WASHINGTON Politicos in Seattle, Wash., took Earth Day to heart. Mayor Paul Schell and the city council made an unprecedented pledge: to meet Seattle’s future electricity needs without increasing net greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists say these gases, some of them produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal, make the Earth’s temperature rise. “The mayor […]
Seattle passes on greenhouse gases
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Mining tops toxic list
NATION For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual inventory of industrial toxic releases included hardrock mining and six other industries – and the newcomers stole the show. With the addition of these industries to the Toxics Release Inventory (HCN, 9/16/96), reported toxic releases in the United States nearly tripled, increasing from 2.6 to […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
The Wayward West
David Brower resigned from the national board of the Sierra Club on May 18, criticizing its neutral stand on U.S. immigration issues (HCN, 5/11/98: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses) and accusing the organization of a general lack of gumption. “Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Nuclear waste needs new backyard
CALIFORNIA After more than a decade of legal challenges and nonviolent protests against a proposed nuclear-waste dump, the Save Ward Valley Coalition is closing its office. Members have gladly worked themselves out of a job. “We’ve made tremendous steps toward victory,” says Bradley Angel of Greenaction, one of the environmental groups in the coalition. US […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Can ‘property rightsniks’ stop a popular bill?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – You know folks are going to lose when they choose Helen Chenoweth-Hage to close their argument. Resplendent in a red suit, perhaps symbolic of going down in flames, the Idaho Republican stood at the well of the House and used her two minutes to … well, that wasn’t quite clear; her rhetoric […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Supreme Court upholds Babbitt’s grazing reforms
Putting livestock on public land is a privilege, not a right
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
More trouble waits in the wings
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”The West’s hottest question: How to burn what’s bound to burn.” While the 1988 fire at Yellowstone National Park stands today as an ecological success story, some scientists and forest managers say the Cerro Grande fire will be […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
The West’s hottest question: How to burn what’s bound to burn
In the wake of the Cerro Grande fire, everyone ponders prescribed burning
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Hanford executive quits in protest
Cleanup mounts to more than $15 billion
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Dear Friends
Eyewitnesses visit Abe Jacobson and Carol Griffiths Jacobson were driving an unusual rig when they dropped by in May. Two kayaks and a canoe rode atop their van, which was stuffed with paddles, snowshoes, skis and just about every other outdoor toy you can imagine. This was no ordinary vacation, they explained; they were refugees. […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Invisible roads block wilderness
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Imagine a map of North Dakota with every section line – the crisscrossed lines that stretch north-south and east-west across the state precisely one mile apart – converted into a public road. That’s just what the Dakota Territorial Legislature imagined in 1871, when it […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Elk find no home on the grasslands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When rangers at North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park culled the park’s burgeoning elk herd early this year, they sent about 200 of the animals to Kentucky. There, the state wildlife division reintroduced the once-native animals to parts of the Appalachian state. This struck […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
A dissident speaks up for the Badlands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story To get to John Heiser’s home on the high plains of western North Dakota, you turn at the construction yard (“They’d like to pave everything over”), then bear left when you spot the microwave tower (“I think to myself every day how I’d like […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Change on the Plains
Ranchers on the national grasslands see their power ebb as a new era rushes in
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Starry Eyes
Recently, at mid-afternoon on a rainy day, I looked up at the cloud-burdened sky and missed the stars. Truly missed them. I felt the kind of wistful pangs that you might feel when remembering a long-gone but beloved grandparent, or a teenage sweetheart who once misunderstood you. I knew they were up there — the […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Dear friends
WELCOME, NEW INTERNS As a teenager, HCN summer intern Patrick Farrell says he spent summers in his hometown of Lincoln, Neb., “scheming ways to get to Colorado to rock climb.” Lured by his love of nature, he moved West to study history at the University of Washington — but spent “more time in the library […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
How we banned Compound 1080
Dear HCN, In a back-page essay, you show a photograph of Sen. Gale McGee, William Ruckelshaus, and me: Nathaniel Reed (HCN, 3/27/00: HCN at 30: ‘On faith alone’). I was serving as Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The story of how the poisoned eagles were located, the intense investigation that followed, […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Carless in Denali
Dear HCN, Larry Warren said in the April 10 High Country News that, “Beginning May 23, Zion (National Park) becomes the first Western park, and just the second in the national park system, to go carless. Acadia National Park in Maine was the first.” Mr. Warren should check out the history of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Dump cows – for what?
Dear HCN, In Debra Donahue’s opinion, “The writing is on the wall: Livestock grazing on semi-arid public ranges is uneconomic and unsustainable. The only solution is removing livestock altogether” (HCN, 2/28/00: A prof takes on the sacred cow). I’m not familiar with the implications of that statement in the state of Wyoming; I do know […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
‘Militia woman’ is fighting for her rights
Dear HCN, I read with interest your March 13 article about Jim Catron, “The Last Celtic Warlord lives in New Mexico” – which leads the reader to believe he is some kind of hero of the West. Many of us here in Catron County see it otherwise. We see him as a pompous, hot-headed little […]