The Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources Matthew McKinney and William Harmon 297 pages, softcover $30, hardcover $60. Island Press, 2004 Authors McKinney and Harmon look at the West’s endless tug-of-wars over water, land use, fire management and wildlife — issues, they say, best resolved through collaboration, negotiation, or consensus. That’s not easy, […]
The Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate Robert Bryce 327 pages, hardcover $26.00. PublicAffairs, 2004 “I’m all for business. I’m all for government. I just don’t want them to be the same thing,” says Robert Bryce, taking on the state of Texas and its enormous political influence over American life, from […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
The World’s Water 2004-2005: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources
The World’s Water 2004-2005: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources Edited by Peter Gleick 320 pages, softcover $35. Island Press, 2004. The fourth installment of this annual report covers water issues that span the globe. Gleick — president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security — and other water brainiacs contemplate […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
No room for democracy on California farms
Remember high school history class, and all that jive about Thomas Jefferson and his dream of a democracy based around small family farms? When it comes to California, you can toss that dream right out the window. So writes Richard Walker in The Conquest of Bread, a sweeping new take on agriculture in California. “The […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
The artist, her caretaker, and eight years of letters
The initial draw of Maria Chabot — Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949 is its promise of a peek into the artist’s personal life. But the surprise of these collected letters between two women in the 1940s — one of them in northern New Mexico, cleaning out acequias, planting fruit trees and commenting on the “bloodsucker” artists […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Moving beyond stereotypes
Kudos to Jim Stiles for his essay on Old and New Westerners (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). Right on target. For 12 years, I have been fortunate to be a member of a group of Old and New Westerners that has, not easily, gotten mostly beyond the typical attitudes […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
The old urban West speaks out
Perhaps most HCN staff and readers will recognize themselves in Stiles’ essay (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). I did not recognize myself or my neighbors. We are the Old Urban West. I am a fourth-generation Northwesterner living in the urban neighborhood where I was born, a neighborhood as strained […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Dudes and locals need to work together
I smiled at Jim Stiles’ essay (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). In the late 1950s, my mother ripped my sister and me out of New York City and moved us to Wyoming. My mother was tenacious and proud of her “Western” life, but despite over 30 years of living […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Stereotyping sets us back
Jim Stiles’ stereotyping is nothing less than ignorance in its purest form (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). Mr. Stiles, as a journalist, you should know better. It takes but one person to make a change in the world. One woman chose to ride at the front of the bus, […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Westerns don’t protect their own
The essay on the Eastern wind farm clearly belongs to the Real Westerners vs. Effete Easterners genre (HCN, 3/7/05: Easterners tilt at windmills while Westerners joust with a real foe). The fact that wind power has many positive features does not mean that wind turbines should be sited wherever winds are particularly favorable. Easterners like […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Wind farm raises real concerns
The wind farm issue is far less simplistic than Joshua Zaffos would have us believe (HCN, 3/7/05: Easterners tilt at windmills while Westerners joust with a real foe). Yes, there are wealthy people on Nantucket just as there are wealthy people in the West, but they are not the majority. The greater number of people […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Farmers and ranchers say city is stealing water
Steel pumps and filter towers may soon rise from the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico — and that has a small agricultural community seriously concerned. The growing city of Alamogordo wants to draw water from deep within the Tularosa Basin aquifer. But that water is salty. To make it drinkable, the city plans to […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
D-Day for dam decommissioning approaches
Preparations have begun to bring down the dam that has withheld water from 14 miles of Fossil Creek in central Arizona for almost a hundred years. In 1908, laborers built Arizona’s first commercial hydroelectric plant, which diverted more than 95 percent of Fossil Creek’s water. The plant, along with a second facility built nearby in […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Climate model may help farmers know what to grow
What farmer hasn’t wished for a weather-predicting crystal ball? Now, growers in the Yakima Valley have the next best thing: a high-tech climate model that may benefit the entire West. The climate model is adapted from a West-wide model developed by the Department of Energy, which predicts that, over the next 50 years, Western snowpack […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Surprise bequest to protect Columbia Gorge
A scrappy conservation group in Portland has received a giant gift. The $4 million windfall for the Friends of the Columbia Gorge came from Norman Yeon, the son of a legendary Oregon timber and real estate baron. Yeon’s father, John Baptiste Yeon, earned $2.50 a day as a logger when he first arrived in Oregon […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Follow-up
The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, plans to investigate allegations that bunk science led to her agency’s claim that hydraulic fracturing poses “little or no threat” to drinking water. “Frac’ing,” a technique pioneered by Halliburton, increases the production of a gas or oil well by injecting it with liquid, which can include […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA California’s Highway Patrol sees a lot of silly stuff, like the guy crouched down in an open trunk, gamely trying to hang on to lawn chairs, or the driver in the carpool lane pretending that a life-size doll of “SpongeBob SquarePants” was a passenger. Officer Rob Rusconi says he watched a driver struggle to […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Death Valley wakes up with a bang
I stood among the multicolored stones of Death Valley, gazing at the greatest wildflower bloom I’ve ever seen — the greatest bloom of a generation. I had driven from my home in Oregon through the night to see this spectacle, and now that I’d arrived, I found I was unprepared for the power of its […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Montana tells the federal government to butt out
No one knows just when the West decided it had had enough of being run from Washington, D.C. The indications that Montanans have had it with federal mandates became evident in the state Legislature this March. Although the capital routinely ignores the opinions of a state like Montana, which boasts fewer than a million people […]
Posted inApril 18, 2005: What Happened to Winter?
Drought and spring rains portend an explosive summer
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “What happened to winter?“ Where there’s drought, there’s fire, and this year, the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies are bracing for a fierce summer. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, D, whose Department of Ecology declared a statewide drought emergency on March 10, has requested […]