“We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” – W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Times of Civil War “This is a war we’re in. We’re choosing up sides,” thundered Gene Gustin, chairman of the public lands advisory committee for Elko County, Nev. Shouts of approval rose from a crowd of […]
Essays
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Don’t just stand there: Get arrested
Everybody’s doing it – the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, former Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, the Sierra Club’s Charlie Ogle – all going to jail for trees and to stop salvage sales. Getting handcuffed and treated roughly by gendarmes. Paying a new, for them, sort of dues. Since our travels around the West put us in […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
One man’s good move
My father is impeccably urban. Except for a stint at boarding school in New England and a few summer jobs in the country – he was fired from one for accidentally hoeing the heads off a half-mile-long row of cabbage – he remained in New York almost his entire life. His tastes, his habits of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Separating sense from nonsense in New Mexico’s forests
Environmentalists in northern New Mexico have a chance to show their better side. Having brought things to a halt in the recent, unnecessary crisis over firewood on Carson National Forest (HCN, 12/25/95), they might now show they can start things that need to get started. The crisis resulted from a lawsuit over the Mexican spotted […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hanford: Boomtown of the atomic frontier
At the beginning of World War II, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr told American scientists that “to get the fissionable materials necessary to make a bomb, you’re going to have to turn the whole country into a factory.” He exaggerated, of course. The factory took up counties, not countries. The Hanford Engineering Works in a […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hunting: Get used to it
Let me state right off and as unapologetically as possible that I am a member of the “hook-and-bullet” press – a field editor of the venerable Outdoor Life magazine, which along with its sister publication, Field & Stream, are America’s original conservation magazines. Both have been in business since before the turn of the century, […]
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
A few modest principles to help us manage Utah’s public lands
It wasn’t every day that I got to speak at a chamber of commerce meeting, so I tried to be careful. But I must have shown a bit too much green or too many urban mannerisms, and one member of the audience came rushing over almost before I’d stopped talking. In seconds we were going […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
For this hunter, there was only one elk
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. It was mid-afternoon and the bowhunter found himself working up a small knob covered with thick, second-growth lodgepole pine. The knob was part of the north slope of a larger mountain not far from the Continental […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
I like to hunt, but I don’t like to kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. I always edge away from the subject of hunting. I’ve hunted and shall hunt, but I don’t talk about it much – those late-night, throaty recitations of travels and kills make me nervous. It’s miserable standing […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Why a son won’t hunt with his father
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. “You always kill coyotes,” my father would tell me, with a seriousness that both frightened and fascinated me. “Always. They are bad animals. You shoot them whenever you get the chance.” The words rang through my […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
By the grace of old pines
Fish Creek murmurs to itself in a voice like rustling cottonwood leaves as it curves past Montana’s biggest ponderosa pine on its way to the Clark Fork River. Sunlight animates the tree’s trunk and ripples on the underside of its lowest branch, 30 feet overhead. Its bark is a smooth sheath of gold flakes with […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Agency leaders need to come out swinging
With a muffled thump, a small bomb ripped through Forest Service offices in Carson City, Nev., in late March, damaging walls and computer equipment. The damages were not just physical; for the men and women whose daily routines were shattered, the detonation had understandable psychological ramifications. There were political reverberations, too: Some public-land managers who […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Jury tackles a question of ethics in Montana
BILLINGS, Mont. – The three-day trial here last month of a man accused of shooting an endangered wolf ran like a morality play about the new American West and small-town Montana culture. This is a place where men enjoy their guns, hunting, beer and trucks, but as the accused, Chad McKittrick, soon discovered, there are […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
DC’s green power-brokers look for new home
A chastened national environmental movement, watching the progress it fought for over decades being dismantled by a hostile Congress, is going back to its roots. Or so its leaders say. Big national organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Wilderness Society, […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Sinclair Lewis’ George Babbitt would be at home in this Congress
When I read recently that a couple of Republican congressmen were still fighting an impending ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), I was overtaken by a literary obsession: I had to re-read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Let me explain. About a year ago, while still gainfully employed, I wrote a column about Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
To: Mom from: Wolf 3, Somewhere in Yellowstone National Park
About the last thing I remember, we were standing around that dead elk in Canada, you and me and One Eye and the triplets. You were laying out the meal at the south end of dinner, and I was leaving a message for those brain-dead coyotes on a pine tree. Then there was this loud […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
It’s unAmerican, or at best unWestern, but cooperation works
My mailbox is sounding the call to arms again. Since a Republican majority was elected to Congress, it’s been bulging with warnings that Newt Gingrich and his munchkins will dismantle most of the environmental gains made since the 1960s. Send more money and write more letters, the warnings trumpet, or risk seeing this environmental “dark […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Fifteen people march in Idaho to mourn the vanishing salmon
There is a chaos theory adage about the movement of a butterfly’s wings setting off a hurricane on the other side of the globe. It is an interesting notion; for every action, a reaction. It has about it a certain humility, a recognition that we know very little about the potential impact of our doings. […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
We need to avoid riparian hysteria
At a recent workshop on riparian ecosystems sponsored by the Tonto National Forest and Arizona Game and Fish Department, biologists dutifully presented their litanies on the inhabitants, histories and importance of steamside environments. Although the theme of this symposium was understanding and not preservation, several speakers offered up the statistic du jour: 95 percent of […]
Posted inOctober 2, 1995: Did Idaho libel the feds?
Grazing reform: Here’s the answer
We are veterans of America’s longest war: the war over the public lands of the West. For the past quarter century – in a conflict that dates back to the Civil War – we have written and spoken about livestock grazing on federal lands and fought over how those lands should be governed. We have, […]