Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey, by Adriel Heisey. Treasure Chest Books, P.O. Box 5250, Tucson, AZ 85703 (520/623-9558). Hardcover: $40. 114 pages. Flying his ultralight airplane high above the Sonoran Desert, Adriel Heisey found an appreciation for an alien landscape. A former commercial pilot, Heisey moved to Tucson on a whim, and at […]
Pilot finds a soft spot for a hard land
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Birds break boundaries
The Colorado state office of The Nature Conservancy has worked for years to preserve chunks of the state’s shortgrass prairie, breeding grounds for birds such as mountain plovers, burrowing owls and long-billed curlews. But staffers always knew their efforts in Colorado could provide only part-time protection, since most of these species travel south during the […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Mapping a vision
Although local environmental groups often know their immediate surroundings in detail, there’s a bigger picture available. The State of the Southern Rockies Ecosystem, a report released by the Nederland, Colo.-based Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, inventories much of three states – Colorado, northern New Mexico and southern Wyoming – that compose an ecoregion, an area with […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
The power of vision and memory
Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way, by Charles Wilkinson. Illustrated with maps by Diane Sylvain and black-and-white photographs. University of Washington Press, 2000. Hardcover: $22.50. 128 pages. The dust has long settled from the Northwest’s fishing wars of the late 1960s and ’70s – wars which set Indian […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
On the trail
If you’re looking for a little financial help with your off-the-grid dream home, don’t look to vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney. At an Oct. 10 campaign stop at a recreational-vehicle plant in Yakima, Wash., Cheney said, “You have a solar panel on your house, you get tax relief. If you drive a solar-powered car, you get […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Mudfest debacle muddies off-roaders’ future
COLORADO Boulder, Colo., disc jockeys “Willie B” and “D Mack” were just looking for a good time when they invited KBPI listeners to join them with four-wheel drive vehicles at Caribou Flats, west of Boulder, on Sept. 23. But by the end of “Mudfest,” their unofficial gathering, 200 off-road vehicles had driven through a 25-acre […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Council guns down ban on predator hunts
ARIZONA In 1998, an Arizona contest called “Predator Hunt Extreme” offered $10,000 to the person who killed the most coyotes, bobcats, foxes and mountain lions. Public outcry against the event and multiple petitions from both hunters and wildlife advocates convinced the state Game and Fish Commission to propose a ban on such killing contests. But […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
The Berkeley Pit gets deeper
MONTANA Skyrocketing electricity prices in Montana are indirectly raising the level of Butte’s Berkeley Pit, a 900-foot-deep, 30 billion-gallon soup of acid-mine runoff that ranks as the nation’s largest Superfund site. In mid-July, copper-mining company Montana Resources suddenly halted its Butte operations, blaming high electrical rates for the shutdown. During normal operations, the mine is […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Libertarian is Chenoweth’s heir apparent
IDAHO The man who could succeed Idaho’s feisty Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage is in hot water with the Environmental Protection Agency. C.L. “Butch” Otter says he recently dug weeds, cattails, rusty car bodies and concrete from the border of a pond next to his home to make the pond more hospitable to wildlife. But the […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Water runs through a congressional race
SOUTH DAKOTA A man who helped rewrite South Dakota’s environmental history is aiming for the U.S. House of Representatives. Democrat Curt Hohn, 49, of Aberdeen, learned about politics while working for Sen. George McGovern in the early 1970s. Hohn and McGovern parted ways in 1974 over a mammoth water project. With a price tag between […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
The Latest Bounce
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has a plan to curb illegal immigration between Naco and Douglas, Ariz. It includes stadium lights, steel fences, roads and video surveillance cameras, which an INS study says won’t affect endangered wildlife along the U.S.-Mexico border (HCN, 9/27/99: Battered Borderlands). The Center for Biological Diversity disputes the agency’s study and […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
When ‘hunting’ becomes staggeringly stupid
“Canned hunting” is the term critics use when referring to the “sport” of paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of executing “wild” animals trapped in escape-proof enclosures on “game ranches.” The term is overtly derogatory, but hardly derogatory enough. “Pay-per-kill” or “execution by contract” are more apt, as there’s no hunting involved, canned or […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Third-party votes count for plenty
Political conversations this fall often include the observation that “We need a third party.” In the Mountain West, the most reliably Republican part of America, the reply is often “Third party? Wouldn’t it make more sense to start by having a second party?” Soon comes a practical admonition that unless you cast a ballot for […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Heard around the West
The Seattle-Post Intelligencer tries to be conscientious during election season, interviewing by its count more than 100 candidates. Perhaps surreptitiously, the staff of the daily also write down the silliest comments from would-be public servants. Among the paper’s top 10: I was born into leadership – period. Give the Indians Food Stamps to buy salmon. […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough’
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. NIJHUIS: I’ve been wondering who you’d pick for Secretary of the Interior. NADER: Well, I haven’t thought about that yet (laughs), but it would be someone with a determined record of achievement on behalf of the environment and the preservation of the […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Nader shakes up Western enviros
Note: a sidebar article, “‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough,’” accompanies this story. MONTROSE, Colo. – “There’s a lot we have to cover here,” sighs Ralph Nader, stooping over the podium with all the enthusiasm of a harried college professor. The Green Party presidential candidate isn’t campaigning this afternoon. Not officially. […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Colorado’s growth amendment rouses voters
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Landscape photographer John Fielder is a household name in Colorado, but he hasn’t had time to document the changing aspen leaves this fall. He’s too busy championing Colorado’s proposed Amendment 24. “From now until Nov. 7, the camera’s packed away, until we […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Arizona’s 202 takes aim at sprawl
Note: a sidebar article, “Colorado’s growth amendment rouses voters,” accompanies this story. ORACLE, Ariz. – On a Pinal County cattle ranch about 30 miles northwest of Tucson, El Salvadoran-born real estate broker and developer Alex Argueta envisions thousands of homes, as well as shopping centers, high-tech parks, vineyards and several resorts and golf courses. He […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
In presidential politics, the West has a bad hand
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Life, as someone once pointed out, is unfair. Someone, no doubt, pointed it out millennia ago, but the observation is generally attributed to John F. Kennedy, among whose distinctions was winning the closest presidential election in living memory. A mere 118,570 more Americans voted for Kennedy than for Richard M. Nixon 40 […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Washington’s Steel Magnolia
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Like her opponent, Slade Gorton, Maria Cantwell is not a native of Washington. She grew up in Indianapolis in a political household – her father was a county commissioner and a city councilman. Cantwell leaped into politics herself at a young age. […]