Letter to the editor

Dear HCN, Your recent issue on the new Denver airport (HCN, 1/23/95) has caused me to conclude that your standards of journalistic and intellectual honesty are about on the same level as the slickness of your production. Never before have I encountered anything in your paper where you are so wrong (my opinion) and where […]

Dear HCN, Here’s how to save time and effort preparing your next special issue: Take the Denver Airport article and, wherever it says “Denver,” write in “Salt Lake City,” replace “International Airport” with “Winter Olympics.” Seriously, while there obviously are some differences, I was struck by the similarities. Utah politicians are falling over themselves singing […]

Dear HCN, Every time I read a “protect our constitutional rights’ or “jobs save our rural lifestyle” rap (HCN, 1/23/95), I think of two things: The first is that a “rural” lifestyle is a romantic vision that these people have not lived for several generations, if then. They do not grow much of their own […]

I am intrigued by Ed Marston’s statement (HCN, 12/26/94) that “There have been a bunch of studies of this new economy by environmental groups and their economists; almost all welcome it.” The economy of the New West is not necessarily better – just different. It brings with it new opportunities but also new problems. Our […]

Ed Marston’s call to save the West (HCN, 12/26/94) was a well-intentioned plea for protecting the population and communities here from the larger forces at work upon them. Sadly, it lacks a historical context and appears to invoke the same type of preservationist mentality that is often damned when it is wielded by environmentalists. Implicit […]

Dear HCN, I noticed that you now have at least three ranchers on your board of directors – Farwell Smith, Diane Peavey and Doc Hatfield. At least two out of the three are well known and outspoken advocates of public-lands grazing. Isn’t this just like the National Cancer Association having a couple of tobacco farmers […]

Dear HCN, I enjoyed Ed Marston’s editorial in the Dec. 26 High Country News. I’m a (gasp) federal-land rancher in (gasp) Catron County, N.M., and write a weekly editorial in the Courier, which often bashes (gasp) enviro-preservationists. I’ve been active in working on the Catron County Land Plan in relation to water. I’ve watched each […]

Dear HCN, I’ve had a bellyful of Ed Marston’s sappy romanticizing about the Western rancher (HCN, 12/26/94). I’m from a ranching family – my great-grandmother came out West in a covered wagon in 1846, and my grandfather homesteaded a ranch in Arizona in 1913 – and the way you Easterners buy into this “rugged individual” […]

Dear HCN: Why is the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee supporting delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear? (HCN, 1/23/95). After 35 years of research on this population and the expenditure of several million dollars, there still is no reasonable population estimate for the Yellowstone grizzly or a scientifically defensible measure of what constitutes a recovered population. […]

Dear HCN, As a Seattle-suburbs hobby farmer (horses), widow of a lawyer, mother of four college graduates, and (unpaid) legislative liaison for the King County Property Rights Alliance, I am also one of those “people with an ideological predisposition who are most vulnerable to independence, anti-government and property rights slogans.” (Hoo-ha!) The condescension of the […]

Dear HCN, Those who simply scanned Paul Koberstein’s Nov. 28, 1994, headline, “BuRec to allow water thefts to continue,” may have assumed that Reclamation is not addressing the problem of unauthorized use of water. That’s not the case. Reclamation is actively seeking to eliminate the unauthorized use of water, sometimes referred to as water spreading. […]

Dear HCN, “Shrink To Fit” (HCN, 11/12/94), about downsizing the Park Service, hit me where I used to live. Almost 40 years ago I began a Park Service career as a laborer on a trail maintenance crew at Many Glacier. Two months ago I was one of the 425 who took the “buyout” and retired. […]

Dear HCN, I was most interested in Bruce Selcraig’s article on the pending water crisis facing the city that never listens (HCN, 12/26/94). I was enticed by the city manager, Richard Wilson, in 1971 to assume the position of planning director of the combined planning programs of Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Planning Commissions. One year later Wilson […]

Dear HCN: Had reporter Kathie Durbin been more thorough in her examination of the facts (about the hanging in effigy in Joseph, Ore., of two environmentalists (HCN, 11/14/94), she would have discovered the unemployment rate in Wallowa County is nearly twice as high as she erroneously reported in her exposé on our ugly little town. […]

Dear HCN, Last summer my partner Lynn and I did some backpacking in Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies, a couple of months after Canada instituted their backcountry usage fee of $5 per person per day. After we got over the initial shock, and headed back into Radium Hot Springs to pull more cash […]

Dear HCN, Beauty has definitely not eluded the Beast, and this Beast does not turn out to be any Prince Charming … In the past I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated the journalism of HCN. The Nov. 28 article on the Methow Valley, however, was exceedingly optimistic. The idea of development based on compromise and […]

Dear HCN, It seems to me that we environmentalists are in danger of shooting ourselves in the foot – again! In retrospect, it’s clear that a major mistake was made in giving the appearance (sometimes maybe more than that) of not caring about workers who lost their jobs in mining, timbering or elsewhere. This gave […]

Dear HCN, To suggest that logging in some way is a way towards forest health is like the medieval doctors who thought the best way to save a dying patient was to bleed them to rid them of “bad blood.” From an ecological perspective, there is no forest “health” problem. Disease, insects, and yes, even […]

Dear HCN, In driving around the West for the past five weeks we largely confirmed the picture you described in “Grappling with Growth,” Sept. 9, of pell-mell, frantic growth and the growing gap between obvious wealth and poverty. Not only are the monster “homes’ ugly and in bad taste, but they are usually located on […]

Dear HCN, Having just returned from a four-day camping trip to Yellowstone National Park, I was interested in Dave Tillotson’s letter (HCN, 9/5/94). Unfortunately, what I would like to tackle is a little more difficult than a vehicle ban: visitor stupidity! A huge number of park visitors blatantly ignore warnings about approaching wild animals and […]