“Just grab a shirt and let’s go,” my girlfriend said. But I hesitated. We were going whitewater rafting with her mother, and the top T-shirt in my drawer proclaimed its wearer an “Uneducated Idiot.” Somehow it didn’t seem a wise message. The moment has resonated with me, in part because I live near Yellowstone National […]
T-shirt etiquette confounds and confuses
Posted inWotr
A letter to a rancher named George Bush
Dear Mr. President: We’re back in an energy boom in parts of the West, and this made me wonder how a rancher like yourself might feel if geologists discovered an enormous pocket of natural gas beneath your spread in Texas. What if the story got out, and the press corps suddenly appeared at your Western […]
Posted inWotr
Small farmers seek refuge in the city
Squeezed out of their traditional outlets by larger growers and global competition, Oregon’s small farmers are seeking refuge in the cities. They’re selling directly to customers at farmer’s markets–and, in the process, helping urbanites reconnect with the source of their food. “This is the farmer’s only hope, the only way we can make a living […]
Posted inWotr
From Washington, D.C., comes a new spoils system
Under the guise of flexibility, the Bush administration is quietly engineering a corporate takeover of government. President Bush has ordered all federal agencies to solicit bids from private corporations to replace 425,000 civil service jobs by the next election. That’s nearly one-quarter of the entire permanent federal workforce. The National Park Service has been one […]
Posted inWotr
The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Route 666 is fading in the distance. That stepson of the Mother Road –Route 66 –is headed toward oblivion. That’s a shame, because for me, like plenty of pavement pilgrims who arrived in the West over the last half-century in RVs, SUVs or astride Harleys, the Devil’s Highway was the road into God’s Country. U.S. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
NEPA gets short shrift in the courts
For more than a year, environmentalists have been warning that the Bush administration is attempting an unprecedented rollback of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). A recent study of NEPA court cases by the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife indicates that such warnings have merit. Supporters of NEPA describe it as the Magna Carta […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
A peek over the edge
In the endless arguments over public land, it’s healthy to seek the boggy middle ground. But it’s also worthwhile to stroll out to the edge, out where the arguments define right and wrong. For readers ready for such a stroll, Richard W. Behan has written a provocative travel guide, Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Calendar
Colorado State University is holding its 10th Annual Conference on Tailings and Mine Waste on Oct. 12-15 in Vail. For more information or to register, call Linda Hinshaw at 970-491-6081, or log onto www.tailings.org. The Environmental Protection Agency is holding its Brownfields 2003: Growing a Greener America Conference in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 27-29. Registration […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Digging through the dust of Libby
For decades, the best jobs in Libby, Mont., were to be found at the local vermiculite mine. The work was tough and dusty, but it paid better than anything else in northern Montana. In the 1970s, however, mine workers, their families, and their neighbors started dying of respiratory diseases and rare, painful cancers. Libbyites didn’t […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
We’re starving our land managers to pay private companies
Wildfires are again raging as heat and drought continue across the West. Now that Congress has recessed without providing any funding for firefighting, the U.S. Forest Service is expected to keep fighting the fires, and to take the money needed for that task from other areas in its already shrinking budget. Though our national parks […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
We can restore the forests
As a consultant who is involved with restoration silviculture from the ponderosa pine forests of New Mexico to the Oregon white oak forests of the Willamette Valley, I have been frustrated with the lack of understanding by the general public, as well as federal and state land managers, of the reasons behind the increase in […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Light them and leave them
When it comes to fire, we need to get going on some concrete changes and stop pussyfooting around (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle). I can’t speak for spruce stands in Wyoming, or Doug-fir old growth in Oregon, or redwood groves in California, but let me say this about ponderosa forests and the sky islands of […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Developer tries to make a killing off the Black Canyon
Notorious for snapping up private inholdings surrounded by federal land and then reselling them for big profits, Colorado developer Tom Chapman is at it again. Chapman made a name for himself in 1992, when he used a helicopter to carry building supplies for a luxury cabin into a 240-acre inholding within the West Elk Wilderness […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
State land no longer just for the cows
For the first time, environmentalists have outbid a rancher to gain control of a grazing allotment on state land in Arizona. The Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians had tried to lease the allotment since 1997. But the state land office repeatedly rejected the applications, saying only ranchers could bid on Arizona’s 8.3 million acres of school-trust […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Feds to Energy Department: Slow down
In the struggle to clean up nuclear waste left by weapons programs and power plants, the West’s men in black robes are ganging up on the U.S. Department of Energy. So far this year, ruling in environmentalist lawsuits, no fewer than three federal judges have ordered the department to do a more careful job. On […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Bush administration stretches a lawsuit to get the cut out
In the Pacific Northwest, trees probably will start falling faster than they have in nearly a decade. In August, the Bush administration committed to more than double the amount of logging in public forests west of the Cascades — including massive old-growth trees. The commitment came in a legal settlement with 18 Oregon counties and […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Follow-up
Another Interior Department official is under investigation for a conflict of interest: This time it’s the department’s top lawyer, William Myers (HCN, 6/23/03). Watchdog groups say Myers, who represented public-lands ranching associations as a Boise lawyer and signed a recusal agreement after his appointment as solicitor, met with cattle interests seven times to discuss changes […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
The best little radio show in the West
An appreciation of Radio High Country News,and of the band of brilliant, visionary and completely nuts peoplewho made it possible
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Heard Around the West
UTAH Some Western wag once said that the most dangerous thing in a forest was a bunch of Boy Scouts with hatchets. In Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest, make that heavy equipment instead of hatchets. When his son needed a service project to become an Eagle Scout, Scott Vanleeuwen proposed “cleaning up” an abandoned trail that […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
Like Paul on the road to Damascus
The fact that cynicism and irony are deeply entrenched in popular culture is hardly headline news; most of us indulge in them from time to time, slide into a detached stance if for no other reason than self-defense. Harmless enough, probably, in small doses. But as I was walking past the Toyota dealership some weeks […]