New landfill regulations force counties to be more creative with their trash.
Quake’s shakes move masses
At least one business sees a silver lining in the recent Los Angeles earthquake. The Nevada-based Greener Pastures Institute, which helps “urban opt-outs’ find their footing in the unfamiliar terrain of the rural West, is getting a lot more phone calls. The Institute’s newsletter circulates to about 2,000 people, two-thirds of whom live in Southern…
Fast food at fault
That humble staple of the fast-food industry – the french fry – is more dangerous than it looks. A recent study by the non-profit Columbia Basin Institute found that fry-makers in the Columbia River Basin waste cheap water and poison residential wells. The 100-page report, Value Added and Subtracted, says fry-makers use only half of…
Cows crowded out
Bob Niccoli, a life-long rancher in Crested Butte, Colo., says the decision to sell his ranch and leave town just got easier. Niccoli protested a proposed development near his ranch in early January. He asked Gunnison County planners to require developer Dan Gallagher to build his 12 houses 100 feet back from a riverside cliff…
A natural vacation
National forests in the Northwest have opened unused fire lookouts, stock stations and maintenance cabins to the public. All can be rented for overnight camping with up to a two-week stay allowed in some places. Because each facility is rented by the national forest in which it is located, two brochures, available at most Forest…
For green writers
Environmental issues are particularly difficult for journalists from small newspapers and broadcast stations who do not have the benefit of large libraries, colleges or conferences. “Charting the Environmental Journalism Frontier,” an April 14-16 workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will help such journalists develop a better understanding of environmental issues in the West.…
Missile chaos
In a 4-inch-thick draft environmental impact statement, the U.S. Army recently concluded that its missile test flights to the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico could have significant land-use impacts. Launched from either Green River, Utah, or Fort Wingate, N.M., the missiles would fly over Canyonlands National Park, Dead Horse Point State Park…
Will timber plan fly?
The Clinton administration’s final plan for Northwest forests was delayed for release until March 31, but a Feb. 23 summary reveals it hasn’t much changed since last July when it was first proposed. The plan calls for annual federal timber sales of 1.05 billion board feet across the range of the northern spotted owl. That’s…
Green scientists get-together
A March 12-13 conference at the University of Oregon looks at how scientists can participate in environmental politics and policy-making. “The 1994 Public Interest Science Conference” includes panels on science in the courtroom, scientists and the Endangered Species Act, and the use or misuse of science by politicians. More than two dozen panelists will speak…
No change on the range
When you’re right, you’re right, and when Philip Fradkin worked for the Los Angeles Times from 1964-1975 as that paper’s first environmental reporter, and for Audubon from 1976-81 as that magazine’s first Western editor, he often batted 1,000. Fradkin recalls those days in his book of collected essays, Wanderings of an Environmental Journalist: In Alaska…
Forcing the spring
Mainstream organizations such as the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation often define the environmental movement. In Forcing the Spring, writer Robert Gottlieb shows that alternative groups, such as Mothers of East Los Angeles, are equally important. These grass-roots groups rely on community members more than experts, concentrate on changing the social order rather than…
Reclaiming high places
Alpine forget-me-not, a miniature, bright blue flower, grows above timberline through constant winds, glaring sun and only two months of summer. Now, in addition, it faces the added stresses of mines, ski areas and increased radiation through a thinning ozone layer. At the 11th annual High Altitude Revegetation Workshop, scientists and managers will discuss how…
E-Mail for the rural West
The West’s great distances, geography and weather often isolate its communities. That can make for a high quality of life but difficult communications. The Helena, Mont.-based computer non-profit WestNet hopes to overcome those barriers by providing a computer-based bulletin board service. With a computer and a modem, anyone – from ranchers and loggers, to Native…
Baca is back
