A panel of scientists assembled by an international commission says the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona is threatened by runaway growth and development (HCN, 4/12/99). The panel’s final report, released in March, recommends aggressive water conservation measures by area residents and nearby Fort Huachuca. For a copy of the 123-page Sustaining and Enhancing Riparian […]
Sustaining and Enhancing Riparian Migratory Bird Habitat on the Upper San Pedro River
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Conservation hero?
Do you have a conservation hero? The National Wildlife Federation wants to know. Every year the federation honors a conservationist or contributing to the future of wildlife, wild places and natural resources. Past winners include Lady Bird Johnson and Morris Udall. Send your nominations by July 10 to the Communications Department of the National Wildlife […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
The Power of Place: Writing Out of the West
Writers Mary Clearman Blew, Don Snow, C.L. Rawlins and Hannah Hinchman will lead workshops at the 16th Annual Western Montana College’s Writers’ Conference. The theme of the July 16-18 conference at the Birch Creek Center in the Pioneer Mountains is The Power of Place: Writing Out of the West. The $200 fee includes instructors, meals, […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
An Olympic eyesore?
The Utah Sports Authority is etching out a 120-meter ski jump on a mountainside near Park City for the 2002 Winter Olympics, but the project isn’t inspiring Olympic fever. Instead, it’s raising the ire of local critics, who lament the ugliness of the scarred slope. “There was no environmental input whatsoever, and consequently we’re going […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
The Wayward West
The beleaguered black-tailed prairie dog is getting some federal help (HCN, 11/11/96). On May 28, the Forest Service ordered all staffers to stop poisoning the ground squirrels except in “extremely rare situations.” The ban will remain in effect until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether to list the animals as threatened. Wildlife Services, […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Big Oil down the tubes?
A Northwest oil consortium’s plan to build a 237 mile-long pipeline across Washington has fueled a fiery debate between environmentalists. Will the pipeline eliminate the risk of oil spills in the ocean or will it create a recipe for disaster right in the heart of the Cascade Range? “It makes more sense to get petroleum […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Wolves get no welcoming party
The 1 million acres of Olympic National Park could sustain as many as 56 gray wolves, says a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. Yet even though the peninsula provides ample prey and habitat, no wolves will wander the park soon. The obstacle is Washington Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, says Gerry Ring Erickson of Defenders […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Happy campers we shall always be
Every summer, my husband and I head for the woods, flushed with optimism and giddy with anticipation. The maps are crisp, the fuel cans are full and the road is open. And every summer, I forget that the reality of camping is different than that pictured in Dodge Dakota commercials and my mind. I imagine […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Heard around the West
Even bison, it turns out, need a bailout. Too many of the big critters are raised and not enough of us want to eat them. After producing more bison-burger than the market could bear, ranchers recently asked the federal government for help – their second request in as many years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Homegrown leaders: Lakota educators bridge two worlds
ROSEBUD RESERVATION, S.D. – Sherry Red Owl’s conference room in the tribal Department of Education is chaotic, but it’s the kind of happy chaos that reflects its main obsession: the schoolchildren of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in southern South Dakota. Piles of reports, papers, pictures and boxes line the room and occupy several chairs. Wedged […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Can poverty protect the last, best place?
All who care about the non-metropolitan West should be grateful to Montanans. Within the generous confines of that 145,000 square-mile state, they are asking, in the closing days of the 20th century, whether the good life can be disconnected from the economy. They are testing whether a place that in 50 years has plunged from […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Rural Utah braces for a latter-day plague
These crickets and hoppers eat anything in front of them
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Cattlemen make use of a conservation tool
GUNNISON, Colo. – Frost gilds the branches of the elder and cottonwood trees bordering the Redden family’s pastureland as Brett Redden climbs into a tractor at dawn and delivers hay to 300 cattle. Then he goes to his “regular” job with the fire and rescue crew at Gunnison Airport. Some months he’ll pick up extra […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
A grudge against sludge
DEER TRAIL, Colo. – Crowded into a corrugated-steel firehouse, some 50 farmers and ranchers are talking strategy. They have carved a break from their 16-hour, calving-season workdays to battle a common foe, and it’s not a dismal farm economy, nor is it drought. The people gathered in this town 60 miles east of Denver, are […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
As salmon decline, feds draw the line
In northern Washington state, a 100-year-old system of irrigation ditches has turned the dry Methow Valley into a well-watered oasis. Alfalfa and oats grow on hobby farms and the water nurtures the wave of second homes popping up in this beautiful valley tucked along the eastern flank of the Cascade Range. Irrigation ditches deliver the […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Dear Friends
Look for local experts At our invitation, writer Cate Gilles stopped in for lunch and an informal seminar about reporting on Indian reservations. Cate wrote for the Navajo-Hopi Observer and the Navajo Times – and freelanced for High Country News – before heading to the University of Colorado in Boulder as a Ted Scripps Fellow […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Dreaming the prairie back to life
Even though the second-highest point in North Dakota lies just a few miles from the dwindling town of Regent, you probably wouldn’t know that if you saw it. At 3,468 feet, Black Butte rises from rolling wheat fields like a bump under a rug. But to Gary Greff it looks like the ideal spot for […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
The disappearing farm
Can cooperatives keep rural people rooted in the plains?
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Always question land trades
Dear HCN, I want to thank writer Lynne Bama for her story on land trades, and particularly for showing the connection between 19th-century land grabs and the present-day subsidization of corporations through exchanges (HCN, 3/29/99). Lynne called me a “one-woman truth squad,” which I took as a compliment, but which belies the efforts of scores […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Let’s support taxpayer restoration
Dear HCN, Thanks for your feature on ecological restoration (-Working the Land Back to Health,” HCN, 3/1/99). However, as an ardent conservationist and a small business owner, I was annoyed by Ed Marston’s introduction. “In a time of tight public money,” he writes, “restoration depends on creating economies that can produce healthy land and profits, […]