CALIFORNIA In the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, a 15-year-long battle over 131,000 acres of desert may be coming to a head. The proposed expansion of the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin could harm two high-profile local residents, the threatened desert tortoise and the endangered Lane Mountain milkvetch. The expansion area, now managed […]
Tortoises take on tanks
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
West braces for Big Buildup II
In the boom times of the 1950s, Western city leaders embarked on the Big Buildup. It was an intensive resource-development campaign that wrote a critical part of the story of the modern West across the grand tableau of the Colorado Plateau – the Four Corners area, the high redrock desert, the canyon country, including the […]
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Heard around the West
James Watt is positively basking in nostalgia these days. For those who don’t recall his bumpy years in Washington, D.C., Watt was the former Interior Department secretary under President Reagan, who pushed for energetic energy development on all public lands. When The Denver Post caught up with Watt recently, he was delighted to talk about […]
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Environmentalism meets a fierce friend
Ten years ago, Tom Knudson awakened the West by revealing what had happened in California’s Sierra Nevada – John Muir’s “Range of Light” and the mountains that inspired the formation of the Sierra Club. Knudson’s 1991 series in the Sacramento Bee showed a Sierra under siege from five horsemen of a coming apocalypse: logging, grazing […]
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
California monument welcomes cattle
Does the wildlife-rich Carrizo Plain need grazing to thrive?
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
An energy plan as solid as natural gas
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Surely, there was a time when the much-heralded proposals issued in these parts actually meant something. One must not romanticize the past, and in the immortal words of racing columnist Col. Stingo, “memory grows furtive.” Furtive or not, there is a memory of receiving, one chilly November afternoon in 1973, the much-heralded […]
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Takings legislation cracks Oregon’s green foundation
Rural landowners say government is regulating them to death
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Energy plan eyes the Rockies
Land managers and environmentalists wait for the details
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Dear Friends
Back from Berkeley They stayed for graduation and one last sushi dinner, but then Ed and Betsy Marston, publisher and editor of this paper, high-tailed it east from Berkeley, Calif., to Paonia, Colo., and the rural life. But while their four-month teaching stint at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, […]
Posted inJune 4, 2001: Tribal links
Tribal Links
Why are New Mexico’s Indian tribes embracing the ultimate white man’s game?
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Hard work in progress
When Dale Shewalter talks about hiking the Arizona Trail, he describes a “sense of elation with what it does for your life.” In the next breath, though, he admits, “I kinda wore out my knees through the years.” Shewalter, who’s long been a fan of long-distance backpacking, started looking for a north-south route across Arizona […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Tribal leaders go to school
Freshmen congressmen go to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to learn the ropes. Now, tribal leaders have a comparable resource. This winter, the University of Arizona and the Morris K. Udall Foundation, in conjunction with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, established what could become the premier training center for Indian leaders – […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Sacred Objects and Sacred Places
“When Col. John M. Chivington and his drunken troops killed Cheyenne Indians in the infamous dawn massacre at Sand Creek, Colo.,” writes Andrew Gulliford in Sacred Objects and Sacred Places, “the troops also cut off their victims’ heads for shipment to Washington, D.C.” There, the severed heads were used in attempts to establish a racial […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Finding home
We were all outside watching the sunset from the casita, which had a high view of the city. From there, the “big picture” was not abstract. It was real, tangible, visible – we could just make out the Burger King sign towering beyond the border fence. The sun was blood red, and then the whole […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Wolf assassin on the loose
IDAHO A murder mystery case is unfolding near Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest. Over the past two years, nine endangered gray wolves have died there by the poison Compound 1080, according to recently released tests conducted at the National Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Ore. The discovery of all nine wolves occurred after their radio collars began […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
High court weeds out pesticides
OREGON For years, irrigation districts and golf course operators have used pesticides in irrigation canals to battle pesky weeds that choke the flow of water. But a few years ago, an aquatic herbicide in southern Oregon didn’t kill just plants. More than 90,000 young steelhead trout died in 1996 when the chemical acrolein leaked from […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
The Latest Bounce
Over 22,000 communities nationwide may be at risk from summer wildfires, especially those with neighborhoods where houses and forests meet, warns the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center (HCN, 5/7/01: Back into the woods). All the communities are seeking a portion of the $240 million Congress set aside last year for fire management and fuels reduction. […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
Mud-boggers get mud in their eye
WYOMING A U.S. magistrate dealt fines to 20 Sheridan, Wyo., four-wheelers for destroying national forest land last June. The incident happened during an annual “Spring Run” across the Bighorn National Forest, says Tongue District Ranger Craig Yancey. “Normally they do it on gravel roads, so it’s not a problem,” says Yancey, “but for some reason […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
County tax collectors visit public lands
COLORADO For the second time in six years, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that counties can tax ski areas, park concessionaires and others who use public lands for profit. In a 4-3 decision issued Feb. 21, the court found that a 1996 law granting property-tax exemptions to entities with “possessory interests” in public lands […]
Posted inMay 21, 2001: Quenching the big thirst
The sublime delight of backtracking
It’s a Saturday midnight in late September, and David Bertelsen drives his battered car to the northern edge of Tucson, where the newest pseudo-adobes push hard against the Santa Catalina Mountains. He parks off the road, then begins walking up Finger Rock Canyon toward the summit of Mount Kimball. While many hikers try to avoid […]