Letter to the editor

Dear HCN, Ed Marston believes that a reborn Department of Interior under Bruce Babbitt has led America out of the darkness of greedy natural resource extraction interests and into the warm sunlight of enlightened environmentalism

Dear HCN, Idaho Indian tribes won a long culture war when a legislative committee recently agreed to strike the word “squaw” from the map. But the tribes’ victory doesn’t let anglers off the hook. What are we to call the fish formerly known as squaw? A while back, state and federal agencies agreed to call […]

Dear HCN, This letter is in response to Greg Hanscom’s article, “Road Block” (HCN, 12/4/00: Road Block). Back in December 1999, during a Christmas visit to my hometown of Albuquerque, I took a drive to the east side of the city and found yet another subdivision in the once empty Elena Gallegos Land Grant. I […]

Dear HCN, We greatly appreciated the article by Mark Matthews, “Last chance for the whitebark pine” (HCN, 12/4/00: Last chance for the whitebark pine), which described the widespread decline of the once abundant high-elevation whitebark pine ecosystem in the Northwestern United States and Southwestern Canada. The losses result from the combination of introduced disease (white […]

Dear HCN, Paul Larmer makes two fundamental errors in the second paragraph of his article (HCN, 1/29/01: Power on the loose). California deregulation didn’t “require” that power companies sell off their power generation; it just made it attractive to do so in the short term, and shortsighted utilities did just that. However, other utilities, notably […]

Dear HCN, I enjoy your paper most of the time, but Ed Marston’s essay, “Rearranging the Grid,” struck an especially deep chord (HCN, 1/29/01: Rearranging the Grid). As his long, persistent efforts on the DMEA board have taught him, it may be in the trenches at the heart of our Western civilization that the battle […]

Dear HCN, “Troubled harvest,” your Dec. 18 lament over an immigration policy that doesn’t encourage immigration, reads like a plea for “wise use.” A population that grew more than 13 percent in the 1990s – the fastest growth rate among the industrial nations – exacerbates virtually all of the environmental problems covered so well by […]

Dear HCN, As one of the designated bad guys in Greg Hanscom’s reprise of Milagro Beanfield War (HCN, 12/4/00: Road block), I guess I should be thankful that the Valley Improvement Association came out looking no worse than it did … and stay quietly holed up in my “airy offices” (in a 30-year-old converted shopping […]

Dear HCN, I’m sure environmentalists are ready to declare the Sagebrush Rebellion over now that People for the USA is closing its doors (HCN, 12/18/00: People for the USA! disbands). Sierra Clubber Bruce Hamilton couldn’t resist one last distortion, telling HCN readers that PFUSA went about “buying rural representatives.” Hamilton also pointed out that “Corporate […]

Dear HCN, Edwin Dobb (HCN, 12/18/00: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?) argues that we must accept our alienation from nature and, out of humane compassion, take endangered species into our adopting hands. His philosophy of “natural representation,” while perhaps inspiring some individuals to protect wildlife, would be disastrous for the conservation […]

Dear HCN, Logger Kirkmire’s letter in your Dec. 4 edition requires several responses. 1) The people he claims are outraged about the killing of excess hatchery salmon need to study up on their biology and ecology. Any watershed has a limited capacity for spawning and rearing of salmon. To introduce more spawning adults into a […]

Dear HCN, The “Analysis” by Tony Davis regarding the failure of Arizona’s anti-growth Proposition 202 in the last election misses an important part of the situation in southern Arizona and, I suspect, elsewhere as well (HCN, 11/20/00: In Arizona’s growth fight, advertising defined reality). Davis attributes the failure to an advertising blitz by the pro-growth […]

Dear HCN, I just received your latest edition of HCN and couldn’t get the Burma Shave lines out of my head. I think bringing information like this up about our checkered history is important (HCN, 10/23/00: Dear Friends). A quick, easy-to-read sign is an innovative way to get the information across. The hard-hitting reporting that […]

Dear HCN, Not long ago, I was eating pancakes in a small diner/grocery in Clark, Colo., just 25 miles north of Steamboat Springs. My waitress was 60-something, and I soon found that she and her husband owned a farm outside of Clark. “It’s been part of the family since the Homestead Act,” she explained. By […]

Dear HCN, Bob Skaggs and so many others miss the point when they argue that immigrants only take low-paying jobs that “no one else wants” (HCN, 11/20/00). Corine Flores is right. We have little hope of advancing the earnings potential of this nation’s poor or minorities, or of protecting the environment, as long as immigration […]

Dear HCN, I have just finished lunch with your essay, “Squishy-soft processes – hard results” (HCN, 8/28/00). I read with particular interest the part about Nye, Mont., and the palladium mine. We visited Nye in the early ’90s for the sole purpose of seeing the mine (hillbillies do that). We were having a chuckle about […]

Dear HCN, Susan Cockrell’s letter attacking my research into nonlethal federal management of coyotes in the Oct. 23 issue of High Country News proves that, once again, you can lead some horses to water but you can’t make them drink. But the hopelessness of some tasks just encourages folks like me (I love my job!). […]

Dear HCN, Your story, “Into the depths” (HCN, 11/6/00) grossly understated the depth of Crater Lake, Ore., the deepest lake in North America at nearly 2,000 feet. You surely meant 600 meters. Because of this great depth and its clarity, it has an incredible blue color caused by molecular scattering and its steep shoreline. Go […]

Dear HCN, Mark Muro’s piece about the defeat of growth-control initiatives in Colorado and Arizona was disheartening, but there is a bright side (HCN, 11/20/00). All of us know that developers care about only one thing. Forcing them to spend money to defeat such proposals puts a crimp in their profits, and more than $4 […]

Dear HCN, I have just finished lunch with your essay, “Squishy-soft processes – hard results” (HCN, 8/28/00). I read with particular interest the part about Nye, Mont., and the palladium mine. We visited Nye in the early ’90s for the sole purpose of seeing the mine (hillbillies do that). We were having a chuckle about […]