A writer considers the philosophical questions that underlie endangered species protection, and how it is that one predator – the human kind – now finds itself assisting other predators, and also trying to help their prey.
Students’ snowmobiles show up industry
WYOMING Last winter, in about six months, university students designed a cleaner snowmobile – a feat the four major snowmobile manufacturers haven’t been able to accomplish in 10 years, says Teton County Commissioner Bill Paddleford. Paddleford co-founded the Clean Snowmobile Challenge, held in Jackson, Wyo., to find alternatives to two-stroke engines that emit more than…
Bovine weedeaters
Leigh Frederickson, a natural resources professor at the University of Missouri, has been testing whether cattle can hold down the spread of noxious weeds, particularly white top. Last summer, the 14,186-acre Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado worked with five neighboring ranchers, who rented pasture with mixed results. “Depending on the moisture and the…
Little town shows big heart in the face ofgrowth
CALIFORNIA Silicon Valley has pumped $50 million into California open space preservation since 1998. But this fall, on California’s central coast, residents of the small town of Cambria showed that sheer will also goes a long way in the fight against development. Hong Kong investors had plans to put over 250 homes on 417 seaside…
Of raptors, rats and roadkill
At the Northern Rockies Raptor Center in northwestern Montana, Ken Wolff has been nursing injured birds back to health for 12 years. But this August his nonprofit operation hit a small snag. Five hundred pounds of frozen rodents, which Wolff uses to feed birds of prey, failed to arrive at the Missoula airport. He spent…
This hunter is for freedom
Dear HCN, As a hunter, I find opinions like those of Ali Macalady nauseating (HCN, 11/6/00). “Hunters for Gun Control?” I wonder if she’s not a “plant,” a leftist radical posing as a hunter. If she’s really a hunter, she should be aware that the gun-grabbers will never be satisfied with banning handguns and semi-automatic…
EPA reins in ranchers
OREGON For years, a bureaucratic gap in Oregon law has allowed some ranchers to violate the Clean Water Act by allowing their cows’ manure to seep into rivers. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down. So far, the EPA has fined 10 Oregon ranchers – some as much as $50,000 – while also requiring…
Let’s organize!
Dear HCN, I was pleased to see the article on “Hunters for Gun Control” (HCN, 11/6/00). I am interested in building a coalition of groups in Montana (and elsewhere) that can effectively challenge the perception that all or most hunters and sportsmen accept the NRA line. Ralph StoneVista, Montana This article appeared in the print…
Gun controllers need to think again
Dear HCN, I am glad that Ali Macalady and her family are devoted to hunting. I share with her the belief that “there is something important about harvesting my own food,” and a love of early mornings spent waiting for game. But it is disappointing to read that an outdoorswoman such as Macalady considers it…
Park sues notorious developer
COLORADO The National Park Service says it won’t buckle under to Tom Chapman, the Colorado developer who has a history of marketing luxury homes on private inholdings within the state’s wilderness areas and forests (HCN, 7/5/99: Wilderness developer Tom Chapman is back). Officials at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park near Montrose, Colo.,…
Why immigration hurts
Dear HCN, Bob Skaggs and so many others miss the point when they argue that immigrants only take low-paying jobs that “no one else wants” (HCN, 11/20/00). Corine Flores is right. We have little hope of advancing the earnings potential of this nation’s poor or minorities, or of protecting the environment, as long as immigration…
The latest bounce
An estimated 2,000 people marched in Seattle to commemorate the Nov. 30 anniversary of the World Trade Organization protests (HCN, 12/20/99: WTO limps home from Seattle). The peaceful event turned ugly late in the evening, when about 50 people clashed with police; the confrontation eventually resulted in 140 arrests. Most of those arrested were charged…
One for two
Dear HCN, I have just finished lunch with your essay, “Squishy-soft processes – hard results” (HCN, 8/28/00). I read with particular interest the part about Nye, Mont., and the palladium mine. We visited Nye in the early ’90s for the sole purpose of seeing the mine (hillbillies do that). We were having a chuckle about…
