An unprecedented, informal coalition of angry Indian tribes, environmentalists and Democrats are going after Washington Republican Sen. Slade Gorton’s seat in November, and Gorton’s opponent – Democrat Maria Cantwell – may have a chance for victory.
‘biles get the boot
A final winter use plan for Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks takes a hard line on snowmobiles. If approved, the plan will allow van-like snowcoaches on park roads, but will ban snowmobiles completely by the winter of 2003-2004. It’s a marked change from the draft plan, released last winter, that would have allowed snowmobiles…
Thanks for the methane issue
Dear HCN, Thanks for your recent issue on coalbed methane. It was wonderful to see you treat an issue that is widespread, complex, and far from environmentally benign, despite methane being labeled a “green” fuel. I have to admit to being a little disappointed that you didn’t say anything about the Raton Basin here in…
Where cultures collide
Travelers on Route I-84 may speed past Ontario, Ore., with nary a glance. But the decision not to stop at this agricultural center is their loss, because the town houses one of the best historical and cultural centers in the West. The Four Rivers Cultural Center celebrates the confluence of cultures in the Western Treasure…
Meth story a wake-up call
Dear HCN, Thanks for that excellent article and wake-up call about the “meth invasion” by Stephen Lyons. As a retired detective (NYPD), I know the value of informing the public about the drug perils in their midst, even in the most, so-called, unlikely places. An alerted public could well be a major factor in dealing…
Click for conservation
Maybe there is still no such thing as a free lunch, but a new Web site called EcologyFund.com lets users conserve land at no cost. Each time a visitor to the site clicks on a corporate sponsor’s advertisement, the sponsor donates half a cent to one of six land-trust projects. The pennies add up: In…
Learning from John Sawhill
Dear HCN, Fine piece on the late John Sawhill by Jon Margolis (HCN, 9/11/00: Remembering an establishment revolutionary). Lest anyone forget, he was one helluva public servant, and that rare breed, a GOP conservationist. As a Newsweek Washington correspondent, I covered him in the Nixon and Ford administrations during which he put the first ax…
The Latest Bounce
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has a plan to curb illegal immigration between Naco and Douglas, Ariz. It includes stadium lights, steel fences, roads and video surveillance cameras, which an INS study says won’t affect endangered wildlife along the U.S.-Mexico border (HCN, 9/27/99: Battered Borderlands). The Center for Biological Diversity disputes the agency’s study and…
Powder River Basin Resource Council
Wyoming’s small-mine law exempts mines 10 acres or less from environmental quality permits and notification of adjacent landowners. The law is the focus of Powder River Basin Resource Council‘s annual meeting, Oct. 28 in Casper, Wyo. For information, call 307/358-5002. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Powder River…
Water runs through a congressional race
SOUTH DAKOTA A man who helped rewrite South Dakota’s environmental history is aiming for the U.S. House of Representatives. Democrat Curt Hohn, 49, of Aberdeen, learned about politics while working for Sen. George McGovern in the early 1970s. Hohn and McGovern parted ways in 1974 over a mammoth water project. With a price tag between…
Carnivores 2000
Scientists, land managers, educators and advocates will discuss predator conservation and biology at Defenders of Wildlife’s three-day “Carnivores 2000” conference in Denver, Nov. 12-15. Register online at www.defenders.org or call 202/789-2844, ext. 315. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Carnivores 2000.
Libertarian is Chenoweth’s heir apparent
IDAHO The man who could succeed Idaho’s feisty Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage is in hot water with the Environmental Protection Agency. C.L. “Butch” Otter says he recently dug weeds, cattails, rusty car bodies and concrete from the border of a pond next to his home to make the pond more hospitable to wildlife. But the…
America’s Parks – America’s People: A Mosaic in Motion II
America’s national parks are usually associated with their diverse wildlife. But the Park Service and the National Parks Conservation Association think human diversity is important as well. The two groups will sponsor an event called America’s Parks – America’s People: A Mosaic in Motion II, from Nov. 8-12 in Santa Fe, N.M. The event will…
The Berkeley Pit gets deeper
MONTANA Skyrocketing electricity prices in Montana are indirectly raising the level of Butte’s Berkeley Pit, a 900-foot-deep, 30 billion-gallon soup of acid-mine runoff that ranks as the nation’s largest Superfund site. In mid-July, copper-mining company Montana Resources suddenly halted its Butte operations, blaming high electrical rates for the shutdown. During normal operations, the mine is…
Council guns down ban on predator hunts
ARIZONA In 1998, an Arizona contest called “Predator Hunt Extreme” offered $10,000 to the person who killed the most coyotes, bobcats, foxes and mountain lions. Public outcry against the event and multiple petitions from both hunters and wildlife advocates convinced the state Game and Fish Commission to propose a ban on such killing contests. But…
Mudfest debacle muddies off-roaders’ future
COLORADO Boulder, Colo., disc jockeys “Willie B” and “D Mack” were just looking for a good time when they invited KBPI listeners to join them with four-wheel drive vehicles at Caribou Flats, west of Boulder, on Sept. 23. But by the end of “Mudfest,” their unofficial gathering, 200 off-road vehicles had driven through a 25-acre…
On the trail
If you’re looking for a little financial help with your off-the-grid dream home, don’t look to vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney. At an Oct. 10 campaign stop at a recreational-vehicle plant in Yakima, Wash., Cheney said, “You have a solar panel on your house, you get tax relief. If you drive a solar-powered car, you get…
The power of vision and memory
Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way, by Charles Wilkinson. Illustrated with maps by Diane Sylvain and black-and-white photographs. University of Washington Press, 2000. Hardcover: $22.50. 128 pages. The dust has long settled from the Northwest’s fishing wars of the late 1960s and ’70s – wars which set Indian…
Mapping a vision
