For the past two years, I have actively opposed the construction of massive chemical weapons incinerators, both in Tooele County, Utah, where I live and at seven other sites across the nation where chemical weapons are stockpiled. As common folks like me (I’m a librarian) who get involved in controversial issues often say, “It’s been […]
Essays
Posted inOctober 3, 1994: Subdividing the desert: Should there be a vote?
The Southwest’s writers are terrified liars
One of the best modern novels about the real Southwest is in technicolor. It takes place in Prescott, Ariz.: A rodeo performer returns to his hometown, finds out that his brother is bulldozing the home ranch and slicing it up into ranchettes and subdivisions, that his dad is about to hit the road for prospecting […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 1994: Flame and blame in the Northwest
Love, hunger, money
I’ve just returned from the Spokane Tribe’s casino-and-gambling mecca at the western edge of our reservation, and I may have to enter the federal Witness Relocation Program because I have seen and know too much. I couldn’t believe it. I had gone there expecting to see a few slot machines and some sweaty small-town gamblers. […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 1994: Flame and blame in the Northwest
Bit by bit, government’s power is being eroded by wave of takings lawsuits
Takings in its newest formulation has taken the West by surprise. It shouldn’t have. Many reservoirs sit on taken ranches. Highways and railroads run across formerly private lands. Missile silos are embedded in once-private farms. These lands were taken by government or corporations through the power of eminent domain. The only question was how much […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 1994: Flame and blame in the Northwest
The Park Service didn’t put my son in a coma
The lead story in High Country News Aug. 22 concerned a hiking trip gone tragically awry near Zion National Park in Utah. Two men died, and the survivors filed a $23 million lawsuit against the Park Service. This essay responds to the question the story raised: “Whose fault?” My 24-year-old son’s accident in Yosemite National […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 1994: Can planning rein in a stampede?
The real bind is too many people everywhere
I suggest that one of the dominant environmental issues in the West’s future will be: How many people can live satisfied lives here? Population size is a factor of three variables: birth rates, death rates, and immigration. Birth, death and territory. Can any other issue cover such deep atavistic feelings? The issue will divide friends […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 1994: Can planning rein in a stampede?
Towns angling for tourism should beware of the great white shark
MOAB, Utah – The simplest way to describe what happened in Grand County is to say that, in 1986, our resilient community leaders got in their rowboat and went fishing for a little tourism to revive and diversify our economy. They hooked a great white shark. This monster has swamped the boat and eaten the […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 1994: Can planning rein in a stampede?
This boom will end like all the others – in a deep, deep bust
In 1982 a plumber named Jeff Everett and I competed to see who was the greater fool. I won. The competition centered on a 1,000-square-foot building we owned at 124 Grand Avenue, on Paonia’s two-block-long main street. It had been home to Betsy’s and my first newspaper – North Fork Times; by 1982 it stood […]
Posted inAugust 22, 1994: Whose fault? A Utah canyon turns deadly
Mothering a good forest fire isn’t easy
MEEKER, COLO. – The helicopter flew us toward the smoke. Even in the air, we wore heavy leather boots, jumpsuits and gloves made of Nomex – nothing that would ignite or melt easily. We had to be prepared in case of a forced landing. The Nomex felt surprisingly lightweight: thin protection. We topped the ridge, […]
Posted inAugust 22, 1994: Whose fault? A Utah canyon turns deadly
Bruce Babbitt in the lion’s den
Elsewhere in this issue (page 4), writer Michael Riley describes how Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt attended a ranchers’ barbecue. At the barbecue, as Babbitt knew they would, speaker after speaker tore into him. Throughout the talks, Riley reports, Babbitt chatted quietly with ranchers and local officials. Babbitt’s visit to the barbecue was another example of […]
Posted inAugust 22, 1994: Whose fault? A Utah canyon turns deadly
We aimed for Russia and hit the West
Former Arizona congressman Stewart Udall served as Interior Department Secretary during the 1960s when landmark bills such as the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act became law. When Udall returned to Arizona, however, he took on a cause that would change his life. With a team that included members of his family, Udall investigated what […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
FBI was out to get freethinking DeVoto
Nearly 40 years after his death, Bernard DeVoto is remembered as a brilliant historian, pungent social critic and one of the West’s earliest and most outspoken conservationists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, knew him differently. To the FBI, DeVoto was an “intellectual revolutionary,” “the son of a fallen away priest of the Roman Catholic […]
Posted inAugust 8, 1994: Glitz and growth take a major hit in Santa Fe
Why did 14 more have to die?
Jim Carrier wrote this column for the Denver Post after 14 firefighters died in a blowup in the Canyon Creek, Colorado, wildfire, July 6. The image that endures is that hillside, marked by charred trees and bristle-like brush stuck in rusty-blue, nearly rose soil, scarred in the center by a boot-scuffed line that became a […]
Posted inJuly 25, 1994: 'Unranchers' reach for West's state lands
How love of gold moves mountains
Through the centuries of our mythology, gold has gathered such a mystical sheen that we forget it is just another commodity. This is a critical oversight, especially for those people fighting gold mines in the West. We oppose gold mines and proposals for mines through the usual government channels, meager as these might be with […]
Posted inJuly 25, 1994: 'Unranchers' reach for West's state lands
How I tried to patch together a disintegrating world
Royce Green (not his real name) and his wife were eating dinner by the kitchen window during a storm when the wind blew their new roof into the air, opening the tin trailer like a can opener. Royce’s wife thought the whole place was going to go, just like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Utah and the Ute Tribe are at war
It all began with Abraham Lincoln and a promise. In the midst of history’s greatest test of presidential mettle, Lincoln took time in 1861 to establish the Uintah Valley Reservation for the Ute Indians in Utah. Before he wrote the order, however, the federal government asked Mormon leader Brigham Young if the Uintah Valley was […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
A life to fry for: hot on the trail of bighorn
Night slides down the mountainside, and the temperature in the Tule Desert sinks to 108 in the shade. A bighorn sheep 50 yards away gawks at me while I nervously work down a steep stone slope. I can see amusement in her big, dumb eyes. Suddenly, my backpack nicks a boulder. I hear a horrible […]
Posted inJune 27, 1994: Home, home on the range ... where neo-Nazis and skinheads roam
Camping out in the Merry Widow Mine
BOULDER, Mont. – Most people hear the word radon and think of an odorless, colorless gas that seeps into homes and can cause cancer. But some, like Denise Palmer, think of radon as a miracle drug. Crippled with psoriatic arthritis, her hands had become so painful she could no longer pull her clothes on or […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 1994: Turmoil on the range
Consensus may not be the best way to reform grazing
Editor’s note: The following letter was sent to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt by Dan Heinz, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service. Heinz is now an environmental consultant and field agent for the non-profit American Wildlands, 16575 Callahan Ranch, Reno, NV 89511 (702/884-1998). Dear Secretary Babbitt, Your willingness to listen to the grass […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Of buffalo thoughts and amethysts
I’ve grown up and moved away. I live in a city now instead of a little town. My grammar is better, my table manners hardly offend at all and I’ve been seen at art galleries and concerts. Yet still there are people who patronize me when they find out where I grew up. That was […]