One of the environment’s dirty dozen leads in congressional ‘fair fight’
Dems stumble in Arizona race
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Election-year environmentalism
The Bush administration throws enviros and hunters some bones
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Dear friends
A lesson the First Amendment Writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams came to western Colorado in early October for the 24th annual meeting of the Western Colorado Congress. She spoke to a packed auditorium about the “open space of democracy.” Williams, who just published a book by the same name, talked about the differences that […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Don’t expect Washington to lead the West
It’s election season, and President Bush is using the West as a political game piece. He’s promising to up the timber cut on the national forests and increase oil and gas development, all in the name of jobs and national security. In reality, of course, he’s earning points with his industry supporters, but doing little […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Part-Time Paradise
Mountain towns echo with construction activity, but the resulting homes lie silent much of the year
Posted inWotr
The ghost of Richard Butler surfaces in Arizona
It would be foolish to believe that the death of Aryan Nations’ leader Richard Butler means the death of hate in the West. Butler, who sowed ill will for decades in the region, passed away at the age of 86 Sept. 8 in Hayden, Idaho. He died a broken man, his empire of knuckle-draggers that […]
Posted inWotr
The West has to count on itself
If you care about the environment, and you survived the presidential debates without running out into the backyard to scream at the heavens, you’re a bigger person than I. For those of you who missed them, the three debates included just one question on that “fringe issue” of what’s in the air we breathe and […]
Posted inWotr
American — and proud of it
Until I traveled to Holland recently, I didn’t know how irreversibly American I am, perhaps not precisely a patriot — the word comes from the Latin for father — but certainly one deeply identified with my native land. In Amsterdam, people eyed me with pity, suspicion or loathing as soon as I opened my mouth […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
The conservation hall of fame is too small
Just as sports fans have their legends of the game — their Babe Ruths, Michael Jordans and Jack Nicklauses — so, too, do conservationists. Our legends aren’t household names; my daughter had never heard of Aldo Leopold until her high school science teacher put A Sand County Almanac on her optional reading list last week. […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington
Their fathers were Western conservation giants. Can the younger Udalls bridge today’s social and political divides and leave their own legacy?
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Udall patriarch laments startling changes
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington.” Stewart Udall lives in a comfortable adobe house near downtown Santa Fe, N.M. Now 84 years old, he’s earned the distinguished looks of a Western sage, with his beaked nose, strong face, long hair. Each evening […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
The Udall bloodline is consistent
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Coyote Caucus Takes the West to Washington.” Throw a stick around the West’s public offices and institutions, and the odds are decent you’ll hit a member of the extended Udall clan. Joining Mark Udall and Tom Udall in Congress is their second cousin, […]
Posted inWotr
Nostalgia for Colorado’s past isn’t what it used to be
A wave of yearning for “Colorado as it used to be” has been sweeping the state and I suspect much of the West. It’s almost enough to make you wish for a time machine. If only the past were as wonderful as we think it was. This nostalgic, backward-looking pose is particularly evident in the […]
Posted inWotr
Chain stores discount a town’s true worth
Glasgow, Mont., is a far cry and a long drive from the mountainous western portion of a state that draws its name from the Spanish word montana. I know that because I recently drove to Glasgow, a town of 3,253 that rests in a flat region of northeastern Montana and serves as the county seat […]
Posted inWotr
So much for sticking to the center
Return with us now to those thrilling days of not quite four years ago, when George W. Bush was taking office and almost every veteran political observer — even including your humble agent here — predicted that his presidency would not stray too far from the ideological center. We were, as fools so often are, […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Wandering into wolf territory
The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently. […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Calendar
Visit Albuquerque for RangeNet?s conference, Envisioning Wild Landscapes: Momentum for Change, on Nov. 11-13. The conference will include discussions concerning grazing issues on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands; keynote speakers are U.S. Reps. Ra?l Grijalva, D-N.M., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., who recently introduced the Voluntary Grazing Buyout Act in Congress. Billy Stern […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
University gets smart about food
In May 2003, two environmental studies graduate students at the University of Montana in Missoula teamed up with the university?s Dining Services, a $2.5 million-per-year business, to start the Farm to College program. Since then, the efforts of Crissie McMullan and Shelly Conner have made large-scale local food purchasing a reality: The university has bought […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Klamath farmers stand in the way of progress
Tim Holt’s column on the Klamath Basin makes some excellent points, but misses two of the keys (HCN, 9/13/04: Failure of leadership, not a lack of water, dooms the Klamath). Any rational person familiar with the situation understands that demand reduction is key to rebalancing water in the basin. Gross overallocation of water by the […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Squirrels not victims of conspiracy
The article “Squirrels and scopes in the line of fire” misleads the reader on several points (HCN, 8/30/04: Squirrels and scopes in the line of fire). The 850 trees removed from around the Mount Graham International Observatory were dead, killed in the last several years by a spruce bark beetle infestation. They were removed as […]