In some parts of the West, conversations about land use can be hazardous to your health. This time, you can leave the brass knuckles at home; all you need is a bookmark. The writers in Home Land aren’t just old-time Westerners; they include a descendant of New York coal miners, a wildlife biologist, and a […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inJune 11, 2007: Brave New Hay
Tribal victory
Yakama Nation buys Lyle Point, ending decades-long struggle over fishing rights
Posted inWotr
Bring on the immigrants
Vanishing towns of the Great Plains and Midwest ought to open a welcoming door for immigrants.
Posted inWotr
Fees have become a public-lands shakedown
Scarcely anyone objected in 1996, when Congress authorized the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to charge the public new or increased fees for accessing its own land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp or walk. After all, it was going to be an experiment […]
Posted inMay 14, 2007: Two Views of the Verde
British writer tackles border politics
Make room on your bookshelf: Midnight Cactus will fit nicely between T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. While Boyle provides a satiric fictional account of Southern California haves versus immigrant have-nots, and Urrea documents a deadly real-life journey across the border, British author Bella Pollen offers a lighter, though […]
Posted inWotr
Killer commutes in the rural West
Every day a clot of drivers moving at high speed takes on the Gallatin Canyon between Bozeman and Big Sky, Mont. It is the second-busiest commuting corridor in the state, and the most dangerous. Between 5,500 and 7,500 drivers navigate the perilous gantlet of highway 191 on a daily basis, on their way to work […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Two weeks in the West
Doomsayers think suburbia will be slaughtered by rising oil prices, or drought. But for now, gas is relatively cheap, the grass is still green, and the population keeps on growing. Suburbs continue to gobble up the Western landscape. Don’t be fooled, though: Suburbia is suffering. But don’t blame water or oil for the cul de […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Why the West should copy Swiss transit
This winter, my family discovered that Oregon’s Mount Hood is known for more than dramatic mountain rescues. Would you believe it could also be home to the mother of all traffic jams? Taillights for as far as the eye can see, gridlock for nearly an hour: That’s what the highway through the Mount Hood National […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
The granddaddy of all collaboration groups
One thing you quickly learn in the rural West is that ranchers come in all shapes and sizes. There are the fourth-generation ranchers hanging on by their toenails with overextended credit and the eternal hope that cattle prices will rebound, the drought will break, and most of their cows will be found on the mountain […]
Posted inArticles
One of Interior’s departed returns to D.C. (for a short while)
On April 17, 2007, Ann Morgan got to do something that few Western conservationists have done since 2001: testify before a congressional committee. The subject before the Energy and Minerals Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee was the BLM’s ongoing push to open up as much of the public domain as possible to oil […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
Wealthy landowners and locals wade into the ditch
Does a trout know who owns the body of water it lives in? This is not a Buddhist riddle. All a trout, elk or black-footed ferret cares about is whether the water or land can sustain it. Some of us have forgotten that unadorned fact. Motivated by laudable concerns over social change, some Westerners have […]
Posted inApril 16, 2007: Phoenix Falling?
The sacred and the toxic
Tohono O’odham tribe fights a hazardous landfill
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Rail out of town
Schwarzenegger budget says hasta la vista to bullet train. At least for now.
Posted inArticles
Public lands “crown jewels” languish for lack of funding
On a balmy spring day in Ironwood Forest National Monument, volunteers work up a sweat as they plant native bushes and sweep away the vehicle tracks that cut across the Sonoran Desert landscape. Arizona’s Ironwood Forest is one of 15 national monuments in the Bureau of Land Management’s National Landscape Conservation System. The monument already […]
Posted inArticles
Utah county tries to rein in off-roaders
“There was a time I could go out and ride a motorcycle cross-country,” says Ray Peterson, director of the Emery County Public Lands Council. “And the next day I could go back out and there wouldn’t be another track except mine.” That’s no longer the case: Off-road vehicle use in Utah has exploded during the […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2007: Wish You Weren’t Here
Don’t send a check, send yourself
When I first visited “Carnage Canyon” in the 1970s, it was clear to me how it got its name. The place was a mess. It had become a racetrack for racing bikes and motorcycles that zipped up and down the sides of the canyon. A few years later, people dragged in old refrigerators, cars and […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
The end of ‘analysis paralysis’?
The Forest Service overhauls its forest-planning process — but goes too far
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Two weeks in the West
Forests battered by budget cuts
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Ode to a public lands experiment
This could have been just another coffee-table volume full of stunning vistas and images of elk grazing in misty valleys. But by refusing to be yet another pretty book, Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve better serves the preserve’s long history and complicated beauty. The preserve’s abbreviated history goes something like this: […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
Condemned
Out on the range, old eminent domain laws erode private property rights