Regarding your recent story “the great giveaway,” i retired as national recreation director for the bureau of land management in 2003, because i saw the bush administration consistently subvert the overall mission of the blm through the appointment of politicos willing to overrule professional judgment and substitute white house imperatives (hcn, 10/13/08). I retired earlier […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inOctober 27, 2008: Prophets and politics
The coming quake
Is Los Angeles ready for the Big One?
Posted inOctober 13, 2008: Back to the future
The end of Western welfare?
As Wall Street’s titans of finance crumbled before our eyes in mid-September (coincidentally, this was Bin Laden’s stated goal after 9/11), I remembered the day I interviewed Bill Yellowtail at his ranch, near Wyola, Mont., 15 years ago, and the shocking things he said that afternoon about capitalism in the West. One of my notes […]
Posted inGoat
Plum Creek deal — plumb wrong?
Since last spring, Plum Creek Timber Company and the Forest Service have claimed that thousands of miles of old logging roads in western Montana can automatically be turned into driveways for second homes and cabins. Such guaranteed access would make Plum Creek’s 1.2 million acres in the state worth much more to buyers. The industry-friendly […]
Posted inArticles
One species versus 1.8 million others
I’m a student of roadkill. I keep an informal tally of the carcasses I spot on the roadside – what kind, how many and where — and I note the splatters that accumulate on our car windshield. They’re an indication of the diversity and abundance of animal and insect lives along the unnatural transects we […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Keep ’em down on the farm
Comprehensive land-use planning such as we have in Oregon prevents the kind of problem that your recent story “Death, and taxes” addresses (HCN, 8/18/08). Agricultural and timber land is just that, and where it is located does not affect its property tax value. Having farmland adjacent to urban areas does not have to result in […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Wet dreams
In Jonathan Thompson’s recent column, he writes of grand new resorts that “depend entirely on the wealthy buying into them” (HCN, 8/18/08). Well, maybe not entirely. I was reminded of Leslie Marmon Silko’s highly praised 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead. One of the major plot lines is about an architect who feverishly envisions “Venice, […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Don’t eat the rich, tax them
Christopher Solomon’s article “An Unlikely Shangri-la” is a classic example of what HCN does that no one else seems to do: An otherwise obscure not-quite-news story that, when treated with careful and exhaustive reporting, provides insights of profound importance to the future of the West (HCN, 8/18/08). There are a number of significant inferences one […]
Posted inAugust 25, 2008: Hot Wheels
Portrait of a threatened land
Travels in the Greater Yellowstone Jack Turner 288 pages, hardcover, $25.95. Thomas Dunne Books, 2008. Jack Turner’s Travels in the Greater Yellowstone chronicles both the subtle and radical changes that he’s seen in the place he’s called home for over three decades. Turner, author of several books on ecology and mountaineering, has watched this extraordinary […]
Posted inAugust 25, 2008: Hot Wheels
Peace on the Gila, too?
“Peace on the Klamath.” Words like that, used on a recent cover, might compel one to believe that there are no insurmountable water problems (HCN, 6/23/08). And they give us hope for the Gila. The situation in the Gila Basin of New Mexico is a bit different from that in the Klamath. Rather than arguing […]
Posted inAugust 11, 2008: Trouble in (Private) Paradise
Death, and taxes
In Western communities with runaway land values, even estate planning can’t keep the farm in the family
Posted inApril 14, 2008: Taking to the Trees
The leasing protest game
Conservationists’ gritty strategy yields small fruit
Posted inArticles
Primer 6: Immigration
To get a glimpse of the complexity of the issues surrounding immigration in the United States, one need only watch the peculiar dances of this year’s presidential candidates, and the way a few of them stumbled and lost the beat and fell to the ground at the end. Somewhere, somehow, someone in the ranks of […]
Posted inArticles
Regulating the river
Jim Hagenbarth has spent his life ranching along the banks of the Big Hole River in southwestern Montana, on land his family has worked for more than a century. The area remains sparsely populated and mostly agricultural, much as it was when Hagenbarth used to get in trouble as a kid for riding calves behind […]
Posted inApril 14, 2008: Taking to the Trees
Plowing under the fields of shame
Under a brain-scorching heat, a group of farmworkers harvests melons from a vast field near Huron, Calif. There is only one woman among the dozen or so workers; she leans into the task, her arms outstretched, her body itself a tool. The bandana around her face and her baggy long-sleeved T-shirt offer a thin protection […]
Posted inArticles
Yellowstone grazing allotments
Updated March 24, 2008 Stephen Gordon lost more cattle to grizzly and wolves than any other rancher in his neck of the woods. In the 20 years that he ran his Diamond G Ranch herd on the Dunoir federal grazing allotment just east of Grand Teton National Park, predators killed between 200 and 250 calves. […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2008: Unnatural Preservation
Two weeks in the West
Updated 2/4/2008 A groan must have risen from some Western developers at the end of last year, as a flurry of conservation easements yanked hundreds of thousands of acres out of their reach. The rush was at least partly due to a federal tax incentive that expired at the end of 2007. (Congress is considering […]
Posted inWotr
Whatever we do about illegal immigration, somebody suffers
It’s 6:30, and I’m eating breakfast at a café north of Denver with a man I’ll call Bob. Born and raised in Denver, Bob sprays custom finishes on drywall and has owned his own company for 18 years: “At one point we had 12 people running three trucks.” Now, the business is just his wife […]
Posted inWotr
A bad idea hits the gas pumps
A quiet invasion is under way near my home in Colorado. Inconspicuous black stickers are appearing on gas pumps announcing the arrival of a new molecule looking to occupy gas tanks. It goes by the name of C2H5OH — ethanol. Typically, my consumption of ethanol is strictly oral, in the form of alcoholic beverages. But […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2008: An energy oasis in the political desert
Two weeks in the West
Wide-open spaces and burly, gas-guzzling automobiles go hand in hand in the West. After all, how else can you get to your favorite climbing crag or hiking trail? Perhaps by driving a burly rig that guzzles a lot less gas. Or so California and a handful of other Western states had hoped. But the U.S. […]