Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The wild card.” The 1964 Wilderness Act instantly protected 9.1 million acres of wilderness. Since then, the wilderness system has grown to over 106 million acres. Much of that came in the late ’70s and mid-’80s, as wilderness areas identified by the Forest Service’s […]
Peaks and valleys: Protected wilderness by year
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Wilderness on the move
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The wild card.” IDAHO: Rep. Mike Simpson, R, is considering introducing a Nevada-style wilderness/development bill that would protect parts of the Boulder-White Cloud and Pioneer Mountains in central Idaho. The Idaho Conservation League is also working with local county commissioners and cattlemen to negotiate […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Let bikers in, and we’ll stand behind wilderness
I’m a mountain bicyclist. The pleasure of my life is pedaling through wild places, experiencing the views, the changing colors and textures of the plant life, the occasional animal sightings. On the trail, I’m renewed, and my commitment to public-land preservation is strengthened. I think that’s the way most mountain bikers feel, and historically, we’ve […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Get off and walk – wilderness is for wildlife
Like many mountain bikers, I’m happiest when I’m charging up and down hills through the West’s spectacular public lands. I live in Durango, Colo., arguably the mountain bike capital of the world, and I ride every day. While I’ve spent most of my cycling years on roads, in the last five years I’ve been spending […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
While America waits for war, the environment suffers
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the best of times, it’s tough to get the average American to pay attention to such arcane matters as whether it should be legal to sue the Forest Service if it fails to protect wilderness in Alaska, or whether to pay logging firms to thin one section of forest by letting […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Locals fight new railroad
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Grasslands take a step toward nature.” The new national grasslands plans ignore one potential impact entirely: The nation’s largest railroad construction project in more than a century. The Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad got a green light […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Grasslands take a step toward nature
Efforts to restore an ecosystem are bold but controversial
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Fences go up along the Mexican border
Interior Secretary Norton ‘troubled’ by impacts on desert wildlife
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
Dear friends
A wintry gathering As a gentle snow fell from a gray winter sky, 130 High Country News readers and friends jammed into the Cache La Poudre Grange in Bellvue, Colo., just outside Fort Collins. They brought splendid food and drink (thanks, New Belgium Brewery!), and a bevy of story ideas for the HCN staff. Issues […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2003: The Wild Card
The wild card
As the Wilderness Act nears its 40th anniversary, protecting wild lands requires a new kind of deal-making.
Posted inWotr
For wet or for dry
I was pushed out of New York 30 years ago. I couldn’t take the city as it was, and I couldn’t change to meet New York on its terms. We moved to Colorado, where a mountain loomed in our backyard. There were challenges, of course. A tiny coal-mining town is alien to someone raised on […]
Posted inWotr
Lake Powell: Going, going, gone?
Who would have believed it? Water levels at Lake Powell have dropped to 50 percent for the first time since it filled in 1980. This draining is likely to continue to the point where the reservoir could vanish in the next three-to-four years. With snowpacks below 25 percent of normal, and continued warnings from the […]
Posted inWotr
A report from Nebraska, deep in drought
We’re dying out here. Thirsty grasses crunch underfoot, ground into sand that hasn’t gathered sufficient moisture to generate seed for new growth. Dried water holes wear wrinkled remnants of last summer’s mud, and powdery alkali sifts in our ever-present wind. Topsoil flies skyward from fields that never should have seen a plow. It’s a familiar […]
Posted inWotr
Of Western myth and jackalopes
“Are there jackalope around here?” the dude from Chicago asked. “Well, up here there’s too much elevation. They’re down on the sagebrush flats.” from Jackalope by Hilda Volk On Jan. 6, 2003, the West lost one of its great mythmakers, 82-year-old Douglas Herrick, of Casper, Wyo. No, Herrick wasn’t a writer, an artist, or a […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson in aridity from Wallace Stegner
The wisest man and best writer the West has produced was born this week 94 years ago. He died in 1993, but left us a massive inheritance, including Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Angle of Repose, Wolf Willow and From the Uneasy Chair. You can celebrate his Feb. 18 birthday by reading one of these books […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson in engagement from Mary Page Stegner
Who do we believe? How do we behave? These are questions I hold as we watch President Bush make his case for war. Our Department of Homeland Security recently placed us on “high alert/code orange,” advised us to buy duct tape and cover our windows with plastic, then in the same breath told us not […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Living in harm’s way
Unlike water, denial is in excess supply in California. Half the residents west of the 100th meridian live in that state, and 80 percent of them live in areas that have been rattled by major earthquakes. Northern Californians, for example, straddle 60 miles of the deadly Hayward fault; the late Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
It wasn’t environmental racism
Dear HCN, A recent High Country News article about the Northern Cheyenne tribe’s battles over coal (HCN, 1/20/03: A breath of fresh air) includes an allegation by Gail Small that the settlement of the New World Mine battle near Yellowstone National Park several years ago was an example of “environmental racism” because the conservation groups […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Anti-immigration myopia
Dear HCN, Phil Cafaro’s letter “Real environmentalists don’t support immigration” and Ed Marston’s column on a similar topic (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart) strike me as a tad myopic. Are the lands in the West more worthy of preservation than those in Mexico; does not putting up barriers to […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2003: Wyoming at a crossroads
Build wealth, not walls
Dear HCN, I hope Ed Marston found his confession about his “change of heart” regarding immigration therapeutic (HCN, 2/3/03: The son of immigrants has a change of heart). Rather than wring his hands in public, he should take his ideas to their logical conclusion: a 30-foot border wall and citizenship for immigrants that have their […]