When a developer threatened to bid on 1,280 acres of school trust land in the redrock country northeast of Moab, Peter Lawson and Anne Wilson laid out $1.3 million to preserve the mouth of Mary Jane Canyon. “The prospect of having this canyon we love so much have houses run through it was more than […]
Couple buys state land to block development
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Showdown at the Four Corners
Visitors to the Southwest know the Four Corners Monument as a bleak, dusty site that tourists flee once they’ve snapped a photo on the slab where four states come together. But that could all change with a proposed $4 million expansion project. Four years ago, Congress authorized $2 million to build an interpretive center, permanent […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Toxic waste looms over village
While a toxic waste heap inches toward a northern New Mexico village, a mining company and the state crawl toward a reclamation plan. In the 1960s, the mining company Molycorp dumped wasterock from an open-pit molybdenum mine, leaving a 1.6 million-cubic-yard toxic pile above the small town of Questa (HCN, 8/28/00: The mine that turned […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Follow-up
It isn’t easy being Indian, and it’s even harder being Navajo. A special investigator into the mismanagement of Indian money from oil and gas royalties found that companies paid Anglo landowners 20 times what they paid Navajos when building pipelines across the reservation (HCN, 5/12/03: Missing Interior money: Piles or pennies?). Bureau of Indian Affairs […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Burning one for the road
Ecoterrorists strike in Southern California, and an SUV owners’ group lashes out at environmentalists
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Heard Around the West
THE NEW WEST To the question, “What would Jesus drive?” originally asked by the Evangelical Environmental Network, one group has an easy answer: a large SUV, of course. “Most people think it’s a ridiculous question, and that’s the approach we’ve taken toward our own ads,” says a spokesman for the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Changing the number won’t change the fortunes of small towns strung across the dusty Southwest … where the future offers little more hope than dry thunderclouds promise rain.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
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 inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Conservationists work on cooperation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The West’s Biggest Bully.” KALISPELL, Mont. — “In the past, almost everything you read about (environmentalists) was about lawsuits, appeals and conflict,” says Ben Long. “We’re trying to reframe the debate around what the community agrees on, rather than what splits us up.” Long, […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Sin City keeps its fringes wild
Las Vegans rally in an unprecedented fight to preserve open space
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Delta beast rears its head
The U.S. Department of Interior may be ready to resurrect the Yuma Desalting Plant
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Dear Friends
IN FROM THE HEAT When Nancy LaPlaca first became a subscriber to High Country News, she sat in her apartment in Tempe, Ariz., and wondered where Paonia was. Now, 16 years later, she knows exactly where it is: Nancy moved here in July to become HCN’s marketing associate. No stranger to environmental causes, Nancy has […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
A shock to the system
When Ray Rasker, director of the Sonoran Institute’s SocioEconomics program, traveled to Montana’s Flathead Valley recently to lead a training workshop for local environmentalists, he was pleasantly surprised. “I’d always remembered that the environmental community up there was very divided,” says Rasker, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., “but we had 50 enviros all in the […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
The West’s Biggest Bully
Environmentalists in Montana’s Flathead County make quiet progress against a 5,000-watt loudmouth
Posted inWotr
T-shirt etiquette confounds and confuses
“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 […]
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 […]