Two whistleblowers – safety auditor Casey Ruud and geophysicist John Brodeur – find that radioactive waste from some of the biggest, leaking storage tanks has already reached groundwater and is heading toward the Columbia River.
Floods hammer Southwest
A moving wall of water following a severe thunderstorm Aug. 10 forced residents and tourists in a Havasupai Indian village outside Grand Canyon National Park to evacuate. Two days later, thunderstorms southeast of Page, Ariz., near Glen Canyon Dam, pushed a flash flood down a slot canyon, where it drowned 11 hikers. “It was chocolate…
Fixing Fish Creek
The past 50 years have not been kind to Mount Hood National Forest’s Fish Creek watershed. In the past two years alone, over 200 landslides have ravaged its 30,000 acres, where unstable slopes have been made even weaker by decades of logging and road building. Now, with the forest at 60 percent of its original…
Close those roads
Up Stevens Gulch near Paonia, Colo., some Coloradans want to drive all-terrain vehicles on logging roads the Forest Service once promised it would close off. Now, the agency is offering two more timber sales, which means even more road construction, and then more ATVs. The Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Western Slope…
Quincy Library Group
Michael Jackson, co-founder of the Quincy Library Group, known for its controversial plan for northern California forests, will speak in Olathe, Colo., Sept. 5. The Delta/Montrose Public Lands Partnership, a coalition similar to the Quincy Group, is hosting environmental attorney Jackson, who will speak at 2 p.m. at the Olathe Community Center and participate in…
The Wayward West
When membership and funds drop, most nonprofits pinch, prune and make minor adjustments. Greenpeace USA crashed. In early August, the organization announced it would close each of its 10 regional offices, lay off over 300 employees, end its neighborhood canvass and concentrate only on its climate change and logging campaigns. Employees who work on less…
Trailfest 1997
Hikers and trail activists will converge on Vail, Colo., Sept. 6-7 for a Continental Divide Trail Alliance conference, Trailfest 1997. There will be workshops and outdoor demonstrations about the 3,100-mile trail, which was designated a National Scenic Trail nearly 20 years ago, but which still needs work to connect trekkers from Canada to southern New…
Montana Environmental Information Center
Members and friends of the Montana Environmental Information Center will rendezvous in the Bitterroot Valley Saturday, Sept. 13, to exchange stories and revitalize. The gathering at the Teller Wildlife Refuge near Corvallis, Mont., will include workshops on transportation, weeds and the proposed gold mine near Lincoln. All are welcome. For information, call 406/443-2520. This article…
Waterton-Glacier International Writers Workshop
For people interested in writing about nature and conservation, the Waterton-Glacier International Writers Workshop Sept. 25-27 features workshops and speakers such as John Rimel, publisher at Missoula’s Mountain Press, The Nature Conservancy’s Jim Mepham and many Canadian writers, including Candace Savage. There will also be backcountry hikes, lake cruises and trips to area ranches, watersheds…
Great Old Broads for Wilderness
You don’t have to be old or a broad to attend the Great Old Broads for Wilderness Annual Broadwalk and Conference Sept. 29-Oct. 5, but it helps to be feisty. The Boulder, Colo.-based environmental nonprofit, started by women over 45, is meeting in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument this year. After a five-day “Broadwalk,”…
Crossing borders to save hawks
For more than a decade, biologist Brian Woodbridge watched hundreds of Swainson’s hawks raise their young in the fields of Butte Valley in northern California. Each fall, the birds headed south, but Woodbridge spotted a strange pattern. “I noticed that some years a lot more adults returned from migration than others,” he says. “That really…
Connections
The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative has a mission: to connect 18,000 miles of wildlife corridors and protect biodiversity for an area that is larger than most states. The Connections conference, from Oct. 2-5 in Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park, includes speakers Dave Foreman, current chairman of the Wildlands Project, and Colleen McCrory, a director…
The Taylor Ranch downsizes
In a surprise development, Zachary Taylor, owner of the controversial 121-square-mile Taylor Ranch in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, sold one-third of the property to an undisclosed buyer in early August. Since 1993, the state of Colorado and some valley groups have looked for money to purchase the ranch, which Taylor has been intensively logging…
American Birding Association
To encourage young people interested in wildlife and conservation, the American Birding Association is sponsoring the Young Birder of the Year Competition, with lots of prizes, beginning at the end of September. In this year-long contest, kids 10 to 18 years old will be asked to write two essays, and keep a field notebook of…
A High Plains rejoinder
Dear HCN, Jeffery Smith’s plaintive essay, “Sensory Deprivation on the High Plains’ (HCN, 7/7/97), reflects what Patrick Jobes has called the “deconstructing” of Western communities. In his decade-long study of demographic trends in the Gallatin Valley of Montana, Jobes found that newcomers had, on average, moved four times in the past decade. “Newcomers have a…
Something fishy about this pollution
Industrial waste. Raw sewage. Atlantic salmon. One of those wasn’t considered an environmental threat until recently. Environmentalists from Washington charge that escapees from large floating salmon farms in Puget Sound should be regulated just like factory and sewage-plant discharges. They say Atlantic salmon raised in hatcheries compete with wild stocks, spread diseases through accumulated wastes…
No hand-wringing here
No hand-wringing here Dear HCN, I read with some dismay your front-page article by Paul Krza (HCN, 7/7/97). I feel that this was a very negative slant on our state. Mr. Krza is a very negative third-generation Wyomingite. I am also a third-generation Wyomingite, with both of my grandfathers in Wyoming before the turn of…
A South Dakotan protests
A South Dakotan protests Dear HCN, I found Paul Krza’s article on Wyoming in the July 7 issue fascinating, since I recently saw some of the things he discussed – the instant boom towns, the huge trailer parks, the endless coal trains, the deserted towns in the rural areas. But will Wyoming “become more like…
Speaking up for Summo
Dear HCN, Team Summo, as you refer to us in your recent issue (HCN, 6/23/97), feels an obligation to respond to your article which focuses on us and our exploration and mine development activities in the central West. Gerald Nailor has a colorful past which lends itself well to the human interest side of Ms.…
Abnormal amphibians
Have you ever been mucking about in the local swamp and found a one-eyed frog or a five-legged salamander? If you have, you’re not alone. In the last decade, malformed amphibians have turned up in about a dozen states around the country, including Washington, Oregon, California and North Dakota. Herpetologists, the scientists who study amphibians…
Injunction shakes forests
Federal judges sided with environmentalists in July, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service has failed to make good on its promise to protect endangered species in Southwestern forests and streamside areas. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a six-week ban on over 20 timber sales and barred grazing on 11 Southwestern…
Fleeting forests
For more than two decades, Utah wilderness advocates have been chanting, “5.7! 5.7!” Now, a similar cry is rising in Idaho: “8 million! 8 million!” There are 8 million acres of unprotected roadless land in Idaho’s national forests, according to Idaho’s Vanishing Wild Lands, a report by the Wilderness Society. The number is falling fast.…
BLM gives trespassing farmers a break
Twin Falls, Idaho – When his boss here at the Bureau of Land Management made a personal business deal with a farmer cited for plowing up public land, Mike Austin, 52, thought he was doing the right thing by reporting a conflict of interest. Now he says he’s being punished for it. Austin, a realty…
What’s underneath the Staircase?