Although local environmental groups often know their immediate surroundings in detail, there’s a bigger picture available. The State of the Southern Rockies Ecosystem, a report released by the Nederland, Colo.-based Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, inventories much of three states – Colorado, northern New Mexico and southern Wyoming – that compose an ecoregion, an area with…
Environmentalists for Bush
Dear HCN, As the nation prepares for the upcoming presidential election, it is so sad to read about the formation of the group “Environmentalists Against Gore” (HCN, 8/28/00: The Latest Bounce). If this group succeeds in what must be its goal, we will get George W. Bush as our next president. If this is what…
Birds break boundaries
The Colorado state office of The Nature Conservancy has worked for years to preserve chunks of the state’s shortgrass prairie, breeding grounds for birds such as mountain plovers, burrowing owls and long-billed curlews. But staffers always knew their efforts in Colorado could provide only part-time protection, since most of these species travel south during the…
A cheer for the Church
Dear HCN, Concerning Jim Robbins’ “Holy Water”: It is very good to see the Catholic Church taking some more specific steps (in the Columbia River basin pastoral letter) toward applying the ideas in Renewing the Earth (HCN, 9/11/00: Excerpts from the pastoral letter draft). I would like to set the record straight, however (or at…
Pilot finds a soft spot for a hard land
Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey, by Adriel Heisey. Treasure Chest Books, P.O. Box 5250, Tucson, AZ 85703 (520/623-9558). Hardcover: $40. 114 pages. Flying his ultralight airplane high above the Sonoran Desert, Adriel Heisey found an appreciation for an alien landscape. A former commercial pilot, Heisey moved to Tucson on a whim, and at…
Churches greening none too soon
Dear HCN, Thanks to HCN and Jim Robbins for the fine piece on the Columbia River Pastoral Letter Project (“Holy Water,” HCN, 9/11/00: Holy Water). The pastoral letter is a good example of what some have called the “greening” of the Christian Church. Other efforts to make Christianity more “earth friendly” are under way among…
Stalking Slade
Tribes, Greens and Democrats hope to ambush Washington Sen. Slade Gorton in November
Dear Friends
Our election issue If there’s a theme for this year’s election issue, it’s that Old West politicians are under increasing attack: Our cover story reports on Washington Sen. Slade Gorton’s tough re-election battle, and Todd Wilkinson writes on p. 5 that several of Montana’s statewide races remain neck-and-neck. Western citizens are demanding more power in…
Montana hunters blast game farms
Initiative 143 would kill canned huntingand hobble the elk industry
A tricky tale of the past and the future
Salt Dreams, text by William deBuys and photographs by Joan Myers, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999. Hardcover: $35. 307 pages. There is only one Western story. It is the story of a mad rush to “settle” and exploit. This single story consisted always of the destruction and displacement of native people, followed by…
Heard around the West
The Seattle-Post Intelligencer tries to be conscientious during election season, interviewing by its count more than 100 candidates. Perhaps surreptitiously, the staff of the daily also write down the silliest comments from would-be public servants. Among the paper’s top 10: I was born into leadership – period. Give the Indians Food Stamps to buy salmon.…
Third-party votes count for plenty
Political conversations this fall often include the observation that “We need a third party.” In the Mountain West, the most reliably Republican part of America, the reply is often “Third party? Wouldn’t it make more sense to start by having a second party?” Soon comes a practical admonition that unless you cast a ballot for…
When ‘hunting’ becomes staggeringly stupid
“Canned hunting” is the term critics use when referring to the “sport” of paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of executing “wild” animals trapped in escape-proof enclosures on “game ranches.” The term is overtly derogatory, but hardly derogatory enough. “Pay-per-kill” or “execution by contract” are more apt, as there’s no hunting involved, canned or…
Washington’s Steel Magnolia
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Like her opponent, Slade Gorton, Maria Cantwell is not a native of Washington. She grew up in Indianapolis in a political household – her father was a county commissioner and a city councilman. Cantwell leaped into politics herself at a young age.…
In presidential politics, the West has a bad hand
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Life, as someone once pointed out, is unfair. Someone, no doubt, pointed it out millennia ago, but the observation is generally attributed to John F. Kennedy, among whose distinctions was winning the closest presidential election in living memory. A mere 118,570 more Americans voted for Kennedy than for Richard M. Nixon 40…
Arizona’s 202 takes aim at sprawl
Note: a sidebar article, “Colorado’s growth amendment rouses voters,” accompanies this story. ORACLE, Ariz. – On a Pinal County cattle ranch about 30 miles northwest of Tucson, El Salvadoran-born real estate broker and developer Alex Argueta envisions thousands of homes, as well as shopping centers, high-tech parks, vineyards and several resorts and golf courses. He…
Democrats see the light in Montana
The 2000 elections could be pivotal for theeconomy and environment
Colorado’s growth amendment rouses voters
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Landscape photographer John Fielder is a household name in Colorado, but he hasn’t had time to document the changing aspen leaves this fall. He’s too busy championing Colorado’s proposed Amendment 24. “From now until Nov. 7, the camera’s packed away, until we…
Nader shakes up Western enviros
Note: a sidebar article, “‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough,’” accompanies this story. MONTROSE, Colo. – “There’s a lot we have to cover here,” sighs Ralph Nader, stooping over the podium with all the enthusiasm of a harried college professor. The Green Party presidential candidate isn’t campaigning this afternoon. Not officially.…
‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough’
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. NIJHUIS: I’ve been wondering who you’d pick for Secretary of the Interior. NADER: Well, I haven’t thought about that yet (laughs), but it would be someone with a determined record of achievement on behalf of the environment and the preservation of the…