Among publicly owned lands, state trust lands are an anomaly. Granted at statehood by the federal government, they run in patchwork patterns across the West, from the red Utah desert to the dense forests of Oregon. Their arrangement on the landscape is utterly arbitrary — generally, two square-mile sections, numbered 16 and 36 in every […]
Growth & Sustainability
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Paving over an ancient burial ground
15-acres of undeveloped landscape sits as an oasis among the undulating, cookie cutter housing developments that crowd the edges of the Carquinez Strait, a natural tidal channel in Vallejo, California. At this spot, known as Glen Cove Waterfront Park, a swath of yellow grass, dappled with the woody stems of wild fennel, leads to the […]
Posted inGoat
Northwest coal port ignites controversy
Bellingham, Washington is no stranger to industry. The seaside college town in the northwesternmost corner of the country was founded on coal and timber in the 1800s. But after the downtown Georgia-Pacific pulp mill shut down in 2007, the city has been more focused on cleaning up the toxic mess left behind than bringing big […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Greening a city … and pushing other colors out
San Francisco, CaliforniaThe Hunters Point Naval Shipyard covers 500 acres on San Francisco’s southeastern flank, jutting out into the bay like the fletching of a giant arrow. Acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1940, it was once one of the West Coast’s largest shipyards, at its World War II peak employing up to 17,000 people, […]
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New Urbanism irks even green Westerners
In my last post, I explored what appear to be conflicting views on what we today call environmental justice in Edward Abbey’s cult classic Desert Solitaire. The book is fun to assign to my Environmental Rhetoric students because between the lyrical descriptions of Utah wilderness and the fist-pounding Luddite rants it’s guaranteed to provoke lively […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Empty nests
IDAHO When the real estate market went bananas in the middle of the last decade, Teton County, Idaho, couldn’t approve new subdivisions fast enough. In fact, the Idaho valley, which is located just over the pass from pricey Jackson, Wyo., was named one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States. But when the housing […]
Posted inApril 18, 2011: Muddy Waters
Green ‘New Urbanist’ development rises in Albuquerque suburbs
One way to explain how a Manhattan-sized mesa may become the Southwest’s largest green development is to point to its past success as an apocalyptic wasteland. In 2008, a touch of twisted metal transformed part of Mesa del Sol, a 12,900-acre expanse south of Albuquerque, into a robot-ravaged Los Angeles for the movie Terminator Salvation. […]
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Eagle Mountain: Still Not Safe From Los Angeles Garbage
Environmentalists and activists touted it as a victory last week when the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would not hear Kaiser Eagle Mountain v. National Parks Conservation Association et al, the decades-old legal battle over a landfill slated for a spit of land on the southern boundary of Joshua Tree National Park. But after reading […]
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A new brand of trust land?
Over the last 20 years, timberlands around the West have been falling fast to development. In Washington State, one sixth of commercial forests have been converted to other uses in that time, according to the state Department of Natural Resources (WDNR). Some 1.2 million acres of forest are converted to development and other uses each […]
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The incredible growing shrinking ski resort!
Do you remember those little packets of gel-cap pills? The ones that would, when submerged in water, swell to become little sponge dinosaurs? Only the little sponge dinosaurs were tiny and flat and lame and never came close to the awesomeness promised by the full-sized dinosaurs rampaging across the label? Seems that could be the […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Evolution not revolution
I appreciate your highlighting the Bureau of Land Management’s efforts to invigorate its National Landscape Conservation System (HCN, 12/20/10). After 10 years, there have certainly been mixed results, as you pointed out in your reference to the Canyon of the Ancients National Monument and its fluid mineral leasing program. But I think it’s important to […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
State and municipal governments fertilize local food craze
Over the last 80 years, federal policy has increasingly put small farmers at a disadvantage by massively subsidizing a centralized, industrial agriculture system that produces cheap food. Activists have spent decades pushing federal reforms, such as organic standards, with incremental success. Now, a surge of state and local government policies that promote local food and […]
Posted inRange
Road rage on the Front Range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Momentum is building for the construction of a controversial, 10-mile toll road through a wildlife refuge outside of Denver. Embroiled in the road row are warring counties, a powerful mining company and one man obsessed with asphalt. Now that it seems the road may become a reality, the […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Rethinking national parks and wilderness
Review of Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks
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Tree equity
The Los Angeles community Sherman Oaks sounds like a place that should be verdant and laden with leafy trees. Not surprisingly, the students of Arbol University found that to be exactly true. Yet the students, who were using trigonometry and other tools to collect data about Los Angeles’s urban tree canopy, were shocked at the […]
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The age of loudness
“No age is louder than ours,” Ken McAlpine writes in his book, “Islands Apart.” “We have reached a crescendo of clamor, and it is both curse and comfort,” he continues. “Solitude, in our times, is rare and, for many, profoundly unnerving.” What might solitude offer those who never have a chance to experience it? Can […]
Posted inRange
Public transportation systems come at a high price
Last weekend the New York Times reported on efforts to develop a fast train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Being a rider myself—I am writing this on the Cascades run south—and knowing how appealing European trains are and how outdated, inefficient, and unreliable North American trains are, I read the article with a sinking […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Cock-a-doodle-brouhaha
COLORADO Don’t even think of toting roosters along if you’re moving to Ridgway in western Colorado. The birds are unwanted, and not just because they tend to cock-a-doodle-doo at the crack of dawn. They’ve become the symbol of a town that’s no longer rural, relaxed and live and let-live. For proof, just ask resident Janet […]
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Snowbound? Take a virtual tour of the West
If you live in the mountains, or near them, or you have to fly over them, you know that the holidays aren’t just about visiting family, stuffing your face, or dropping into a prolonged eggnog coma (IMHO, that must be why the stuff is called “nog” in the first place). They’re also about not being […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
State trust lands serve public
What’s equivalent in area to Washington state, lies mostly west of the Mississippi, and raises well over a billion dollars for public education each year? State trust lands. These unique “public” lands were granted by the federal government to every state that joined the Union, starting with Ohio in 1803, in the belief that townships […]