I took a stroll through our lower pasture the other evening and discovered that April showers had turned it into a riotous weed patch. It wasn’t what my wife and I had planned three years ago, when we bought the badly overgrazed property. Back then, we took the advice of our local cooperative extension agent […]
Laboring for the environment
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
In Search of Solidarity
Will hard times renew historic alliances between environmentalists and labor unions?
Posted inWotr
A feminist liberal looks back at age 90
What’s it like to look back at 90, over most of a century? Been there, done that, enjoyed most of it. When I was born in 1914, women could not vote. But in my lifetime, a woman named Hillary Clinton may well become president. The year I was born, we were at war. When I […]
Posted inWotr
Who can argue with equality for all salmon?
A new policy from the Bush administration on endangered Pacific salmon is startling in its simplicity and brilliance. The policy cuts through all the scientific mumbo-jumbo the press repeats and puts a finger on the basic problem: Salmon are endangered because there aren’t enough of them. If there were lots of salmon in the rivers, […]
Posted inWotr
Revisiting “A River No More”
With the five-year drought worsening in the Colorado River Basin, two Western icons are emerging like sore thumbs aching for attention. One is the casino-hotels of Las Vegas, their resplendent fountains and the waterways on which gondolas float and water spurts in time to music. The other is the graceful arch of Glen Canyon Dam […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
The Faces Behind the Lawsuits
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Shooting Spree.” Relentless Johanna Wald Natural Resources Defense Council, branch in San Francisco Bio Law degree from Yale University, 1967 Helped open the first NRDC office in California in 1972, and quickly became the leader in BLM issues, pioneering cases on grazing, coal mining […]
Posted inWotr
Throwing out the dishwater
Once I lived in a one-room log cabin where I pumped my water from a well and heated it on a wood stove. When I was finished washing my dishes, I carried the dishpan outside and tossed the water on the nearby sagebrush. It seemed natural to me to return the water to the same […]
Posted inWotr
Nature is not a club to bash people with
As a nature writer, I’m always interested when a columnist or politician claims to speak for “nature.” As a gay Portlander, I’m especially amazed to hear that “nature” has passed judgment against me. A religious activist here in Oregon keeps getting anti-gay initiatives on the ballot, but he hardly seems the paragon of nature. True, […]
Posted inWotr
Permanent life support is no substitute for a native land
One rides the summer thermals; the other glides through rivers and streams like a pale torpedo. They could not be more dissimilar, this big buzzard and the silvery fish, yet they have a great deal in common: Both are icons of the environmental movement, and both challenge us to deepen our understanding of the relationship […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Seeing the forest for its dead trees
Until piñon pines began dying by the millions across the Southwest a few years ago — victims of drought and voracious bark beetles — few people gave much thought to the gnarled, scrubby trees or the delicate ecosystem that supported them. Even now, attention is focused on the piñons mainly as a wildfire hazard rather […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Calendar
The Colorado Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council is co-sponsoring the Teton Green Building Conference, June 2-4 in Grand Teton National Park. Developers, planners, builders and architects will learn from national experts about the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard and building science, methods and materials for colder climates.www.tetongreenbuilding.com 970-328-6449 The University […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Report unearths the high cost of mining
If you drive a car, wear jewelry, or use a cell phone, you use the products of mineral mining. But mining for aluminum, gold, and other metals exacts a steep toll in damage to ecosystems and human health. A recent report from Earthworks and Oxfam America, Dirty Metals: Mining, Communities and the Environment, details the […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Follow-up
Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative — a group of ranchers, environmentalists and off-road vehicle users — has unveiled a wilderness proposal for the Owyhee Canyonlands (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the middle path). The plan would protect 511,000 acres, including 40,000 acres that would be cow-free. U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, hopes to introduce a bill in early June […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA If Arnold Schwarzenegger has his way, gas-powered cars will be terminated in 10-15 years. The media-savvy governor recently drove a hydrogen-powered Toyota to a press conference in Davis, where he championed hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Schwarzenegger, who has played an unstoppable robot from the future, predicted the […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
The common beauty of a spring day
In the afternoon, they drove side by side, three abreast in the big Ford, and watched the land. When they came to a small rise on a gravel road between nowhere and nowhere, they slowed to a stop and lowered the windows. They sat there like they might be sitting their horses, or at a […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Motorized recreation belongs in the backcountry
I’ve had motorcycles in some form, on-or-off-road, since I was 11 years old. That’s how I went fishing or just exploring, dodging logging trucks as I gallivanted through the Flathead National Forest in Montana. It was, and still is, great fun; try it sometime. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with motorized recreation. […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Off-road vehicles are chewing up our public lands
It’s hard to find anybody these days who’d even try to argue that off-road vehicles don’t damage public lands throughout the West. The U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded in 1999 that “with an increase of off-highway vehicle traffic, i.e., motorcycles, four-wheel drive vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service have observed […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Filmmakers Filmmakers Dru Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis: Documenting the Evolving West
MISSOULA, MONTANA — Filmmaking isn’t about big budgets, explosions or special effects for Dru Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis, the only full-time employees at the Missoula, Mont.-based High Plains Films. Instead, it’s the tool they use to document — and, they hope, protect — the ever-evolving West. In the early ’90s, Carr and Hawes-Davis were students […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Seattle embarks on a dramatic experiment in restoration
Ecologists try to make second-growth forests function like vanishing old growth
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Dam’s price tag skyrockets
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Water ‘holy war’ rages in central Utah.” After decades of rancorous debate, construction is under way on the Animas-La Plata dam project in dusty southwestern Colorado (HCN, 8/27/01: A-LP gets federal A-OK). But anyone who thought the […]