The Worldwatch Institute, in partnership with Earthworks, has a new online consumer guide that offers suggestions on how to shop more responsibly, for the sake of both the environment and your family’s health. You can also find out about everything from buying better-quality chocolate to learning where to recycle old DVDs and CDs. www.worldwatch.org/pubs/goodstuff Contact […]
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Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Hidden Waters resurfaces
These days, Charles Bowden is known as a grizzled, pistol-packing scout of the Southwest’s dark side, a man who chronicles the lives and deaths of the border’s most infamous drug runners. A quarter century ago, however, Bowden wrote an unpretentious book, Killing the Hidden Waters, that was equal parts ethnography, mysticism, hydrology and thermodynamics. That […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Dump the stereotypes, Skinner
So, Dave! What happens when the real world doesn’t fit in to your neat, simple categories (HCN, 5/10/04: Motorized recreation belongs in the backcountry)? Say, for example, when an avid hiker (and former NRA member) also avidly defends her family’s right to have fun on their ORVs — or advocates responsible, sustainable logging, grazing and […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Common ground in the ORV debate
In response to Dave Skinner’s essay, I must confess to being what he calls a “greenie” (HCN, 5/10/04: Motorized recreation belongs in the backcountry). But I implore you, Dave, don’t give up all that quickly. You might have allies you have not counted on. First, however, allow me to establish that in western Nevada where […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Let’s get ugly!
Thank heaven for Lydia Millet (HCN, 4/12/04: Die, baby harp seal!). Her challenge to us all — especially to proponents of sentimental, cutesy environmental promotion — is to find “the guts to assault us with the ugly impacts of our own appetites,” rather than the romanticism of the animal and scenic porn of environmental calendars […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
There’s room for beauty, too
Lydia Millet describes landscape photographs as seen in calendars and posters as pornography because “they offer comfort to the viewer” and “serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness” (HCN, 4/12/04: Die, baby harp seal!). Many of the individuals I know who have experience traveling in wilderness realize that landscape photographs can be both simulations […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Mountain bikers go wild
OREGON Environmentalists hoping to create a 37,000-acre Badlands Wilderness Area about 20 miles east of Bend, Ore., got a tremendous boost in February, when the local mountain bike group endorsed the proposal. Because bicycles are banned from wilderness areas, many mountain bikers are lukewarm, at best, about proposals to create more wilderness. But the biker-run […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Follow-up
Is clean water bad for business? Last year, the New Mexico Environment Department told Phelps Dodge Mining Company to clean up contaminated groundwater beneath its Tyrone Mine (HCN, 5/12/03: Phelps tries to Dodge bond). The state recently upheld its decision despite the company’s appeal, leading a company spokesman to tell the press: “We think it […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Heard around the West
MONTANA How do you test a garbage can to find out if it’s tough enough to withstand the long claws and big brain of a ravenous grizzly bear? Just ask a seasoned hand at product-testing — a half-ton grizzly named Sam — to lend his expertise. Sam and seven other bears are “official product inspectors” […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
At home on the range with 10-year-old writers and dreamers
During a spring storm, a group of fourth-graders are considering how their lives will change in the future. I’ve asked them to think about anything that might be different for them tomorrow, or even 30 years down the road. A bunch of hands go up, and the first student I call on looks out the […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
I’ve tried, but I can’t eat the view
I’ve given up on one of the great American dreams — owning a home of my own. Why? Because it’s becoming impossible to find affordable housing in the West, even in the non-resort towns. It’s easy to tell that Missoula, Mont., is still a working-class town. Just check out the traffic on the tree-shaded lanes, […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Wal-Mart: Love it or loathe it
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Wal-Mart’s Manifest Destiny.” For two years in a row, Fortune Magazine, in a survey of 10,000 business experts, has named Wal-Mart “America’s Most Admired Company.” But if businesspeople love Wal-Mart, many working people loathe it: Wal-Mart now faces at least 30 class-action lawsuits from […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
In a bitter strike, grocery workers lost ground
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Wal-Mart’s Manifest Destiny.” At the same time that Inglewood was fighting off Wal-Mart’s assault, the United Food and Commercial Workers union staged the longest grocery store strike in U.S. history. The strike was triggered when traditional grocery chains decided to prepare for the Supercenter […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Defending the West Desert: Utah activist Jason Groenewold
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH — Utah’s West Desert is a tough place to love. The barren landscape, which stretches across tens of thousands of square miles along Utah’s border with Nevada, lacks the redrock spires and canyons that draw recreationists and sightseers to southern Utah. The occasional mountain range and salt flat are the only […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Wilderness up for lease
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Buying time against the energy assault.” As industry gobbles up oil and gas leases across the West, citizen-proposed wilderness areas, which encompass millions of acres of public lands, have become battlegrounds. Under a Clinton-era policy, these areas […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Buying time against the energy assault
Do oil and gas leases offer citizens a chance to save the land?
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Small-time ski operator fights for his life
A mom-and-pop ski area takes on a Texas billionaire and his plans for a mega-development
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Arizona voters say ‘yes’ to open space
Unusual alliances — and a little bit of pork — give land preservation an economic boost
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Dear Friends
The good news The High Country News board of directors came to Paonia in late May, to mull over the finances and plan for the future. The numbers for the first quarter of 2004 look good: Our expenses are below budget, and our income is above budget, thanks largely to a grant from the Hewlett […]
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Ballot-box democracy
A few years ago, my hometown got a taste of the rancor that often comes with growth and development in the West these days. A local businessman wanted to build a subdivision on some hay pastures outside Paonia’s city limits, in an area the town’s comprehensive plan had identified as important for its agricultural value. […]