Too often when we speak of wildness in the West, we only envision vast untracked settings like the Bob Marshall Wilderness, High Unitas or the Owyhee Canyonlands. It is easy to forget that wildness can still be found within our ever-growing urban landscapes. Now, editors Michael Houck and M.J. Cody have released a new book, […]
Wild in the city
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
How Utah got that way
Geology is a hard thing to miss in southern Utah. Unless you travel through the state blindfolded, you have probably wondered about the evolution of the region’s dramatic cliffs, spires and canyons. Maybe that’s why there are so many guidebooks that aim to decipher the area’s layered landscape. Unlike most popular guidebooks, The Geology of […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian
Visionary photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis spent 30 years documenting the waning cultures of North American Indians. But following his death in 1952, his work plummeted into obscurity. Curtis’ photographs were a mix of stoic portraiture, peopled landscapes and illustrations of tribal life. He photographed Nez Perce Chief Joseph, Apache leader Geronimo, and a host of […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
End of a dam saga
For the past two years, Jim Trees, the founder of the Grand Canyon Trust, has endured criticism over his plan to reconstruct an historic dam in a wilderness study area inside Zion National Park. Now the green leader and organic apple farmer from southwest Utah has come up with an “environmentally friendly” solution that should […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
The latest bounce
Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck resigned on March 27, citing differences with the Bush administration’s environmental policies. In a letter to new Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, he urged her to “withstand political pressure” and uphold the roadless initiative (HCN, 1/29/01: Roadless plan slides to safety). He also called for stronger protection of old-growth forests, increased […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
The myth of the wooden Indian
Flip through any 19th century collection of American Indian portraits and you’ll see many stereotypical images of Native Americans: the warrior Sitting Bull, who wears a serious expression, his eyes avoiding the camera and his chin tilted forward in a gesture of nobility; children wearing the military uniforms of a government boarding school. The stereotypes […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Heard around the West
How low-flow can you go? In Redmond, Wash., the developer of a “Green Built” resort community touts its toilets as so advanced, they adapt to individual behavior, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Australian-made Caroma toilets require their users to decide how much water to flush with: one button for No. 1 and another for No. […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
How green is this growth?
Opposition builds against a ‘model’ development in Southern California
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
New Mexico loggers get ‘police power’
Legislature won’t wait for feds to clean up flammable forests
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Montana gets a taste of old-time logging
Massive salvage operations leave little for the birds
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Green power threatens the Black Rock
A proposed geothermal plant in a newly protected Nevada desert sparks a fight
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Republicans launch counteroffensive
Bush administration revokes environmental rules
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
A journalist, and much more
During my first semester in college, I wrote a paper for an environmental studies class in which I cited an article by “journalist Donella Meadows.” “A journalist, and much, much more,” my professor wrote in the margin, high praise from a man not given to excess. In recent years, Meadows was known to many as […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
Dear Friends
Putting California back on the map Reader Frank Aloisio called recently from California to ask where his state had gone. Our official HCN map of The West, drawn by our intrepid cartographer Diane Sylvain, doesn’t include the Golden State. We’ve been too shy, in the past, to cover California, for fear of being swept into […]
Posted inApril 9, 2001: The water empress of Vegas
The water empress of Vegas
How Patricia Mulroy quenched Sin City’s thirst
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Time Warp
Shoot, the enviros haven’t won the battle for the West’s public lands after all Back in the 1980s, the West was cut and dried. Ronald Reagan and James Watt were there to protect us from soft-on-Communism redwoods, while environmentalists climbed tripods and lay down on the statehouse steps in protest. There were good guys and […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Chuckling about polar blasts
Dear HCN, The other day I touched snow for the first time since 1995, when my wife and I fled the snow, ice and cold of Colorado after 50 years of residency. We moved to Southern California, where we could view the cursed stuff only on mountains far in the distance. A pickup truck just […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Margolis, you fiend, stop torturing the language
Dear HCN, It’s time to remind you and indirectly Jon Margolis that sentence fragments are not particularly convincing or fun to read and that a comma is not a semicolon. From “The power of love, and its opposite”: “At the cost of a political firestorm that a politically shaky administration can ill afford.” Isn’t the […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
HCN misunderstood Moran
Dear HCN, I don’t really want to quarrel with the main argument of Allen Best’s essay, “The mythic West and the billionaire” (HCN, 2/26/01: The mythic West and the billionaire), but I think two observations concerning Thomas Moran might complicate it a bit. In the first place, Best is simply wrong in his assertion that […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Not all grazers are ‘welfare cowboys’
Dear HCN, I’m writing in response to the article “Zero-Cow initiative splits Sierra Club” (HCN, 2/26/01: ‘Zero-Cow’ initiative splits Sierra Club). Before I left New Mexico to pursue a graduate degree, I worked for several academic, nongovernmental, and federal entities as a field biologist. This work took me all over the Southwest, and to my […]