Massive salvage operations leave little for the birds
Montana gets a taste of old-time logging
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 […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
A poverty of imagination
Dear HCN, Your article on the Sierra Club’s zero-cow initiative (HCN, 2/26/01: ‘Zero-Cow’ initiative splits Sierra Club), as with so many pieces that HCN does related to grazing issues, once again misrepresents the issues by trying to create a black and white – either/or – situation. The article portrays the Sierra Club’s zero-grazing initiative as […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Club supports flexible grazing policy
Dear HCN, “Zero-Cow initiative splits Sierra Club” (HCN, 2/26/01: ‘Zero-Cow’ initiative splits Sierra Club) fails to recognize that the Club is neither “zero-cut” nor “zero-cud.” In its attempt to simplify it misses the real story. While the Club has a position that advocates an end to all commercial logging on public lands, private use and […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Not your average Paul Bunyan
Not all forest workers wield axes and chainsaws. In the oral history compilation Voices from the Woods: Lives and Experiences of Non-timber Forest Workers, 32 mushroom harvesters, tree planters, medicinal herb gatherers, and wild huckleberry harvesters articulate their lives and work in the forests of the Pacific Northwest (HCN, 2/15/99: An entrepreneurial spirit). Antonio Perez […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Columbia Champion
In the early ’80s, when construction started on the massive Glen Jackson bridge across the Columbia River, opening up the Washington side of the river to Portland commuter sprawl, Nancy Russell took action. She founded the 3,200-member Friends of the Columbia Gorge, parlayed hard-won media backing for protection of the Gorge into support from local […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Idaho wants to help manage federal lands
Idahoans may soon have more say about how federal forestlands are managed. In 1998, the Idaho State Land Board appointed a group of eight recreationists, teachers, lawyers and timber company executives to devise ways that locals could work with the federal government to manage public lands. In late February, the committee released Breaking the Gridlock. […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Watershed Wars
“Rather than follow a time line, I’ve followed the river, pursuing an upstream journey that began in Wind River Canyon and will end at the headwaters near the Continental Divide.” With these words, former High Country News editor Geoffrey O’Gara embarks on a meandering course through Indian dispossession, legal wrangling, floundering farm communities, and reservation […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Demonstrating for the delta
UTAH With the simple rallying cry “1 percent for the delta,” environmentalists hope to overcome the complexities of Colorado River politics and send some water to the river’s dying delta in Mexico (HCN, 7/3/00: A river resurrected: The Colorado River Delta gets a second chance). On March 5, 120 groups led by the Glen Canyon […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Salmon feel the heat
NORTHWEST Salmon in the Snake River are in hot water, and so is the Army Corps of Engineers. On Feb. 16, a federal judge gave the Corps 60 days to come up with a plan to reduce temperatures and dissolve gas content along the river. The court ruled that the Corps violated the Clean Water […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Two laws collide in the Northwest woods
IDAHO, WASHINGTON Federal legislation designed to protect Alaska’s wild areas may enable a timber company to build at least 21 miles of new road through endangered species habitat on public and private lands in the Selkirk Range of Idaho and Washington. Stimson Lumber Company says it is guaranteed access to its checkerboard of national forest […]