Goodbye, Linda For a decade, Associate Publisher Linda Bacigalupi – often called Linda B, for obvious reasons – has been the administrative heart of High Country News, ensuring that we operated in ways that were orderly, efficient and, most of all, humane. Nonprofits tend to chew up their staffs, and Linda did her best to […]
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Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘The concept is simple’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Earl McKinney, a retired BLM range conservationist, was an early participant in the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group. He is based in Carson City, Nev. “Riparian areas are super simple to recover. All you have to do is let them regrow a little bit. […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘I will try anything’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Rose Strickland is a member of the Public Lands Committee of the Sierra Club and co-author of How Not to be Cowed – Livestock Grazing on the Public Lands: An Owner’s Manual. She is not an official member of the Trout Creek Mountain Working […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘I was mocked and set up’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kathleen (Kathi) Simpson Myron, an artist from Canby, Ore., joined the Trout Creek Mountain Working Group members in 1988 as a representative of Oregon Trout. She left the group in 1994. “I got along fine until I became what they called a pushy broad […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
The ranch restored: An overworked land comes back to life
Note: in three sidebar articles accompanying this feature story, environmentalist Kathleen Simpson Myron, environmentalist Rose Strickland, and retired BLM range conservationist Earl McKinney give their perspectives in their own words. McDERMITT, Nev. – The Trout Creek Mountains of southeastern Oregon will never rank among America’s most magnificent peaks. Although beautiful in their way, the Trout […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Is there a market for tiny trees?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Flagstaff isn’t the first place to try its hand at manipulating forests. One southwestern Colorado county has already learned some hard lessons about restoration’s bottom line. Like the forests around Flagstaff, the ponderosa pine forests in Montezuma County, Colo., show the effects of fire […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘We need to get this stuff on the table’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Brett KenCairn is the coordinator of the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust this fall, he was the executive director of the Rogue Institute for Ecology and Economy in Ashland, Ore., and a board member of the Applegate Partnership, a […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘It’s really a sales program’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Henry Carey is the executive director of the Forest Trust, a nonprofit community forestry group based in Santa Fe, N.M.“The Forest Service is trying to get political support for a thinning program, but the fire problem is no more huge than it was 10 […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Flagstaff searches for its forests’ future
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It was June of 1996, and temperatures had already cracked the 100-degree mark all over the Southwest. The brief winter rains were a dim memory, the sky was cloudless, and ponderosa pine forests near this northern Arizona town were choked with dry underbrush and spindly trees. Forest Service firefighters geared up for […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Working the land back to health
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s two feature stories. The two major stories here open long after crushing environmental defeats occurred. The magnificent ponderosa pine forests around Flagstaff, Ariz., were heavily logged during the past century, and the cut-over land has now sprouted into fire-prone thickets. To the west and north, the once-healthy grasslands […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
More on mail pollution
Dear HCN, The following is a note I sent to Al and Betty Schneider upon reading of their efforts to get control of junk mail in my first issue of a new subscription to High Country News (a newspaper I’ve wanted to get for years but have just now gotten as a gift subscription). Al […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Enlibra is just window dressing
Dear HCN, James Souby’s letter in the Dec. 21 edition concerning the Western Governors’ Association “Enlibra” program is contradictory. On the one hand, Souby lauds the Oregon Salmon Plan as a “good example” of “environmental management strategies that incorporate balance and stewardship” while on the other he asserts “skepticism” that Enlibra-style “solutions’ would work “where […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Don’t give up
Dear HCN, As an eighth-grade science teacher, I empathize with “Asta Bowen’s discouragement (HCN, 1/18/99). At times, just one negative interaction with a student or parent can cast a pall over your whole day and cause you to wonder about your choice of occupation. Ours is a profession where the results often do not surface […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Pogo was right
Dear HCN, I found it ironic that three of the four folks opposing sprawl that Tony Davis chose to highlight in his sidebars in the Desert Sprawl article are, in fact, “sprawlers’ themselves. Whether they moved to the Catalina Foothills in 1946, watched the east side of Tucson expand from their home in the Tucson […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
We did our job
Dear HCN, In Ted Williams’ original commentary on Nevada land exchanges, as it appeared in Fly Rod and Reel magazine, Williams wrote that the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics had an “obligation” to report on the Office of Inspector General investigation (HCN, 12/21/98). We agree. That’s why we did. It may also interest your […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
How we ended up with rural mansions
Dear HCN, I read with interest your Tucson sprawl article, but saw no solution (HCN, 1/18/99). Here in rural King County, thanks to Seattle politicians, we have all the downzoning that accompanied this state’s 1990 Growth Management Act (GMA). That act was the result of newcomers’ I’m-here-pull-up-the-gangplank mentality. The GMA called for a pristine countryside […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Riding the rails in Colorado
Rails may be the most cost- and energy-efficient way to move commodities across our landscape, but they’re also a shrinking asset; America’s major railroads abandon about 3,200 miles of track every year. How should state and local governments, and community activists, respond when a railroad files to abandon a line? Colorado, where rail mileage has […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Tucson draws a line on sprawl
TUCSON, Ariz. – A crowd of several hundred people burst into applause at a public meeting here, as the Pima County Board of Supervisors killed a developer’s plan to turn a cattle ranch into 6,100 homes, two golf courses, a hotel, shopping areas and an airstrip. The Jan. 12 vote, the first denial of a […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Activists block bison capture pen
Suspended 35 feet in the air from tripods made of tree trunks, two members of the group Buffalo Nations keep vigil. They are here to prevent the Montana Department of Livestock from building a bison pen outside West Yellowstone, Mont., near Horse Butte, about 15 miles from Yellowstone National Park. The department wants to capture […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Ghost town hangs on
SOUTHERN CROSS, Mont. – The handful of locals in this Montana ghost town are haunted by the specter of eviction. Protected by a 1998 court injunction, homeowners earned borrowed time to stay put. But they still face a court challenge from the development company that owns the land beneath their homes. About 20 people own […]