.” In western Colorado, the Bureau of Land Management has tackled the issue of dueling recreationists head-on, and come up with a plan that gives each user group room to […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Moab: On the horns of a recreation dilemma
Finally, a limit to off-roading on public lands
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
For sale: Your local ranger station?
Budget cuts and forest thinning force agency to trim down
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
A call for modest reform
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t read a heartwarming story in our local newspaper about a conservation easement deal that is saving some important chunk of the West from the subdivider’s bulldozer. The typical story features the landowner, usually a longtime farmer or rancher, who waxes eloquent about the importance of the land […]
Posted inWotr
Opposing Wal-Mart doesn’t make you a Nazi
I’m a radical, yes. An environmentalist, yes. A small-is-better zealot, yes. A feminist, a fierce supporter of independent bookstores, a rabble rouser. I’ve been called a Chicken Little who shrieks, “The sky is falling!” I admit to all those labels. What I am not, and this is the second time in a decade I’ve been […]
Posted inWotr
On the basketball court, a confusion and profusion of races
Steve Nash was chosen as this year’s most valuable player in the National Basketball Association, and other than that he grew up in British Columbia and now plays for the Phoenix Suns, you might ask what this has to do with the West. A fair question, and one I will get to. Nash is a […]
Posted inWotr
Energy Bill rewards the fattest cats
As you may have noticed, gasoline costs more than of yore. Some basic economics: Gasoline is a manufactured good. Its price depends in part on the price of its basic commodity, in this case crude oil. It costs more than of yore, as does natural gas. More basic economics: The price of crude oil and […]
Posted inWotr
I say good riddance to bad billboards
For four years in the 1980s, I lived in Vermont, and then left for the West after tiring of its busybody politics. But I certainly admired one aspect of life in the bucolic yet politically correct Green Mountain State: No billboards. Back in 1968, the Vermont Legislature passed a law banning billboards, and since then […]
Posted inWotr
Love the gas, not the drill
I have a confession to make: I like natural gas. Every morning at five minutes before 6:00, I wake up to the gentle whumph of the gas stove kicking on in the family room. I then get out of bed, tap on my son’s door and call, “Time to get up,” and plant myself in […]
Posted inWotr
In our rush to protect America, we secretly put Americans at risk
Growing up in Richland, Wash., in the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the Department of Energy produced plutonium for bombs, Trisha Pritikin never imagined that the milk she drank or the air she breathed was poisonous. Her father, a safety engineer at the plant, was supremely patriotic, and the entire family felt proud […]