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 […]
End of a dam saga
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 […]
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 […]