“Where is this guy from?” I said to myself, flipping to the inside cover of the new book, “True Grizz,” by Douglas Chadwick. It said the author lived in Whitefish, Mont., a trendy town north of Flathead Lake. He may live there, I thought, but where’s he from? It’s embarrassing to recount my thought process. […]
Being a local doesn’t make you any better
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them
In recent years, we’ve watched droughts parch the West, heat waves claim lives, and tempests encroach on the nation’s capital. With the advent of plagues like West Nile and SARS, soothsayers have enough fodder to last until the apocalypse. But in Six Modern Plagues and How We are Causing Them, author Mark Jerome Walters takes […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Road ripping
The 43,000 mile-long U.S. Interstate Highway System “has been called the largest public works program in the history of the world dwarfing … Egypt’s pyramids and the Great Wall of China,” writes David Havlick in No Place Distant: Roads and Motorized Recreation on American’s Public Lands. Roads across our national forests, parks, wildlife refuges and […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Calendar
The Idaho Conservation League will showcase eight professional photographers’ work in Images of Wild Idaho, Dec. 4 in Boise. The show is part of ICL’s effort to win wilderness protection for the Boulder-White Cloud and Pioneer Mountains and the Owyhee Canyonlands. www.wildidaho.org 208-345-6933 On Jan. 9 and 10, the second annual Wild and Scenic Environmental […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
The BLM is blowing in the wind
It’s no secret that the Bush administration is pushing for increased oil and gas development across the West. But one often-overlooked recommendation of Bush’s National Energy Policy calls for greater reliance on sources of renewable energy, such as the sun and wind. In response, the Bureau of Land Management is studying the prospects for developing […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
The Daily Sun doesn’t shine
“The Big Story Written Small,” about the shortcomings of daily newspapers in the West was well- written and informative (HCN, 10/13/03: The Big Story Written Small). However, I was taken aback to read that my own hometown newspaper, the Arizona Daily Sun, was one of nine newspapers to be awarded the first Wallace Stegner Award […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Journalism’s dirty little secret
Ray Ring’s excellent piece on the shortcomings of Western newspapers (HCN, 10/13/03: The Big Story Written Small) brought back a lot of memories from my own daily reporting days. His story, and the recent report from the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, reveal a dirty little secret: Too many of our newspapers are skewering […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Journalism is in bad shape
Congratulations on a fine piece by Ray Ring, “The Big Story Written Small” (HCN, 10/13/03: The Big Story Written Small). I was a reporter in Arizona in the early ’80s who wrote extensively on environmental and development issues, and frequently found I had the field pretty much to myself. Over the past two decades, alas, […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Whirling disease hits Yellowstone
Cutthroat trout, a native species in trouble around the West, are facing an increasing threat in a key sanctuary, Yellowstone National Park. Whirling disease, spread by a European parasite that showed up in the park five years ago, now infects 12 to 20 percent of the cutthroats in Yellowstone Lake, according to biologists’ studies. And […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Moving the cheese to New Mexico
Neighbors and local governments are increasingly fed up with the stinky, unhealthy conditions of the huge dairy operations on the Snake River Plain. One of the world’s largest cheesemakers, Ireland’s Glanbia Inc., recently wanted to expand its operations near Twin Falls, but local opposition — in the form of heated public meetings and two counties’ […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Logging faces new pollution controls
A recent federal court ruling and a new California law could both curtail stream pollution by the timber industry. On Oct. 12, outgoing Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that allows regional water quality boards to veto logging plans if they would damage streams classified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as “impaired due to […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
State struggling to keep up with CBM
Pollution regulations for coalbed methane wells in Wyoming are severely under-enforced, a state task force says. “Basically, there’s one full-time (inspector) covering all coalbed methane activity (in Wyoming),” says Todd Parfitt, who represented the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on the task force. The department’s lone field inspector monitors 3,924 permitted discharge points from […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Follow-up
Is that sound science, or the sound of science being strangled? For years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has pressed the Army Corps of Engineers to operate its Missouri River dams to mimic natural river flows and help endangered fish and birds (HCN, 11/11/02: Corps stands behind status quo). But the Corps has consistently […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Heard Around the West
MONTANA Here’s a story to make you wince: Three mountain lion kittens, all about eight weeks old, tried to cross railroad tracks 12 miles west of Butte. The kittens were wet from crossing a nearby creek, and the air temperature was only 10 degrees. So the kittens stuck fast, one frozen to the track on […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Our publicly owned forests are being subverted
As the nation remains preoccupied with the war against terrorism, President Bush has been carrying out a less visible assault on another front: our national forests. Most of the attacks over the last year have been below the radar — in arcane rules, stealth riders and misnamed legislation. In this many-fronted assault, big timber is […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Cold War workers seek compensation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut.” Workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are a special breed: Not only do they work with the most dangerous objects on the planet, but most of them believe in what they are doing and are […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Atomic comics
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut.” Visitors to the “history” section of the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos will find more than photos of early lab workers and atomic test explosions. They’ll also find comic books, including Learn How Dagwood Splits […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Mixing oil and water in the Lone Star state
Why are Texans raising hell about a water deal that could raise money for their schools?
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
A mountain town considers going ‘micropolitan’
An airport expansion could forever change an out-of-the-way ski town
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Voters swipe at sprawl
Plan to build commuter expressway through national monument hits roadblock