ARIZONA Environmentalists and state game managers are locked in a battle over the man-made water holes that some biologists say are keeping bighorn sheep and other desert species alive in the drought. As the Sonoran Desert National Monument south of Phoenix, the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the Bureau of Land Management want to […]
Water holes awash in controversy
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Follow-up
The Duwamish Indians have had their land confiscated by the United States government and then by the city of Seattle (which is named after a Duwamish chief), and their status as a federally-recognized tribe rescinded by the Bush administration, but the tribe is determined to keep fighting (HCN, 6/10/02: Duwamish? Duwamish who?). The 560-member tribe […]
Posted inApril 12, 2004: The One-Party West
Jetboats stir up the Frank
IDAHO A new Forest Service management plan for the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness could increase jetboat traffic, and would allow airplanes continued access to four controversial landing strips. Jetboats and airstrips normally aren’t allowed in wilderness areas, but the 1980 act that established “the Frank” allowed those uses to continue there. […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Heard around the West
COLORADO Under the headline “Say what?” Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reporter Michael Bender let a legislator’s faux pas wave in the breeze. State Sen. Mark Hillman got so fired up during a debate about a renewable energy bill that would almost certainly put windmills on his turf — the state’s eastern plains — that he […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Look for the best — and keep it
This country has been built on the idea of running away, of escaping whatever makes us dissatisfied, uncomfortable or ill-at-ease. It’s a vision of entitlement that began with the founding of the Plymouth Colony four hundred years ago and caused us to spread ourselves resolutely across a continent. But more than a century after the […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
The West’s mythmakers are now its newcomers
If you heard about the man who kicked off his campaign for governor by swinging a medieval battle sword on horseback in the middle of downtown Billings, you probably thought, “Only in Montana.” Glenn Schaffer posed at the offices of the local paper in February on a stallion named Big Dog Thunder Horse, and said […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Green investor Hal Brill: Bringing the Money Home
PAONIA, COLORADO — In a house stuffed with green-building books, astrologic calendars and a world-spanning array of wooden drums, a basement office is one of the few signs that Hal Brill’s life has headed squarely into the world of high finance and asset management. “I’m definitely one of the more unlikely candidates to be an […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Fish farms take to the high seas
Program moves forward with little science or oversight
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Senate rejects Energy Bill – again
But the energy industry is amply funding its champions’ re-election
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Dear Friends
Visitors A rite of winter here is climbing out of bed to tune in to the morning avalanche report, which is usually delivered with aplomb by Knox Williams, the head of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. We were pleasantly surprised when Williams and Vince Matthews, the director of the Colorado Geological Survey, showed up on […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
The other bottom line
One of the Bush administration’s trademarks is its absolute determination to run government like a business. Economic efficiency is job number one, and government is being ruthlessly pared down — and shopped out — in the pursuit of that goal. It’s increasingly obvious that the strategy has gotten us into deep trouble in Iraq, where […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Outsourced
As the Bush administration rushes to put the public lands into the hands of private industry, a model group of Forest Service employees gets canned
Posted inWotr
My 40 acres of Eden and the planner’s dilemma
In the 1980s, when I was a college teacher in Prescott, Ariz., I often took my history students down to Cordes Junction to visit Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s urban experiment in the high desert. In class, we were studying the rise of the city and reading Kevin Reilly’s The West and the World, so […]
Posted inWotr
Maybe a good work ethic requires real jobs
A specter is haunting the mountain resorts of the West, not the specter of a working-class revolt against the owning class, but the specter of no working class at all. In western Colorado in recent years, some restaurants and shops have had to cut business hours due to a lack of workers to fill their […]
Posted inWotr
Ruminating on cows
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with cows. I’ve cursed them loudly when they turned my favorite mountain meadow into a cow-pie strewn wasteland. But then, they taste so good. I’ve inched my way through a herd of these stupid beasts on some highway as their cowboy masters moved them to summer range or to […]
Posted inWotr
Eating humble pie can be good for you
From the fifth rung of the ladder, I surveyed the scene, and the conclusion was unavoidable: I’d been screwing up for years. This winter marked a full decade since I bought a small orchard on the north coast of California, but the trees weren’t in top condition any more. With my two riverside acres came […]
Posted inWotr
Democrats hope for a new day in the West
Two recent events signal a new development in Western politics. The first is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s call for a Western primary in the mountain states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The second is the launching of a “Democrats for the West” initiative by leading Democrats from those […]
Posted inApril 12, 2004: The One-Party West
The environment’s ‘most durable foe’
During the rising tide of environmentalism in the 1960s, one man earned the title of the movement’s “most durable foe.” Historian Steven C. Schulte’s new book, Wayne Aspinall and the Shaping of the American West, profiles the congressman who unabashedly promoted the development of the West’s public lands and shaped American environmental policy. For more […]
Posted inApril 12, 2004: The One-Party West
Calendar
The League of Conservation Voters has released its 2003 National Environmental Scorecard. To see how your senator or representative voted on environmental issues, visit: www.lcv.org 202-785-8683 Colorado College launches its first annual State of the Rockies Report Card at a conference May 3-4 in Colorado Springs. New college president Richard Celeste hosts a detailed look […]