Santa Fe’s hotel and tourism industry blames populist Mayor Debbie Jaramillo for the slowing of the city’s upscale boom.
Power to the power boats
Northwest Republican lawmakers want to swamp efforts to regulate noisy power boats in Hells Canyon. Claiming that “the use of motorized river craft is deeply interwoven in the history, traditions, and culture of Hells Canyon,” Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, introduced a bill allowing both powerboats and floatboats year-around access to the entire 71-mile stretch of…
Applause for some ranchers
APPLAUSE FOR SOME RANCHERS Dear HCN: I thought the only folks opposed to conservation easements were greedy land developers. Not so – it seems that reader Wano Urbonas of Durango has a “beef” with Jay Fetcher and other landowners who look for ways to keep family possessions in the family (HCN, 1/22/95). I’m definitely not…
Miners seek jackpot
MINERS SEEK JACKPOT Despite the depressed market for uranium, Green Mountain Mining Venture hopes to hit a jackpot in south central Wyoming. The companies spearheading the operation, U.S. Energy and Kennecott Energy, have asked the Bureau of Land Management for permission to construct, operate and reclaim the Jackpot uranium mine on public land. The mine…
Earthtones
EARTHTONES Essayist Ann Ronald and photographer Stephen Trimble want to redeem Nevada from John Muir’s century-old slur that the state “seems one vast desert, all sage and sand, hopelessly irredeemable now and forever.” Earthtones: A Nevada Album takes readers beyond the Muir clichés, although the authors admit that the Great Basin is an acquired taste.…
Keeping the wolf at bay
KEEPING THE WOLF AT BAY As U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists ship more gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, the agency is considering how it can get out of the wolf reintroduction business. An agency draft proposal says the wolf could be considered recovered throughout the West once 10 breeding pairs have…
American Ground Zero
AMERICAN GROUND ZERO “My profession, which is in my soul, is to document things,” says photographer Carole Gallagher. For seven years, she worked on American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, a book that documents the aftermath of nuclear testing in Utah and the West’s “culture of cancer” through photography and oral history. In an…
How they beat takings
HOW THEY BEAT TAKINGS Thanks to A Clear View, a five-page publication of the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C., we have a better understanding of how a proposed takings law in Washington state was defeated. The toughest in the nation, the law would have forced taxpayers to pay property owners whenever any government regulation…
Catron County wins in court, loses on the ground
Catron County wins in court, loses on the ground They’ve influenced dozens of other counties, been hawked for sale at national conferences and plastered on the front pages of newspapers around the country. Now, Catron County, N.M.” s controversial land-use ordinances have survived a constitutional challenge. On Jan. 16, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit…
Bees need our backing
Bees need our backing Scientists concerned about the decline of pollinators have found something that everyone can care about: food. “If we lost all honey bees in the U.S. without any wild pollinators taking over their chores, the resulting price increases for food in the U.S. would amount to $6 to $8 billion a year,”…
Threatened and Endangered Species are our Mine Canaries
A flock of eagle lovers will gather Feb. 16-18 at the Klamath Basin Bald Eagle Conference in Klamath Falls, Ore., site of the largest concentration of bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Threatened and Endangered Species are our Mine Canaries includes a photography contest, footrace, field trips and workshops. Contact the Oregon Department of…
Williams leaves, Montana scrambles
Williams leaves, Montana scrambles The script in Montana will read like it does every election year: Candidates will debate how much of the state’s mountains and forests should be protected and how much should be open to industry. But for the first time in nearly 18 years, the moderating voice of Democratic Rep. Pat Williams…
Great Salt Lake Issues Symposium
A group called the Friends of Great Salt Lake has organized the Great Salt Lake Issues Symposium, an educational forum on the future of the lake’s ecosystem. Speakers from such groups as the National Audubon Society and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will discuss the lake from historical, political and biological perspectives. Registration for…
Land Board bias questioned
Idaho environmentalists secured their first court victory in the ongoing struggle over who gets to lease the state’s school endowment lands. Judge Duff McKee of the Ada County District Court ruled in December that the State Land Board broke its rules when it combined two grazing leases into one parcel, then awarded the package to…
