Idaho plans to conduct a $300,000 study to learn how much fish its residents eat from state waters. The amount consumed helps determine regulatory limits for pollutant levels in rivers and lakes. Most Western states use the EPA’s default fish-consumption rate, a cracker-sized 17.5 grams per day, to set human health standards for dozens of […]
Oregon
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Tracking Ice Age people in Oregon
Wind-whipped rainclouds formed a low ceiling over the oceanic buttes and basins of south-central Oregon. The usually sundrenched sage darkened in the weather as I walked, my hood pulled up against the grass-bending tug of the northwest breeze. The air smelled richer than it usually does on the dry side of the Cascades, the sagebrush […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
County kickbacks
Though Westerners tend to idealize frontier independence, rural county governments often rely on Uncle Sam. Federal payment programs meant to compensate counties for lost cash from tax-exempt public lands distributed about $900 million nationwide in 2009. One of these programs — the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (SRS) — was barely renewed in […]
Posted inWotr
Wolves: The debate is seldom rational
The wolf pot continues to boil in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Now, another state has been added to the stew. In Oregon, environmentalists are protesting the piecemeal removal of wolves from the Endangered Species list, hunters want less competition from wolves, and ranchers complain that wolves are killing their livestock. In eastern Oregon, where there […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Cultural blight
Plant disease threatens traditions of California tribes.
Posted inWotr
The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
Cheewa James: Chronicler of the ‘Tribe That Wouldn’t Die’
Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn’t DieCheewa James352 pages, softcover: $19.95.Naturegraph, 2008. With song and prayer, soil and prairie grass, Native American author Cheewa James recently honored the memory of her long-lost great-great uncle. Frank Modoc left his Oklahoma reservation for a Quaker seminary over 120 years ago, fell victim to tuberculosis and never returned. While […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2007: Which Way West
Heard Around the West
OREGON Rick Kirschner, a naturopath who works with corporations to resolve staff conflicts, has been hired to train the trash-talking city council of Ashland, a city better known for hosting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The therapist will have his work cut out for him. At the last meeting of the seven-member group, Councilman David Chapman […]
Posted inMay 14, 2007: Two Views of the Verde
Heard Around the West
OREGON Eugene’s annual used-book sale, organized by Friends of the Library, turned vicious last year, reports the Register-Guard. “Aggressive and boorish” Internet booksellers hired local people to wait in line, and when the doors opened, they swarmed in and threw sheets over tables, claiming every book. “It was over the top — it was savage,” […]
Posted inApril 30, 2007: Rural Education 2.0
Why the West should copy Swiss transit
This winter, my family discovered that Oregon’s Mount Hood is known for more than dramatic mountain rescues. Would you believe it could also be home to the mother of all traffic jams? Taillights for as far as the eye can see, gridlock for nearly an hour: That’s what the highway through the Mount Hood National […]
Posted inWotr
Why do we keep driving ourselves crazy?
This winter. my family discovered that Oregon’s Mount Hood is known for more than dramatic mountain rescues. Would you believe it could also be called the mother of all traffic jams? Tail lights for as far as the eye could see, gridlock for nearly an hour: That’s what the highway through the Mount Hood National […]
Posted inWotr
The decline of logging is now killing
If the connection between logging and closing libraries isn’t clear to you, then you don’t live in Oregon. Here, the connection is the stuff of crisis, the subject of daily news stories and of increasingly desperate political maneuvering. It is a crisis that reveals much about changing expectations and attitudes concerning government services, taxes and […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
A quest for the world’s finest pinot noir
This is no stodgy dissertation on wine and how it’s made. With the very first sentence of The Grail, Brian Doyle uncorks a full-bodied work of enthusiastic storytelling. The Grail delivers on the promise of its subtitle: A Year Ambling and Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 2007: Salmon Justice
Under the radar
In the rural West, the homeless are rarely seen and often ignored
Posted inJanuary 22, 2007: Salmon Justice
A family of criminals and killers
Danielle Marie Cox came from a loving family. She attended private school through the sixth grade, had a 3.8 grade point average in high school, and earned a scholarship to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore. But the impressionable Cox fell prey to the drama and drugs of a homeless Portland street “family” she met […]
Posted inOctober 16, 2006: A River Once More
A River Once More
In Oregon, an unprecedented alliance is working to put water someplace it hasn’t been in a long time: in the river.
Posted inOctober 2, 2006: From the ground up
Film: Lens of compassion
Note: This article is one of several feature stories in a special issue about community media in the West. Philomath, Ore., nestled on the Coast Range’s eastern flanks, looks like an average logging town. On a Saturday afternoon, kids pushing BMX bikes scamper across the main street. American flags hang limp in the late summer […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Loss and renewal in the Northwest
“These stories of loss are about farming and forestry in the Pacific Northwest,” writes Steven Radosevich in this compact collection of essays. “They come along with me out of my vineyard.” Radosevich, hunter, fisherman, grape grower and professor of forest science at Oregon State University, writes simple, painful prose about the diminishing natural wealth of […]
Posted inJune 26, 2006: The Tamarisk Hunter
The wild, wild weather
Blame it on climate change or the vagaries of nature, but whatever the cause, weather in the West has been extreme — and wacky. The Southwest has become a tinderbox, while Northwesterners are sopping wet. WASHINGTON Average yearly moisture: 37.02 in.* Moisture June ‘05-May ‘06: 41.53 in. Nine consecutive days of downpour hit western Washington […]
Posted inJune 12, 2006: The Perpetual Growth Machine
Empty pods and pleasant graveyards
Back in the 1960s, when I was a Los Angeles kid, LAX airport planned a big remodel. Regional bigwigs envisioned a futuristic structure of some kind, so the architects went on a Jetsons jag and suspended a gleaming streamlined pod on two sweeping steel parabolas. It would be the theme building for the whole airport, […]