Fear and loathing in HCNland Change is always a little scary, and changing times at High Country News are no different, we’ve discovered. We mentioned in Dear Friends last month that we’re planning to give the newspaper its first major face-lift in probably two decades. The goal is to make the paper look more smart […]
Dear Friends
Posted inMarch 17, 2003: Bracing against the tide
Bracing against the tide
On the rugged coastline of British Columbia, tribes, fishermen and environmentalists fight a ‘salmon apocalypse’
Posted inWotr
Everybody’s a greenie now
Suddenly, everybody’s green: developers, who believe a golf course pond is good for wildlife, ski resort managers, who want to use recycled water to make artificial snow, absentee owners, who want to cut everything in sight in the name of fire prevention, though they spend a weekend a year in their Southwest trophy homes. Or […]
Posted inWotr
We need a shoe to drop on climate change
In 1999, Hurricane Mitch, which had lost most of its kick by the time it reached Honduras, still killed more than 10,000 people as a result of intense flooding, making it the biggest storm-related disaster in Central American history. A year later, 25,000 people died in Venezuelan rainstorms, the greatest such disaster in South America, […]
Posted inWotr
The Bush administration is doing something right on fire policy
There isn’t much I can praise about the Bush administration’s approach to Western resource issues. But its instincts on firefighting policy are just about right. If it can fill in its knee-jerk act of cutting the budget with a sound, long-term policy, it could lead the West out of a quagmire that has been deepening […]
Posted inWotr
Snowmobilers need to police their bad apples
A recent story in my local newspaper, headlined “Snowmobiler says riders endure hate” made me sit up straight. The article quoted Clark Collins of the Idaho-based BlueRibbon Coalition, who said that snowmobilers have become victims of a campaign “akin to any other hate campaign against ethnic or religious groups.” Mr. Collins’ comments interest me because […]
Posted inWotr
Water principles of the West begin with blaming California
Like the rest of the West, Colorado suffers from a multi-year drought. Drought, in case you’re curious, is one of those technical terms for what happens when you have enough water for 1 million residents, but not enough for 4 million, let alone the 10 million that the developers would like to see. What might […]
Posted inWotr
Wyoming lives uneasily with big game and big equipment
As meat lockers go, this corner of northwestern Wyoming is one of the prettiest on earth. Behind me, as I sit on this sage-covered bluff, is a great horseshoe of snow-dusted peaks: the Wind Rivers, the Gros Ventres, the Wyoming Range. Ahead lies the Upper Green River Valley: empty, vast and skeined with moving lines […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Thank you, readers
Thank you, readers! The Spreading the News Campaign came to a successful conclusion Dec. 31, 2002. Your generous contributions have provided a stunning $1.36 million to support High Country News’ new media and intern programs. With your help, we’re reaching millions of Westerners: Radio High Country News, our weekly half-hour show, is now broadcast on […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
U.S. is to blame for immigration
Dear HCN, Oh, come on, Ed! Your apology for anti-immigration sentiment bespeaks loss of nerve (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart). That is not vintage Marston. Despair overwhelms me, too, sometimes, as our grotesque problems proliferate daily. But you know very well, or should know, that Mexican immigration is a […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Poverty — and U.S. policy — are the roots of Mexico’s problems
Dear HCN, In my view, Ed Marston’s column “A son of immigrants has a change of heart” (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart) is wrong in several particulars. First, overpopulation is, as it was in the Rev. Malthus’ day (a couple of centuries ago, when he first suggested that the […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
‘Baby factories’ are the problem
Dear HCN, None of the writers in HCN — including Marston (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart), Nijhuis (HCN, 12/23/02: Holding open the door to the good life up north) and Pritchett (HCN, 2/17/03: Anti-immigration myopia) — understand that the world population grows by 11,000 babies per hour, 264,000 per […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Empower immigrants — don’t knock them out
Dear HCN, As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Such blindness must be willful indeed, when the impaired need look no further than nine pages away to sees the light. In his essay, “A son of immigrants has a change of heart” (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Cut the anti-immigration rhetoric
Dear HCN, I am so tired of seeing these uncomplicated, sentimental appeals that place themselves on the side of pro- or anti-immigration and grace your pages with alarming regularity. I am appalled by the embedded hypocrisy that decries immigrants (read: brown-skinned) encroaching on “our” public space and representing a danger to “our wildlife” when “we” […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Land-use laws attacked from all sides
Although it died on the floor of the Oregon Supreme Court last October, Oregon’s controversial property-rights initiative, Measure 7, may live again. The initiative, approved by voters in 2000, would compensate landowners for decreased property value caused by local and state land-use rules. The regulations, conceived in the 1970s, aim to preserve farmlands and forests […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
The Latest Bounce
New Mexico will continue to uphold two of its oldest — and bloodiest — traditions. State Sen. Steve Komadina, R-Corrales, introduced a bill earlier this year that would have outlawed cockfighting and dogfighting. But the state’s Senate Conservation Committee rejected the bill, upholding New Mexico’s standing as one of only two states in the nation […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Pure and simple, wilderness is not
My first encounter with a federally protected wilderness area came in the early 1980s. I was 23 and working for a conservation group in Washington, D.C., so I understood the concept. I even knew people who had dedicated their lives to trying to convince Congress to designate roadless chunks of the public domain as “wilderness,” […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Heard Around the West
Who said you’re never safe when a state Legislature is in session? In Idaho, women who choose to breast-feed infants came under attack from lawmakers who find the practice offensive. After Rep. Bonnie Douglas, D-Coeur d’Alene, introduced a bill protecting a woman’s right to breast-feed her baby in public, Rep. Peter Nielsen, R-Mountain Home, was […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Off-roaders torpedo a wilderness alternative
When it comes to protecting land, Utah knows only deadlock
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Wilderness provides a ‘safe haven’ for this cowboy
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The wild card.” When I meet Cal Baird at a truck stop about 30 miles south of Vegas, he clears a space for me in the passenger’s seat of his Ford pickup (“I don’t know how we ever got by without extended cabs — […]