To help keep locals informed about environmental issues on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in California, a lone activist has spun an electronic web. The Eastern Sierra Agenda Network was founded by Elizabeth Tenney, a member of Preserving the Eastern Sierra Tradition of Environmental Responsibility (PESTER for short). This list-serve, a free electronic […]
Opening lines of communication
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Less climbing to the top
The Mount Hood National Forest has traditionally been a weekend haven for many Oregonians, but it might not be for long. The three wilderness areas that lie within the forest have eight times as many visitors as they did 10 years ago, and an average of 900 hikers crowd the Mount Hood Wilderness Area during […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
A bigger picture
Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument needs to think of itself in the context of a wider world. That’s the conclusion of Crown of the Canyons, an atlas of colored maps and data on the ecology, geology and economy of the monument and its surrounding landscape, compiled by the Wilderness Society. The monument’s 1.9 million acres […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Caution: Desert Tortoise Crossing
If a desert tortoise crosses your path and you don’t mind your manners, you could face fines of up to $100,000 or one year in jail. Due to urbanization and development, the animal, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, has lost an extensive amount of its habitat in Arizona, California, Nevada and southern […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
State says no to new wildlife
The next time the federal or state government wants to reintroduce wildlife on public lands in Colorado, the state Legislature wants it to ask nicely. On April 22 – Earth Day – Colorado Gov. Bill Owens signed the measure requiring the Legislature’s consent before agencies can restore threatened and endangered species to the state. Critics […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Wanted: HCPs with teeth
NATION Wanted: HCPs with teeth To win cooperation from landowners, over the last decade the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has embraced Habitat Conservation Plans for saving endangered species on private lands (HCN, 8/4/97). It’s an effective alternative to a “shoot, shovel and shut up” approach, say agency representatives. Critics continue to insist that the […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The Wayward West
In what critics call political “shenanigans,” Utah Republican Rep. Jim Hansen stole the bill number from a wilderness proposal. H.R. 1500 has traditionally been the number for the Utah Wilderness Coalition’s wilderness bill (HCN, 8/3/98). But environmentalists withdrew the bill this winter in order to update it, and Hansen introduced his own H.R. 1500. His […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Beware of orange clouds
Earth-shattering explosions are a fact of life in northeast Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Each week millions of pounds of explosives are detonated as the basin’s 17 open-pit mines rearrange thick layers of earth and extract the coal beneath. Sometimes blasting also creates clouds of nitrogen oxide gases. Luann Borgialli was alarmed in January when one […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Another plug to pull?
The Sierra Club has a new campaign: It wants to restore the valley John Muir called “Yosemite’s twin.” But California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, once part of Yosemite National Park, is presently buried under 360,000 acre-feet of water. Resurrecting the valley would require draining the reservoir that the San Fransisco area taps for its primary water […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Spinning back the bison
The trouble with being a handspinner is that people are always giving me bags of fiber: a plastic bag full of hair from their ever-shedding malemute; a paper sack containing coarse waxy hanks of hair from a pet Angora goat. I never turn them down. Most handspinners are hoarders by nature; we go to fiber […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Heard around the West
There’s a fine art to making enemies, Ed Abbey wrote in Confessions of a Barbarian. He then bragged, “I’ve become remarkably good at it.” In the 10th anniversary issue of Canyon Country Zephyr, publisher Jim Stiles quotes Abbey on a few of his targets: The young: “I say, oh you young fuddie-duddies, you young fogies, […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The East Rosebud Trip
Far past road signs local paranoia claimed would signal the Russians’ attack from Montana (numbers I’d thought were Highway Department codes mass produced in Chicago maybe to identify routes and mileage, lo and behold turned out to be signals for the New World Order’s global hegemony – so clutch your rifle); past all that the […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The fall of an Arizona saguaro
In the dead of a late winter night in Arizona, my wife, Joyce, awakened me. “I think I heard the cactus die,” she whispered. So, we dressed, found the flashlight and trekked down the driveway to the road at 2 a.m. It had fallen. About four feet up from the ground the trunk had splintered. […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
When you’re alone on the open road
During the winter, I live in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, in the capital city of Cheyenne. In summer, and in any weather when the roads are passable, I spend as much time as I can on my ranch in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. My two homes are about 280 miles apart, but […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Hoping for river magic on a trip with Dad
What do you feel when you stick your parents in the river? I have in my office an 11-by-14-inch photo of my dad and me in Lava Falls on the Colorado River. It’s a fine river photo: just heads and oar tips visible in the V-wave. It’s printed off a Polaroid. My father clutched it […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Why I’m a poor writer
For almost a month now I’ve been trying to collect $55 that a national environmental magazine owes me for a 400-word book review. That’s two 20s, a 10, and a five. Three polite e-mails have yielded the following one response: “Thanks for reminding me. I’ll look into it.” This proves my first rule about free-lance […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Enough nature writing already!
In a column by Anne Lamott in the online magazine “Salon,” she made the following proposal: “Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies not to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers?” […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
In Montana: The view from the ranchette
Montana has its own special pathologies. But the one it shares most visibly with the Mountain West in general features a peculiar symptom – furtive glances at the horizon with the expectation of seeing silhouetted hordes there, as in a Western movie, except that these hordes are driving Land Rovers and eating sushi. There’s a […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Lynx reintroduction links unexpected allies
SOUTH FORK, Colo. – “They’re back!” yelled wildlife biologist Gene Byrne in February, as a lanky-legged lynx, trapped in Canada, bounded from a cage in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. “They never left,” another Colorado Division of Wildlife officer, Bill Andree, said quietly. That exchange was symbolic of the lynx’s return to the Southern Rockies this […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Greens fight lonely battle near Yellowstone
The car wash in Dubois, Wyo., offers more than high-pressure soap and water – it’s got a larger-than-life fiberglass moose perched on the roof. Next door at the veterinary clinic, visitors escort sick pets through an enormous buffalo skull, and the heads of elk and bighorn sheep stare at customers from the walls of the […]