Jim Baca, who was recently shot out of a cannon in Washington, D.C., hopes to soft-land in the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, NM. Baca was fired by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as head of the Bureau of Land Management (HCN, 2/21/94) in a dispute over management style. He has announced that he will run…
From driveways to watersheds
When oil became scarce in the 1970s, New Mexico’s solar industry quickly boomed and then busted. State tax subsidies had helped sell complicated new systems that sometimes didn’t work, and by the mid-80s many people ditched their solar designs. In an effort to rebuild its solar industry, the New Mexico Natural Resources Department has published…
Andy Kerr on the warpath
Andy Kerr, conservation director for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, filed a criminal trespass complaint against a Spokane, Wash., television reporter for being on his recently purchased property in Wallowa County, Ore. without permission. Tom Grant of KREM-TV was discovered on the front porch Feb. 6 by the house’s caretaker after he had videotaped the…
Back to the sun
When oil became scarce in the 1970s, New Mexico’s solar industry quickly boomed and then busted. State tax subsidies had helped sell complicated new systems that sometimes didn’t work, and by the mid-80s many people ditched their solar designs. In an effort to rebuild its solar industry, the New Mexico Natural Resources Department has published…
No home on the range
The Great Buffalo Herd Monument is extinct – at least on public land. The brainchild of a New York artist, the Mt. Rushmore-type monument would have placed 1,000 copper, moving, moaning bison on a high sage- and pine-covered plateau called the Beaver Rim south of Lander, Wyo. But when the agency which manages the land,…
Symposium won’t be dry
-Rivers at the Crossroads: Law, Science, Politics, and People” will bring together conservationists, agriculturalists and politicos to talk about water-use conflicts in Idaho and other Western states. Symposium organizer Marty Bridges says the meeting will give people the opportunity to voice their concerns about water-use policy directly to the heads of the Idaho Department of…
Workers need protection
The health and safety of workers cleaning up the nation’s nuclear weapons complex have been badly neglected, according to a study by the Office of Technology Assessment, a research arm of the U.S. Congress. Because of the historic autonomy and secrecy of its atomic mission, the Department of Energy is the only federal agency exempt…
Saving spotted cows
More than 1,000 miners, loggers and ranchers rallied in Boise Jan. 18 to save “endangered people.” Partly organized by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, supporters of the rally said environmental controls were socialistic and may snuff out traditional extraction-based industries. “When you deny the cutting of a tree, you’ve denied somebody a job,” Craig told the…
Wet and wild symposium
With memories of drought still fresh in the West, the Montana Environmental Education Association is sponsoring “Water, Wet & Wild: Flowing into the 21st Century” from March 25-27 in Billings, Mont. Designed for elementary and high school teachers, the meeting offers workshops on water pollution and water rights and exhibits by film makers and publishers.…
Roxborough friends fight for park
Local residents who enjoy the relative wildness and beauty of Roxborough State Park near Denver, Colo., are fighting a developer’s plans to build 850 houses along the park’s entire eastern boundary. The development, known as Southdowns at Roxborough, could begin as soon as this March and would destroy wildlife habitat for deer, elk and golden…
STOP-M in Oregon
Since 1989, miners have staked over 40,000 claims to mine microscopic gold dust in eastern Oregon. The prospectors foresee massive open-pit cyanide mines to retrieve the gold, but so far no such mines exist in the state. Newmont Grassy Mountain Corp. ow wants to develop a claim 25 miles south of Vale, a small town…
New plans for Yellowstone
Managers in Yellowstone National Park just released a plan that could leave the park’s 2.2 million acres of backcountry a little more organized. The draft backcountry management plan suggests classifying the park into three management zones. Most people would visit the threshold zone, which surrounds roads and developed areas in the park. It would have…
Pay as you waste, says EPA
It’s a new world for rural trash
Washington county splits in half over proposed dump
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Pay as you waste, says EPA. HOOPER, Wash. – Burying Seattle’s garbage in rural eastern Washington is like putting a toilet in a refrigerator, according to cartoonist Milt Priggee of the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman Review. That sums up the feeling of opponents of a…
