Letter to the editor

David Oates has us happily swimming in the ocean of his imaginative approach to teaching literature to college kids (HCN, 4/16/07). That’s for the first five paragraphs. Then he pulls the plug and leaves us high and dry, blistered by his attack on the current federal administration for its, to him, lack of imagination. In […]

I thought Ray Ring’s “Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields” was the finest piece of investigative journalism I’ve ever read in HCN (HCN, 4/2/07). And I certainly don’t recall reading anything remotely this good about the magnitude of the dangers workers in the oil and gas fields face, and the apparent indifference of […]

Ray Ring’s HCN special report was one of the absolute best pieces of writing I’ve read in a long time (HCN, 4/2/07). I would pick up and read anything this man writes. Wonderful. Extraordinary. An awful beauty of truth. Eileen Baca Reno, Nevada This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the […]

I thought “Death in the Energy Fields” was fair, thorough and careful (HCN, 4/2/07). Through it, the many complex sides of what is going on were made clear to the reader. All the same, I came away thinking that we have to do better than this. In most industrial settings, the kind of safety shortfalls […]

Many loyal readers in Flagstaff were deeply disappointed by HCN’s minimal (125 words) blurb about the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision regarding the Arizona Snowbowl (HCN, 4/2/07). This was an amazing and significant decision with major consequences for land management throughout the West — and elsewhere. Snowbowl principal owner Eric Borowsky is already […]

Great package (HCN, 4/2/07). It reminds me of stories my mom told me about growing up in Sopris, Colo. She said when there were cave-ins at the coal mines, the mine bosses would get the mules out and leave the dead miners inside. The mules were valuable, she said. The dead miners weren’t. Lori Ozzello […]

I can’t tell you how much I admire your “Death in the Energy Fields” project (HCN, 4/2/07). It’s been a long time coming. As I read it, I couldn’t help recalling my days as a young reporter in Sidney, Mont., in the heart of the Williston Basin. I covered the death of a 34-year-old oilfield […]

I worked in the oil fields in the mid-1950s, so I have some direct knowledge of what that work and the workers were like — 15 years before OSHA was born. I’m sure that all the facts in the article are true (and I hate what all those rigs are doing to the land) but […]

Jonathan Thompson says in your March 5 issue that “thanks to humans, the earth is warming up, sea levels will rise, and pestilence and severe weather events will follow” (HCN, 3/5/07). Approximately 40 percent of our warming is due to solar activity. Cows contribute methane gas and even our forests give off carbon dioxide. Sea […]

Ray Ring’s painstaking assembly of the human stories hidden behind the conflicting statistics of industrial accidents in oil and gas was magnificent work (HCN, 4/2/07). I have been reading the U.S. Department of Labor’s Daily News Summaries for six months now, and this is the finest piece they have ever reprinted. Congratulations to the author […]

This great piece of journalism makes me want to weep (HCN, 4/2/07). How can our lawmakers be so careless as to allow this crap to continue? We need state and federal OSHA enforcement and reform! Thanks, Mr. Ring and HCN, for exposing a side of our energy consumption that few of us consider. Joshua Moro […]

As your “Disposable workers of the oil and gas fields” story says, no death should be overlooked or treated as unimportant. However, in comparison to the 89 deaths that occurred in the drilling industry from 2000 to 2006 in the states of Colorado, Utah, Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming, and North Dakota, there were approximately 10,600 […]

Regarding the “Disposable workers of the oil and gas fields” story, I worked as a derrick and floor hand back in 1968 in New Mexico. Drillers are always under pressure to get in and out of a hole, no matter what the cost. If you complain about safety or work conditions, you may find yourself […]

A recent HCN story describes a major delay in planning or building a bullet train to link California’s major cities. As someone who has been working to restore and conserve wildlife corridors in Southern California for a decade, I am relieved. The bullet train needs a few more years of planning. Although you’d never know […]

Poor Lynell Schalk: I share her frustration. In 1979, I was a seasonal Grand Gulch ranger when Turkey Pen Ruin was being systematically looted. At the time, nobody knew who was doing it, and my repeated reports to the BLM Monticello office went unheeded, even after I pulled a hidden shovel out of the ruin’s […]

“The Silence of the Bees” incorporated one tiny error. Hannah Nordhaus writes: “… microscopic tracheal mites that set up shop in a honeybee’s feeding tube and shorten its lifespan.” I’m no honeybee biologist, but I was trained as an entomologist. “Tracheae” are the abdominal tubes that insects use to breathe. So it’s more likely that […]

It was like suddenly discovering the face or object hidden in a maze, a “find Waldo” sort of experience. Here I was, reading with growing concern and despondency one more article alerting me to yet another assault on the environment, this one posed by an “extraordinarily prolific and costly invasive species” — the quagga mussel. […]

I have enjoyed reading your newspaper for over 10 years. However, when I read the new editor’s call for amnesty for all undocumented aliens in the U.S., I realized that HCN is no longer a paper for people that “care about the West.” Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, anyone who takes […]

Regarding the Feb. 19 Editor’s Note, it is refreshing to read something that actually makes sense regarding the subject of illegal immigration. The solution is to find a way to accommodate the people who want to come to this country and work, and at the same time to find a way for illegal immigrants who […]

While I know you need to take a little literary license to keep the controversy alive and sell papers, you went way over the edge and into fiction with your article “The end of ‘analysis paralysis’?” You state five times in this article that under the new planning regulations “Forest plans would no longer be […]