Montanans take to the ballot
In Montana, where author Norman Maclean was haunted by moving waters, a new coalition of sportsmen, ranchers and environmentalists hopes voters will approve a fall ballot initiative toughening the state’s water quality laws. If passed, the initiative could create significant new challenges for two large-scale mining projects, one proposed for a site near Yellowstone National…
Buffalo hunt halted
Fighting their case through federal court, a coalition of animal rights groups and Indian tribes has stopped New Mexico from staging its first public buffalo hunt in 110 years. A federal judge ruled Jan. 26 that the U.S. Army needed to conduct a preliminary environmental analysis first. The state agency had scheduled three hunts at…
Jury convicts a grave robber
After a trial full of grisly detail, a jury found Oregon resident Jack Lee Harelson guilty of looting an Indian burial cave in Nevada. Although the crime was too old to prosecute under the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the state of Oregon convicted him on state charges of theft, abusing a corpse and tampering…
Of raptors and rifles
Rancher Jim Maitland waded through chest-high waters in mid-November on a rescue mission, but not to save a calf. The creature struggling in a southwestern Oregon river was a young golden eagle that had been shot. After Maitland used a potato sack to rescue the raptor from a riverbank, it thanked him by gouging his…
Heard around the West
A man living near Red Lodge, Mont., not that far from Yellowstone National Park, was heading home with a “Road Kill” hot pizza loaded with plenty of extra meat and cheese when he saw what looked like a wolf. So he did what anyone would do: stopped and fed the animal a few slices of…
Separating sense from nonsense in New Mexico’s forests
Environmentalists in northern New Mexico have a chance to show their better side. Having brought things to a halt in the recent, unnecessary crisis over firewood on Carson National Forest (HCN, 12/25/95), they might now show they can start things that need to get started. The crisis resulted from a lawsuit over the Mexican spotted…
…and the words from the meaning on the Nevada range
“We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” – W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Times of Civil War “This is a war we’re in. We’re choosing up sides,” thundered Gene Gustin, chairman of the public lands advisory committee for Elko County, Nev. Shouts of approval rose from a crowd of…
Don’t just stand there: Get arrested
Everybody’s doing it – the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, former Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, the Sierra Club’s Charlie Ogle – all going to jail for trees and to stop salvage sales. Getting handcuffed and treated roughly by gendarmes. Paying a new, for them, sort of dues. Since our travels around the West put us in…
Dear friends
Thanks, Colorado Springs Colorado Springs is best known as the home of Fort Carson, the “Star Wars” missile defense, Focus on the Family and assorted “patriots.” But the board and staff of High Country News discovered another side to the town: a spirited environmental community that turned out in force for the potluck following our…
Facts take a beating on the range
A New Mexico State University press release saying part of the controversial Diamond Bar allotment was not overgrazed has critics crying “pseudoscience.” The allotment straddling two wilderness areas has been home to squalls among ranchers, the Forest Service, the university, environmentalists and politicians for years (HCN, 7/24/95). In the wake of persistent disagreements, the Forest…
The secret life of wolverines
STANLEY, Idaho – Snow machines finally silent, four researchers walked toward a trap for elusive wolverines. All was still in the thick timber of the Sawtooth Wilderness until a growl made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Pacing inside the log-house trap was a wolverine about as big as a bear…
Wolf from Canada killed by U.S. red tape
The release of 26 British Columbia wolves into Idaho and Yellowstone National Park seemed a howling success until biologists were forced to kill a wolf after it bit a biologist’s thumb to the bone. The alpha male bit John Weaver during a stopover in Missoula, Mont., the day before the animal was to be released…
Lack of enchantment
Santa Fe’s boom goes flat
The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe’s boom goes flat. “The thing about the West is that every jerk is figuring out how to rip up the landscape, and the laws in the West let him.” – Retired East Coast businessman It took several years for…
One man’s good move
My father is impeccably urban. Except for a stint at boarding school in New England and a few summer jobs in the country – he was fired from one for accidentally hoeing the heads off a half-mile-long row of cabbage – he remained in New York almost his entire life. His tastes, his habits of…