Groups are wary of aluminum companies bearing gifts
Are Northwest aluminum companies, intent on diverting attention from salmon-killing dams, offering bribes to environmental groups to join frivolous suits against the fishing industry? Some environmentalists think so. Last spring, aluminum companies filed a federal suit to block commercial fishing in the lower Columbia River, claiming the fishing was wiping out too many threatened chinook…
State-by-state trash
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Pay as you waste, says EPA. Idaho had 85 landfills, according to Katie Sewell, solid waste coordinator in the state department of environmental quality; by summer, that will be down to 30, and most of the panhandle counties will ship their trash to big…
Miners hope to become subdividers
The bankrupt owners of a coal mine in central Colorado want the state to drop a lawsuit against them in exchange for cash and equipment. But there’s a catch. Mine owners want to subdivide 6,000 acres to generate some of the money for the mine’s reclamation. Mid-Continent Resources’ latest plan to pay off its debts…
Federal land managers put up no-dumping signs
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Pay as you waste, says EPA. New EPA rules haven’t been the only federal vexation for rural counties. About 425,000 square miles of “land that nobody wanted” is administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management, and in almost 300 places in the West,…
A guide to some trashy reading matter
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Pay as you waste, says EPA. When it comes to trash, most reading matter is so boring that it belongs in the local landfill. Two informative exceptions: The Garbage Primer: A Handbook for Citizens, produced by the League of Women Voters and published in…
Let’s not heap injustice upon injustice
SAN LUIS, Colo. – The ownership of the Taylor Ranch in Colorado’s San Luis Valley has been a bone of contention for the past 34 years. However, the story of the land has a longer history and the feelings about it run deeper because the Taylor Ranch is not just another piece of mountain real…
Dear friends
Commuting hell For many people in this town of 1,400, commuting to work means a hike, a bicycle ride or short trip by pickup. But for Chris Manning, who works in the Aspen post office, going to work means traveling over McClure Pass, a two-hour slog each way. Tough, but worth it for Manning and…
Can San Luis resist ‘regional chaos’?
It was a Colorado state helicopter that turned Maria Mondragon-Valdez around on the subject of the 77,000-acre Taylor Ranch. Originally, she supported a proposal for a split purchase of the mountain tract she and other San Luis Valley residents call La Sierra, and which they believe was stolen from their community in 1960. The proposal…
Can gold mining be slowed by a boycott?
In their eighth year of marriage, Jan and David Zimmerman quietly removed their gold wedding rings. There had been no angry words; the problem was gold. The year was 1990, and the Chicago Mining Corp. was building a cyanide gold mill above the Zimmermans’ home in the tiny town of Pony, Mont. Concerned about possible…
Ex-logger Andrus says our forests are overcut
FAIRMONT HOT SPRINGS, Mont. – Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus used his time at the podium during a rare meeting of Forest Service district rangers Feb. 16 to complain that timber-sale goals in national forest management plans were boosted by politicians eager to please big timber companies. “Your ASQs (allowable sale quantities) are not accurate. They…
Remnant grassland survives in Oklahoma
A wildfire engulfs the sprawling prairie, burning out invading brush and trees and clearing away dead plants. Left behind is a charred landscape that within days will grow anew – lush, green and healthy. Lightning strikes used to produce these violent, spectacular wildfires that roared for miles. Today people play the part of nature by…
Orphaned cubs returned to wild
Columbia Falls, Mont. – Two orphaned black bears got a late jump on hibernation but a new lease on life when they were placed in a man-made den last month. Biologists hauled the tranquilized twin cubs by snowmobile, then tucked them into the 20 below zero snow cave. If all goes well, they will slip…
Sacred places: The West’s new, booming extractive industry
On a crowded flight from Boise to Salt Lake City I read an essay, The Last Canyon: Notes from the Underground, which tells the story of “discovering” a canyon, a remote tributary to the San Juan River. It’s from a 1978 collection of essays, The Hidden West, by Rob Schultheis, an earnest guy from back…