From the mothers in my family I learned what poverty and drought were like during the 1930s. To them, these were experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. Not quite 30 years later, when I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one […]
Writers on the Range
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Giving back the bison
In the 1870s, a Salish Indian brave named Walking Coyote led a handful of bison calves from the Great Plains westward to the home of his people in Montana’s Mission Valley. Some traditions say he did so because he saw that Europeans were hunting the beast to extinction. Bison proliferated in the lush valley, which […]
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Who needs Superfund when we’ve got reality TV?
By the end of the year, only $28 million will be left in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund account. Superfund pays for the reclamation of abandoned toxic waste sites, and $28 million barely affords a study just to figure out how to clean up one of the 1,200 deserted dumps wasting away in American […]
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There’s a way to end the RS 2477 road mess
The West’s public lands face many 21st century problems, including pressure from population growth and energy development. But they also face an old problem — the legacy of the Mining Law of 1866, which granted rights-of-way “for the construction of highways” on federal lands not set aside for other uses. That grant became section 2477 […]
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Protecting fake wilderness goes against the law
Environmental groups are going “wild” over the Interior Department’s recent decisions to recognize Western road claims and chuck out the Clinton administration’s wilderness study policy. Before getting into the angry rhetoric, however, a bit of history is in order. This entire flapdoodle hinges on interpretation of two laws, Revised Statute 2477 — RS 2477 for […]
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Let’s not succumb to the temptation of biopharming
It’s hard to take issue with a technology that might have been able to save my parents’ lives. But that’s what I’m going to do. I’m talking about biopharming, the process that makes medicine from crops. Take a corn plant or a tobacco plant; inject it with a protein-making gene from humans or animals; harvest […]
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Why I do what I do, the way that I do it
I hate corpo-jargon, the trying-to-be hip phrases that aren’t. But the first words in my mind as I pull off Quartzite, Arizona’s main drag into the gritty parking lot of Reader’s Oasis are: “I am definitely working outside the box.” The big-box bookstores, that is. Reader’s Oasis is a metal shed, a half-dozen tables, a […]
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Cheers for Arizona’s governor and a Hopi warrior
The successful effort by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to rename a Phoenix mountain after an American Indian woman killed in Iraq needn’t have turned into a nasty fight. Gov. Napolitano wanted to honor an Arizona citizen, Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a member of the Hopi Nation, because she was the first American woman to die in […]
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To restore the West, go big and go native
It’s always disconcerting to have a myth blown apart. Like when you find out your favorite sports star, who you know to be a morally upstanding person, abuses his wife. The world wobbles; food doesn’t taste as good; you just want to fall asleep and wake up when everything is back to normal. That’s what […]
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Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
In one of his 16 books on fire, historian Stephen Pyne wrote: “If fire were captured today, it would never make it past the federal regulatory agencies.” Letting fire run free is a huge deal; early man must have wondered if it was worth the trouble. Fire empowered our ancestors not just to cook food, […]
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The bittersweet comings and goings in a small town
Most schools have a Homecoming weekend. Red Lodge, Mont., celebrates a different kind of coming home, on Memorial Day. On the last weekend in May, snowplows finish clearing the 10,000-foot Beartooth Pass between Red Lodge and Cooke City. And unless blizzards close it right back up again, which happens with some regularity, people like to […]
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It’s buyer beware when it comes to Atlantic salmon
When Dan Wasil plucks a white package of “Fresh Atlantic Salmon” from the grocery store cooler, he hardly glances at its label. “I assume that it comes from the Atlantic,” says Wasil, a fundraiser who has lived in Portland for over 30 years. While he says he’s careful to check labels to see if chicken […]
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Sometimes you have to fight
I may not be a fan of George Bush’s foreign policy, but I fully agree with one point the president repeatedly made in the months before the Iraq war. The president told us that “sometimes you have to fight.” As Mr. Bush explained, when the other guy just doesn’t get it, he needs a punch […]
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Environmentalists made a deal with the devil
In its effort to gain support from Americans whose connections to the natural world have become less direct and more emotional, environmentalists made a deal with a devil that is coming back to haunt them. The devil in question is the animal-rights movement. For nearly four decades, it has skillfully manipulated the media to propagate […]
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Once more into the breach: Dams could fall in the Northwest
Many in the Northwest thought they’d killed the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River in Washington when they convinced the Clinton administration to pass on it, and then elected George Bush president. They celebrated too soon. On May 7, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland threw out the salmon protection plan […]
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The West loses an unsentimental guide
Historian David Lavender was the best sort of guide a traveler in the West could have: A quiet man with a wry sense of humor, he was passionate about this region, refused to romanticize it and was happy to share his knowledge if asked. He was never sentimental about the West, writing about cowboys: “Although […]
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Real ranches don’t have “ette” in their name
Listen up, folks, here’s a vocabulary lesson from a rancher and writer who’s tired of bad writing distorting Western history. A ranch is not just any patch of rural ground, and the saying, “All hat, no cattle,” is more than a joke. It’s true most ranchers prefer not to reveal the size of their places, […]
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Why I fight: The coming gas explosion in the West
Here’s what I once believed: that if the President knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease. I once believed that if you could show that industry can extract gas without damaging land right near us — as it does on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and […]
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Green Republicans: It’s not an oxymoron
In the seven years since I co-founded Republicans for Environmental Protection, officially known as REP America, I have answered two questions more often than any others: “Isn’t Republicans for Environmental Protection an oxymoron?” And, “If you care so much about conservation and environmental protection, why don’t you become a Democrat?” The first one is easy […]
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Why Greens need blue blazers
One of my childhood friends, Karl Warkomski, is the first and only elected Green Party member in ultra-right-wing Orange County, Calif. Orange Country — home to the mega-hawk and former congressman “B2 Bob” Dornan — is a place where people get misty-eyed remembering the Reagan presidency. So how in the world did Karl get elected? […]