With a pen stroke last year, President Clinton put to rest a decades-old conflict between extraction and conservation. He established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the threat of coal and oil development on southern Utah’s remote Kaiparowits Plateau blew away. So most people thought. But on June 6, Conoco Inc., the largest subsidiary of…
An Indian casino would sit on ancient graves
On Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, some residents want to make money on the ruins of an ancestral village – literally. A year ago, the tribal council agreed to construct a new gambling casino near a freeway exit 10 miles south of Tucson. But there’s a hitch: The site, Punta de Agua, is thought to contain…
Tribe hopes to dam its way to jobs
For decades, the Uinta Mountains have been seen as a watering can for swelling suburbs and thirsty croplands in northern Utah. Under the Central Utah Project (CUP), a massive, 40-year effort to capture Utah’s share of Colorado River Basin water, snowmelt from the Uintas has been dammed, plumbed and piped to cities along the Wasatch…
Utah’s bumbling obscures a valid complaint
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now that government has become show business, one must classify political activities not according to ideology, party or faction but by genre. Is the senator (president, governor, whatever) wearing the smiling comedy face today, or the gloomier mask of the drama? Sometimes, though, there’s little doubt, as is the case with the…
Greens and cowboys gang up on a mine
TUCSON, Ariz. – Looking south, the Santa Rita Mountains rise dreamlike from the desert floor, a hazy string of stony monoliths peppered with stands of oak and pine. Only a 30-minute drive from Tucson city limits, the range is typically thick with hikers, birders and hunters seeking refuge from traffic, noise and heat. But from…
One county’s misgivings over not-so-ordinary housing
Taos County, N.M. – Architect and developer Michael Reynolds doesn’t usually lock the gate to his property west of Taos, but ever since county officials drove out to inspect his work site, he’s been viewing outsiders with a wary eye. Recently a county code enforcement officer had red-tagged several houses under construction, and just after…
A nuclear dump proposal rouses Utah
Over the past two decades, Steve Erickson has spent many days in his aged truck visiting the scattered ranches and dry valleys of Utah’s West Desert. “People have an image of this area as a dried-up lake bed,” says the peace activist, but to him, “it’s a beautiful place.” Erickson has fought dozens of schemes…
Heard around the West
Now people all over the country, if not the world, refer to it as the “sunscreen speech”: “Wear sunscreen” it begins. … “Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth … Do one thing every day that scares you … Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly … Get to…
Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
RICHLAND, Wash. – Casey Ruud and John Brodeur have always stood out in Hanford’s take-no-risks nuclear culture. The safety auditor and the geophysicist made powerful enemies when they uncovered major safety problems a decade ago at the nation’s largest plutonium bomb factory, located deep in rural southeastern Washington. Then in 1994, at the prodding of…
Prairie dogs tunnel their way to a military stalemate
HELENA, Mont. – The Montana Army National Guard has stood ready when called upon to fight any foe. Then it met the prairie dog. The rodents, known for their intricate tunneling, have expanded their stronghold here at Fort Harrison, threatening underground power lines and communications systems. The guard would like to take action, but it’s…
Dear friends
Corrections Richard Millet, executive vice president of Denver operations at Woodward-Clyde, tells us that Robert (not Bill) Moran was employed as a part-time geochemist at his company, so he was not head geologist, as reported by HCN staffer Heather Abel in her lead story about “mining’s corporate nomads’ June 23. He also says that the…
Comment on the Idaho Statesman’s editorial series
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to an essay, “An Idaho daily breaches the Northwest’s silence over tearing down dams.” The Idaho Statesman’s July editorial series on saving salmon signals that this long-unresolved issue in Pacific Northwest politics has become critical. The Statesman’s support for a radical…
An Idaho daily breaches the Northwest’s silence over tearing down dams
The Idaho Statesman likes to think its editorials are felt far beyond the modestly populated Boise metropolitan area in southwestern Idaho where the paper is headquartered. We were never sure just how far, however, until recently. That’s when the six members of the editorial board, which includes the publisher, top editors and a community representative,…