A ranchette owner defends her home and lifestyle in a subdivision near Bozeman, Mont., a Western historian considers Montana’s long history of being panicked about growth from his ranchette in the beleaguered but beautiful Bitterroot Valley, and other essays.
Conservation Voices
Conservation Voices has a new look. This revamped bi-monthly magazine of the Soil and Water Conservation Society most recently profiled a handful of landowners across the nation who’ve successfully restored their land. A six-issue subscription costs $15; contact Soil and Water Conservation Society, 7515 NE Ankeny Road, Ankeny, IA 50021-9764 (515/289-2331). This article appeared in…
The Wayward West
In what critics call political “shenanigans,” Utah Republican Rep. Jim Hansen stole the bill number from a wilderness proposal. H.R. 1500 has traditionally been the number for the Utah Wilderness Coalition’s wilderness bill (HCN, 8/3/98). But environmentalists withdrew the bill this winter in order to update it, and Hansen introduced his own H.R. 1500. His…
Speaking out for God’s forests
To discuss the state of the nation’s forests last year, the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation met for several days on the California coast in the shadow of giant redwood forests. The campaign leaders emerged with a unified voice, calling for an end to the logging of old-growth forests and an end to commercial logging…
Land swaps: the real story
As one who makes a living on federal land exchanges and Land and Water Conservation Fund purchases, I was disappointed in Lynne Bama’s story on land exchanges (HCN, 3/29/99). Two exchanges which came in for heavy criticism in the article were the Huckleberry and Plum Creek exchanges in Washington state. The criticisms stemmed mainly from…
Wanted: HCPs with teeth
NATION Wanted: HCPs with teeth To win cooperation from landowners, over the last decade the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has embraced Habitat Conservation Plans for saving endangered species on private lands (HCN, 8/4/97). It’s an effective alternative to a “shoot, shovel and shut up” approach, say agency representatives. Critics continue to insist that the…
The gorge has been given away
I was appalled to read your recent puff piece about the Bea-Lang house being constructed in a critical place in my home, the Columbia River Gorge (HCN, 2/15/99). Your supposedly objective article claims “a big house slipped through” protections enacted by Congress in 1986. Nonsense. This monstrosity is not an anomaly but the norm –…
Yellowstone ban on boating is arbitrary
Rachel Odell’s article about the whitewater boating ban in Yellowstone National Park missed the heart of the issue: The standard for use in our national parks which was established by the National Park Service Organic Act in 1916 implies that as long as a use does not damage the resource, the National Park Service should…
State says no to new wildlife
The next time the federal or state government wants to reintroduce wildlife on public lands in Colorado, the state Legislature wants it to ask nicely. On April 22 – Earth Day – Colorado Gov. Bill Owens signed the measure requiring the Legislature’s consent before agencies can restore threatened and endangered species to the state. Critics…
Caution: Desert Tortoise Crossing
If a desert tortoise crosses your path and you don’t mind your manners, you could face fines of up to $100,000 or one year in jail. Due to urbanization and development, the animal, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, has lost an extensive amount of its habitat in Arizona, California, Nevada and southern…
My beautiful ranchette
My name is Susan; I live on a ranchette. In the growth-pained West, this is as serious a confession as alcoholism or cruelty to animals. A year and a half ago, I picked up my local newspaper in Bozeman, Mont., and there under the headline TRACKING SPRAWL was an aerial photo of the Bridger Mountain…
A bigger picture
Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument needs to think of itself in the context of a wider world. That’s the conclusion of Crown of the Canyons, an atlas of colored maps and data on the ecology, geology and economy of the monument and its surrounding landscape, compiled by the Wilderness Society. The monument’s 1.9 million acres…
Less climbing to the top
The Mount Hood National Forest has traditionally been a weekend haven for many Oregonians, but it might not be for long. The three wilderness areas that lie within the forest have eight times as many visitors as they did 10 years ago, and an average of 900 hikers crowd the Mount Hood Wilderness Area during…
Opening lines of communication
To help keep locals informed about environmental issues on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in California, a lone activist has spun an electronic web. The Eastern Sierra Agenda Network was founded by Elizabeth Tenney, a member of Preserving the Eastern Sierra Tradition of Environmental Responsibility (PESTER for short). This list-serve, a free electronic…
Photography and the Old West
Asa-Ton-Yeh, a Comanche chief, photographed by William S. Soule in 1868, is part of the exhibit Photography and the Old West, a collection of 80 photographs from the second half of the 19th century. The show at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colo., runs through May 31; contact Michael Williams, 970/882-4811, for more information.…
Sheep is Life
-Sheep is Life” brings weavers and shepherds together for traditional Navajo food, livestock exhibits and workshops in fiber arts and range management. The June 24-26 event at Diné College in Tsaile, Ariz., is free and open to the public. Contact Diné bÆ’ ÆÆna’, P.O. Box 539, Ganado, AZ 86505 (520/755-3266), www.recursos.org/sheepislife. This article appeared in…
Fishtrap writers’ conference
At a rustic camp on the shores of Oregon’s Wallowa Lake, writers gather at the annual Fishtrap writers’ conference. This year’s theme is “Borders,” and teachers include historian Susan Armitage, novelist Craig Lesley, and poet Richard Garcia. For details about the June 27-July 2 workshops or July 2-4 gathering, contact Fishtrap, P.O. Box 38, Enterprise,…
High Altitude Revegetation Field Tour
If you join a free High Altitude Revegetation Field Tour in northern New Mexico from July 29-30, you can visit reclaimed mines, explore ancient archaeological sites at the Pecos National Monument, and dine on traditional Santa Fe food. The sponsor is Colorado State University’s Department of Soil and Crop Science. For more information, contact Gary…
Another plug to pull?
