Letter to the editor

Dear HCN, Mike Medberry’s report on big foundations, national conservation coalitions and grassroots conservation was thoughtful and respectful of the subject’s complexities (HCN, 10/16/95). The Pew Charitable Trusts was featured in Mike’s piece. Many conservationists are not wild about Pew. I have experience of Pew as an employee of a grantee and as steering committee […]

Dear HCN, The deal that Idaho’s Gov. Batt worked out with the DOE is a bad deal for Idaho and a bad deal for the rest of the West (HCN, 11/13/95). The pressure that Gov. Batt claimed to be feeling was coming mainly from Idaho’s congressional delegation and, I suspect, from his political funders. Without […]

Dear HCN, Dan Dagget’s essay (-It’s unAmerican, or at best unWestern, but cooperation works,” HCN, 10/16/95)is a clean and tidy one-size-fits-all solution to the environmental crisis. Certainly cooperation has its place in the scheme of things. Yet many environmental problems are international in scope and interconnected in nature. Suggesting that cooperation is the only or […]

Dear HCN, The take of Beltway green Paul Pritchard of the National Parks and Conservation Association on the national environmental movement is: “We feel like General Custer.” (-D.C. Green Power Brokers Look for New Home,” HCN, 11/13/95). An apt analogy, indeed – though hardly a grassroots, cross-cultural organizing sentiment. The genocidal Custer got what he […]

Dear HCN, It was fortunate that your 10/2/95 issue had in it both the essay by Dave Brown and a letter from William Dickinson. They allowed me to synthesize a new perspective on the effects of cattle grazing on riparian areas. It is now obvious that cattle are the victims of incredible bad luck. They […]

Dear HCN, I am quite upset about the selective quotes from me in the article about program cuts at the University of Washington by Kathie Durbin (HCN, 11/13/95). The manner in which my remarks were used makes it appear that the faculty and staff of the Center for Streamside Studies blame Weyerhaeuser Company for the […]

Dear HCN, Your Oct. 2 article about the jet noise in a Colorado wilderness made me realize that I might be able to help after fighting the jet noise from San Francisco Airport for 25 years. First, start by learning everything about the way the Federal Aviation Administration handles takeoffs and landings in every type […]

Dear HCN, Ganados del Valle is not an organization which “attacks reputations’ and smears them in our valley’s “red brown mud” (HCN, 10/16/95). Over the past five years we have had several opportunities to tell the story of the history of the lawsuit brought by the attorney general of New Mexico against the Sierra Club […]

Dear HCN, I was disappointed and extremely saddened after reading “In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one” (HCN, 10/16/95). Disappointed that with so many other environmental problems facing this country, the Sierra Club Foundation has chosen to pick on a small rural cooperative to the tune of $2.5 million. It seems […]

Dear HCN, I was delighted that Jon Christensen did an article on Elko County, Nev. (HCN, 10/30/95). I just wish he had done so while I was still living there. I worked as an engineer for one of the gold-mining companies in the area until I decided to leave after being informed that my political […]

Dear HCN, I noticed in a recent article by Elizabeth Manning that the residents of Catron County, N.M., support Dick Manning and his anti-government proclamations (HCN, 10/30/95). As a resident of Catron County I can assure you that is not true. At least half, if not more, of the residents think he is a loud-mouth […]

Dear HCN, Hooray for Tom Casey who wants to preserve the nuclear power plant structures west of Olympia, Wash., according to HCN’s Heard Around the West column Oct. 16. They are an honest representation of our cultural heritage, and, like charming 1800s brick buildings, their presence on the landscape tells us, over time, just where […]

Dear HCN, Regarding the anonymous letter, “Where Credit is Due” (HCN, 10/2/95), I’d like to clarify the litigative history that led to the “saving” of Mono Lake. As the letter correctly noted, the first limitation of water diversions from the Mono Basin was the product of lawsuits filed in 1984 by California Trout. The Mono […]

Dear HCN, I was very pleased to see the article about the efforts of Skip Edwards in the Westwater Wilderness area (HCN, 10/16/95). Our ranch, the Mountain Island Ranch, is the only BLM grazing permittee on the east shore of the Colorado River through the Westwater Canyon. Skip and I have had our differences of […]

Dear HCN, Ray Ring’s otherwise excellent article about whirling disease and trout in torment (HCN, 9/18/95) missed a critical part of the fisheries picture in the arid West: livestock. One of the key reasons why the Idaho Watersheds Project and eight regional environmental groups filed a listing petition for the desert redband trout with the […]

Dear HCN, High Country News took a cheap shot to deliver a hot opening line in your article about troubles in the Endangered Species Coalition (HCN, 10/16/95). You would get the idea that the National Audubon Society just woke up one day and fired the coalition staff out of pique. Not true. We were forced […]

Dear HCN, As Colorado State Professor John Loomis shows, contingent valuation can be a useful tool to demonstrate how much we value “goods’ like clean air or dam-free rivers (HCN, 9/18/95). Since the valuation we ordinarily look to is that established by parties in mutually beneficial transactions, goods that are not bought and sold may […]

Dear HCN, I lived and worked in and near Zion Canyon for 12 years, and during that time the two old pioneer towns at the mouth of the canyon experienced rapidly rising population pressures, both from visitors and new residents. Most of the work available in the canyon entailed contact with a portion of the […]

Dear HCN, I was starting to get bored reading another superficial diatribe – Stephen Lyons’ “Have a Kokopelli Day” (HCN, 9/18/95) – against the new colonizers of the West and indigenous imagery. I perked up, however, at the reference to the picture in the Patagonia catalog of Norbu with his donkeys “laden to the hilt, […]

Dear HCN, I’d like to respond to William Corcoran’s attack on guidebook critics like myself (HCN, 10/2/95). Mr. Corcoran says I should spend more of my energy on Planned Parenthood “instead of preaching perfection to an imperfect world” and in part he’s right. The fact is, there are just too damn many people out there. […]