Living with wildlife in the West can be a lot like living with a spouse – annoying. Just when you think you’ve figured out how to make the relationship hum, new quirks appear. And since black bears and coyotes can’t talk about it, we have to be canny enough to figure out what’s going wrong […]
Heard around the West
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
High Country News: Friend or foe?
Over the past months, High Country News has received a number of letters and e-mails from readers upset about the tone of an article or an opinion expressed in one of the Writers on the Range columns. You’ll find one such letter below from a Bozeman, Mont., reader blasting Writers on the Range for running […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
…while another quietly moves ahead
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. ALMA, N.M. – Eight years ago, long before the Forest Service signed the agreement to reduce cattle numbers along rivers in the Gila National Forest, Sewell Goodwin voluntarily pulled his 300 cattle off the San Francisco River. With a little help from the agency, […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
One rancher stands in defiance…
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. GLENWOOD, N.M. – It took seven years for environmentalists to get cattle off 230 miles of rivers and streams across the Southwest. It took nearly three more years to get livestock off one mile of river controlled by rancher Hugh B. McKeen. Until late […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
A graceful gazelle becomes a pest
The exotic oryx is wearing out its welcome in the Chihuahuan Desert
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
Park boss gored by grazing feud
Four-decade controversy continues in Dinosaur National Monument
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
A monorail for the mountains?
Colorado considers a space-age alternative to asphalt
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
Remembering Mike
One of the country’s statesmen died Oct. 5, 2001, at the age of 98. Mike Mansfield grew up in Great Falls, Mont., and worked in the copper mines of Butte before launching one of the longest and most distinguished political careers in history. It was punctuated by his staunch opposition to the Vietnam War. Below […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
Dear Friends
Sympathy from all over It appears that it’s the rare town, city or school that didn’t come up with a creative way to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Penny drives have been popular in the West, and displays of letters from kids to police and firefighters were shared […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
Healing the Gila
Three years after the Forest Service booted cows off some Southwestern rivers, the battle over grazing in the desert is still not over
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Lessons of an intolerant past
As horrified Americans recover from Sept. 11, 2001, many continue to compare the attack on New York and the Pentagon to the 1941 strike against our military base at Pearl Harbor. But let’s also remember another historically relevant place from the World War II era: A lonely scrap of high desert called Minidoka, Idaho. There, […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Purchased news costs integrity
Dear HCN, I am a reader with only a single year of experience with your publication. I have learned to enjoy the doom, irritation, pique and hope that your publication brings to my home on a periodic basis. Being a born-and-bred Lexingtonian (“Home of the Revolution,” don’t you know …), my move West opened my […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
No problem for Brad
Dear HCN, In his piece on Brad Powell, the Forest Service’s Regional Forester for California (HCN, 9/10/01: New forest chief becomes a lame duck), Ed Marston makes it sound like Dale Bosworth fired Powell. In fact, Powell is moving to Missoula to become regional forester for the Northern Region (North Idaho, Montana, North Dakota). That’s […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
A myopic framework
Dear HCN, The unstinting praise for the Sierra Nevada Framework in your last issue is praise for a remarkably one-dimensional and frankly unsound plan. The Sierra Nevada Framework – like virtually every other current national forest planning effort, from the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project to the Quincy Library Group – has a myopic […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Three fiery reads
In the sixth chapter of his newly released book The Seasons of Fire, David J. Strohmaier pens an articulate elegy for the firefighters who died in Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon Fire. When Strohmaier traveled to the fatality site, “it had been only six weeks since the fire, but already thousands of small, light-green Gambel oak […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Tony and the Cows
There is little doubt that conflict over environmental issues will intensify under the twin pressures of population and aspiration. It also seems likely that much of this conflict will involve public lands – those lonely, semi-arid basins and ranges where the cattle roam. From Tony and the Cowsby Will Baker In 1995, journalist and former […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Indians are cowboys
In old Western movies, the roles are rigid: characters on horseback are either cowboys or Indians. But these stereotypes, like most, are limiting and untrue. In reality, many Indians are cowboys, as the book, Riders of the West, demonstrates. Photographer Linda MacCannell and writer Peter Iverson set the record straight by following the Indian rodeo […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
The smog is lifting
COLORADO Ask any Denver resident stuck in rush-hour traffic about growth along Colorado’s Front Range, and you may unleash a frustrated tirade. But despite all the new vehicles idling on the highways, Denver residents are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago. In the late 1970s, Denver violated federal health standards for three […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Army Corps wavers on management plan
MISSOURI RIVER BASIN The release of an environmental impact statement on the operation of six dams along the Missouri River has resparked a 12-year-old debate on how to best use the waterway. During the late 1980s, a long drought created hard times for fish and farmers, prompting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Coho salmon lose federal protection
OREGON For years, scientists have argued over the differences between hatchery and wild salmon (HCN, 10/9/00: Killing salmon to save the species). When it listed the coho salmon as endangered, the National Marine Fisheries Service included only wild fish, drawing a line between hatchery and wild populations. In fall 1999, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a […]