I stand by the story I wrote (HCN, 5/11/09). I don’t believe the facts support BPA’s arguments. Take publicly subsided hydropower: My story says that the region enjoys publicly subsidized hydropower at national taxpayer expense and that is accurate. Here’s why: The hydropower dams were built at national taxpayer expense and for about the first […]
Letter to the editor
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Salmon simplification
The article, “Salmon Salvation” offers a simple answer to a complex problem (HCN, 5/11/09). “Many scientists,” it says (without naming any), think taking out the four Lower Snake River dams will simply bring back salmon. That’s like saying many people voted for John McCain: perhaps true, but blind to the big picture. Scientists realize 150 years […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Gimme wheels
It’s about time someone talked about how the snowmobile issue in Yellowstone National Park has been defined by two opponents that don’t really represent the public at large (HCN, 4/27/09). Fall and winter travel is mostly regional, a large group of people who truly love the park and visit often. Over-snow travel has effectively locked […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
It’s a dam mess
The “Salmon Salvation” article misses the point badly (HCN, 5/11/09). The obsession with the lower four dams on the Snake distracts from a much larger and more tangled problem. Although I, too, would like to see those dams go, the four lower Snake Dams are a relatively minor component of a vast set of problems; […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Open season on white males?
In many ways, the perspective piece “Last Rites and Forgotten Landscapes” by Laura Paskus was profoundly moving. She mourns the deaths of these women and justifiably decries investigators for labeling them as prostitutes even before the bodies were identified (HCN, 4/13/09). However, Paskus goes too far when she pointedly casts men as the perpetrators of […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
New urbanists
Regarding your recent story “The Growth Machine is Broken”: The real estate bust is the best thing to happen to the Sonoran Desert, although fears that the bulldozers will be on the crawl again in a few years are legitimate (HCN, 4/27/09). Yet I believe important changes are taking place that were not mentioned in […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The rest of the story
Terray Sylvester’s Uncommon Westerner profile of the legendary Harold Klieforth alludes only obliquely to Dr. Klieforth’s contributions to the meteorology of mountain lee waves, and the awe-inspiring Sierra wave in particular (HCN, 4/27/09). Dr. Klieforth’s knowledge of the airflow over the Sierra Nevada is unequalled, both from a lifetime of research and from personal experience […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Salmon (apolitical) science
Not only did Steve Hawley’s article “Columbia Basin (Political) Science” include factual errors and omit balancing views, but it also missed dramatic, positive changes surrounding Northwest salmon protection in recent years (HCN, 4/13/09). States, tribes and federal agencies that once stood on different sides now stand together behind the region’s new salmon strategy. Consider the […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Ski in, ski out, make money
Rachel Walker’s story “Go Sell it On the Mountain” about Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s proposed expansion onto Snodgrass Mountain totally missed the point (HCN, 4/13/09). Colorado’s ski areas have gained approval for dozens of terrain expansions by claiming that more terrain would attract more skiers who would spend more money and boost local economies. However, […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
Swindle-ition vistas
Proposing “smart growth” for a city as bloated as Phoenix makes no more sense than a doctor prescribing smart weight gain for a morbidly obese patient (HCN, 4/27/09). One might as well advocate socially conscious prostitution or ethical money laundering. Oxymoronic or not, a shuck is a shuck. The cabal of promoters, land agents, politicians, […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Land of contradiction and mystery
I spent three summers on a research project in Wyoming’s Red Desert, capturing, marking and recapturing prairie falcons (HCN, 4/13/09). The place is heaven for desert raptors; we monitored over 70 nests. The productivity of this ecosystem, in terms of biomass, is deceiving. In order to support so many predators, there must be vast amounts […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Let’s paint Wal-Marts
I was inspired by the report on public art in Salt Lake City (“Breaking Down Walls, With Art”), but have to ask, does not the medium — structures about to be demolished — reinforce the notion, at least subliminally, that art is worthless (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09)? So much of our everyday living environment is […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
The mythic Westerner
Your latest issue on “great ideas” from the West contained some instances of historical revisionism (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). For one thing, far from having to “scratch out a living … competing against the likes of saber-toothed tigers, cave bears, dire wolves, mastodons, woolly mammoths and giant beavers,” the evidence suggests that “early Westerners” actually […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
A shortage of leadership, not water
Jonathan Parkinson does not understand water management or economics (HCN, 4/13/09). It is more cost-effective to efficiently use the available resource than to develop more expensive new supplies. Urban water use is double what is necessary to maintain our lifestyle. Why? Wasteful practices and inefficient fixtures. Agricultural use is double what is needed to provide […]
Posted inApril 27, 2009: Got warriors?
Conservation before compromise
Jonathan Parkinson’s “Compromise is better than nothing” is long on provocation and short on facts (HCN, 4/13/09). He writes, “You can’t conserve your way out of a drought.” A good sound bite, but it’s flat wrong. In fact, Southern California did conserve its way out of a drought in the late ’80s and early ’90s. […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Golly, nukes for everybody!
The “innovative” proposal for many small “pocket” nuclear reactors sounds like the gee-whiz propaganda from the 1950s that every modern family would own a personal atomic car and reactors would produce power “too cheap to meter” (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). In reality, it is an attempt to greenwash a failed technology. One lesson I have […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
More than you think?
How much water is left in the Colorado River to develop? Few questions are as complex — or as important to Colorado and its Western Slope. Matt Jenkins’ recent article, “How Low Will It Go” contains a pair of mischaracterizations that need to be corrected (HCN, 3/02/09). First, the implication that the Colorado Water Conservation […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
Apparently Schwarzenegger wouldn’t agree
I found it interesting that “Tarp Nation” followed so closely on the heels of your article about Amtrak (HCN, 3/16 & 3/30/09). I often ride the Denver-Sacramento and Bakersfield-Sacramento routes when visiting family. Whenever the train enters the outskirts of any sizeable town, observant riders can see slum settlements at regular intervals along the tracks, […]
Posted inApril 13, 2009: The Desert That Breaks Annie Proulx’s Heart
“The officially sanctioned helpless”
Your story “Tarp Nation” seems to condone living in squalor, while trying to convince the reader that the plucky residents of these communities are creative, self-reliant and just happen to suffer because of the government’s harshness, the mainstream’s condemnation and society’s refusal to embrace the positive potential of this new social movement, “informal urbanism” (HCN, […]
Posted inMarch 16, 2009: Innovate
Share the tracks
Our railways are the only transportation systems where both the movable equipment and the track infrastructure are owned by the same company (HCN, 2/02/09). In all other haulage systems, the “tracks” are shared by competing companies. Look at the highways, airways and waterways. Thus, individual railways have an advantage, because they do not have to […]