The Sierra Club has a new campaign: It wants to restore the valley John Muir called “Yosemite’s twin.” But California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, once part of Yosemite National Park, is presently buried under 360,000 acre-feet of water. Resurrecting the valley would require draining the reservoir that the San Fransisco area taps for its primary water…
www.headwatersnews.org
Log onto the World Wide Web, type www.headwatersnews.org, and discover a single source for updates on environmental and community issues from the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada. The free Web site links the reader directly to Web sites of the original news sources, which are most often daily newspapers. It is a…
Beware of orange clouds
Earth-shattering explosions are a fact of life in northeast Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Each week millions of pounds of explosives are detonated as the basin’s 17 open-pit mines rearrange thick layers of earth and extract the coal beneath. Sometimes blasting also creates clouds of nitrogen oxide gases. Luann Borgialli was alarmed in January when one…
Fellowship for Environmental Conflict Resolution on the U.S.-Mexico Border
The Ford Foundation/Udall Center Fellowship for Environmental Conflict Resolution on the U.S.-Mexico Border offers a paid opportunity to research, teach and write for a year on work pertaining to environmental conflict resolution. For more information, contact Robert Merideth at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, University of Arizona, 803/811 E. First St., Tucson,…
Don’t trust everything you see
MISSOULA, Mont. – A few years ago, Chuck Bartlebaugh photographed a young girl in Yellowstone National Park, standing about 10 feet in front of a bull elk whose head was submerged in the tall grass. The girl stood with her back to the elk, facing away from the camera. The girl’s mother noticed Bartlebaugh, and…
Greens fight lonely battle near Yellowstone
The car wash in Dubois, Wyo., offers more than high-pressure soap and water – it’s got a larger-than-life fiberglass moose perched on the roof. Next door at the veterinary clinic, visitors escort sick pets through an enormous buffalo skull, and the heads of elk and bighorn sheep stare at customers from the walls of the…
Lynx reintroduction links unexpected allies
SOUTH FORK, Colo. – “They’re back!” yelled wildlife biologist Gene Byrne in February, as a lanky-legged lynx, trapped in Canada, bounded from a cage in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. “They never left,” another Colorado Division of Wildlife officer, Bill Andree, said quietly. That exchange was symbolic of the lynx’s return to the Southern Rockies this…
In Montana: The view from the ranchette
Montana has its own special pathologies. But the one it shares most visibly with the Mountain West in general features a peculiar symptom – furtive glances at the horizon with the expectation of seeing silhouetted hordes there, as in a Western movie, except that these hordes are driving Land Rovers and eating sushi. There’s a…
Enough nature writing already!
In a column by Anne Lamott in the online magazine “Salon,” she made the following proposal: “Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies not to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers?”…
Why I’m a poor writer
For almost a month now I’ve been trying to collect $55 that a national environmental magazine owes me for a 400-word book review. That’s two 20s, a 10, and a five. Three polite e-mails have yielded the following one response: “Thanks for reminding me. I’ll look into it.” This proves my first rule about free-lance…
Hoping for river magic on a trip with Dad
What do you feel when you stick your parents in the river? I have in my office an 11-by-14-inch photo of my dad and me in Lava Falls on the Colorado River. It’s a fine river photo: just heads and oar tips visible in the V-wave. It’s printed off a Polaroid. My father clutched it…
When you’re alone on the open road
During the winter, I live in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, in the capital city of Cheyenne. In summer, and in any weather when the roads are passable, I spend as much time as I can on my ranch in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. My two homes are about 280 miles apart, but…
The fall of an Arizona saguaro
In the dead of a late winter night in Arizona, my wife, Joyce, awakened me. “I think I heard the cactus die,” she whispered. So, we dressed, found the flashlight and trekked down the driveway to the road at 2 a.m. It had fallen. About four feet up from the ground the trunk had splintered.…
The East Rosebud Trip
Far past road signs local paranoia claimed would signal the Russians’ attack from Montana (numbers I’d thought were Highway Department codes mass produced in Chicago maybe to identify routes and mileage, lo and behold turned out to be signals for the New World Order’s global hegemony – so clutch your rifle); past all that the…
Dear Friends
Welcome, Chris Wehner High Country News welcomes Chris Wehner, who will manage the newspaper’s home on the World Wide Web. Originally from Rockford, Ill., outside of Chicago, Chris lives an hour’s drive from Paonia in Grand Junction, Colo., with his wife, Paula, and their blended family of five children. He’ll split his time between working…
Heard around the West
There’s a fine art to making enemies, Ed Abbey wrote in Confessions of a Barbarian. He then bragged, “I’ve become remarkably good at it.” In the 10th anniversary issue of Canyon Country Zephyr, publisher Jim Stiles quotes Abbey on a few of his targets: The young: “I say, oh you young fuddie-duddies, you young fogies,…
Spinning back the bison
The trouble with being a handspinner is that people are always giving me bags of fiber: a plastic bag full of hair from their ever-shedding malemute; a paper sack containing coarse waxy hanks of hair from a pet Angora goat. I never turn them down. Most handspinners are hoarders by nature; we go to fiber…