WASHINGTON For years, migrant workers have flocked to eastern Washington to pick apples in the fall (HCN, 12/18/00: Troubled harvest). But with a jump in global competition, apple orchards have streamlined their operations to save costs, eliminating jobs in the process. This season, a late hailstorm wiped out nearly 30 percent of the apple crop […]
Go west, fruit picker
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Church aims to purchase public land
WYOMING A national historic site along the Oregon Trail could end up in the hands of private owners. At the request of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, congressional delegates from Wyoming and Utah are drafting legislation permitting the sale of a several-hundred-acre parcel of land in central Wyoming to the […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
The Latest Bounce
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth announced that he will uphold the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan, which has been called one of the agency’s most heavily appealed decisions ever (HCN, 8/27/01: Restoring the Range of Light). Bosworth did, however, call for further review of sections that set fire policy and overlapped with the Quincy Library Group’s […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Rocky Mountain Front saved again – but…
MONTANA In 1997, Forest Service Supervisor Gloria Flora banned oil and gas exploration in Lewis and Clark National Forest for up to 15 years. She cited overwhelming citizen opposition to drilling on the Rocky Mountain Front, and said that exploration would harm the public’s psychological and spiritual connection with the land (HCN, 10/13/97: Forest Service […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Las Vegas: Images in light, images in stone
My brother, Karl, tells me the Las Vegas Strip is the only road in the United States that’s a National Scenic Byway after dark. It is scenic, though people tend to snicker when informed of this designation. We’re outside my brother’s apartment on the west side of the city. Karl points downtown, toward the Strip […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Heard around the West
He had nothing but the best intentions, says a Stanford University surgeon. Then the publicity got out of hand. So Dr. Simon Stertzer reluctantly sold the three Nevada strip clubs he’d bought to finance his medical research. Stertzer tried to explain to the North Las Vegas City Council that owning the all-nude Palomino as well […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
‘You can’t say no to mining’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. John D. Leshy, who served as the Department of Interior’s top attorney during the Clinton administration, played a key role in the attempt to reform federal mining regulations. On Oct. 25, the Bush administration announced that many of those reforms will be abandoned (HCN, […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
The fractured states of mining reclamation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When Jim Kuipers started accumulating information for his guide to Hardrock Reclamation Bonding Practices in the Western United States, he found a regulatory landscape as diverse as the region itself. Though every state in the West requires mining companies to plan ahead for reclamation […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Reclamation’s mixed bag
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Take a chocolate chip cookie and extract most of the chips and maybe a few nuts, as carefully as you can. Then reassemble the cookie without its “ore” and see what you have. That gives you some idea of the challenge mine owners face […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Powell’s enduring teachings
What remains so astonishing about John Wesley Powell is that someone whose policy recommendations were almost totally ignored while he was alive should continue to command the attention of so many Western observers and decision makers a century after his death. Powell’s career studying the West included expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and, most notably, […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
A struggling mountain town looks for a lift
Silverton, Colo., hopes a backcountry chairlift will boost its fortunes
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Cooperating on the Valles Caldera
A public preserve in New Mexico puts its trust in trustees
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Stargazers defend darkness in Arizona
Flagstaff becomes the first “International Dark-Sky City”
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Ruling ripples through salmon country
Fisheries Service must rethink hatchery policy
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Dear Friends
From the inside out There may be no more powerful agent for change in any agency than someone who has worked on the inside. During the 1980s, a Forest Service timber marker from Oregon named Jeff DeBonis became sick of his role in overcutting the public lands. He founded an organization for his fellow Forest […]
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Closing the wounds
A plucky group of New Mexico activists pushes mining reclamation into the 21st century
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
Sabotage isn’t terrorism
Dear HCN, Your article on alleged “ecoterrorism” is misleading and perpetuates the propaganda of polluting industry representatives who have already co-opted mass media (HCN, 10/8/01: Terrorist attacks echo in the West). The Vail fires of 1998, which are better categorized as sabotage, have little to do with terrorism. Terrorism is “best defined as the use […]
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
A capital offense in Canada
Dear HCN, As an American who immigrated to Canada a couple years ago, I was curious to read your story about efforts to protect the Rocky Mountain Front on our side of the border (HCN, 10/8/01: Whoa! Canada!). While I thought the article was generally fairly good, there were two obvious errors of fact that […]
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
Romanticizing rodeo abuse
Dear HCN, Rebecca Clarren’s review of the book Riders of the West (HCN, 10/8/01: Indians are cowboys), about the Indian rodeo circuit, contained a sentence I found most disturbing: “It depicts how rodeo helps Indian youth create a legacy of hope and pride, transcending the severe poverty and rampant alcoholism that often await them beyond […]
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
ESA shuts down collaboration
Dear HCN, Paul Larmer’s opinion, “The enduring Endangered Species Act,” left me bewildered (HCN, 9/24/01: The enduring Endangered Species Act). From the trenches of the rural West, the ESA doesn’t seem to be accomplishing nearly the wonders that you claim. In fact, it appears to be doing the opposite. You wrote, “We need both litigation […]