Stop the propaganda
Dear HCN, Susan Cockrell’s letter attacking my research into nonlethal federal management of coyotes in the Oct. 23 issue of High Country News proves that, once again, you can lead some horses to water but you can’t make them drink. But the hopelessness of some tasks just encourages folks like me (I love my job!).…
Los Alamos piles on more waste
NEW MEXICO With the stockpile of radioactive waste set to expand at Los Alamos National Laboratory, local watchdog groups fear that temporary storage might turn out to be forever. Fifteen years ago, Congress made the Department of Energy responsible for taking low-level radioactive waste from America’s private industries and government programs. But DOE has been…
Deeper than deep
Dear HCN, Your story, “Into the depths” (HCN, 11/6/00) grossly understated the depth of Crater Lake, Ore., the deepest lake in North America at nearly 2,000 feet. You surely meant 600 meters. Because of this great depth and its clarity, it has an incredible blue color caused by molecular scattering and its steep shoreline. Go…
Make them pay
Dear HCN, Mark Muro’s piece about the defeat of growth-control initiatives in Colorado and Arizona was disheartening, but there is a bright side (HCN, 11/20/00). All of us know that developers care about only one thing. Forcing them to spend money to defeat such proposals puts a crimp in their profits, and more than $4…
A short story about palladium
Dear HCN, I have just finished lunch with your essay, “Squishy-soft processes – hard results” (HCN, 8/28/00). I read with particular interest the part about Nye, Mont., and the palladium mine. We visited Nye in the early ’90s for the sole purpose of seeing the mine (hillbillies do that). We were having a chuckle about…
Counties want a park road opened
UTAH An unpaved road to spectacular sandstone Angel Arch in Canyonlands National Park has become another battleground in the continuing war between rural county commissioners and the federal government. The Park Service restricted motorized travel along the primitive Salt Creek Road in 1995, reducing the number of vehicles per day from 70 to 20. Since…
Unclassifieds
NOTICE TO OUR ADVERTISERS: Effective immediately, ad submissions must be received no later than 14 days prior to issue date, 5 p.m. Deadline for Jan. 15 issue is Jan. 1. In addition to advertising in our newspaper, all classified and display ads may be posted to our Web site for an additional 15 percent of…
Mine all dressed up with nowhere to go
ARIZONA The future of a controversial mine in southern Arizona now may be at the mercy of the copper market. The proposed Carlota copper mine, for four years a target of local environmental groups because of its threat to nearby Pinto Creek (HCN, 3/17/97), now has all the permits it needs to open, but its…
Is a gold mine’s discharge illegal?
COLORADO The Cripple Creek & Victor Mine near Victor can claim two superlatives: It is Colorado’s largest open-pit gold mine, and, according to the EPA, it’s also the state’s biggest chemical polluter of water. Because Colorado has failed to rein in the mine, say two national environmental groups, they are threatening to sue the mine…
Atomic farmgirl
It was a headline in The Spokesman-Review that informed my family that both the bomb at Alamogordo and the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki contained plutonium produced at Hanford. That’s how everybody – everybody in the whole world and everybody in our neighborhood – found out what was going on down there: from the…
Ombudsman could be town’s ticket
MONTANA Victims of a 1996 train derailment that spilled 133,000 pounds of chemicals near Alberton, Mont., may finally get some help. Though Montana Rail Link and the Environmental Protection Agency cleaned up a 30-acre area after the spill, many residents continue to complain of lingering pollution and illness. But neither the company nor the regional…
Agency gets rebuked
Since the late 1980s, scientists have known that more than 100 federal nuclear sites, over half of which lie in the West, will remain toxic forever. The problem is how to manage these former bomb sites for thousands of years. Though the Department of Energy commissioned a National Academy of Sciences study over two years…
Bring back towns
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream makes the buzzwords “new urbanism” come alive. The authors, who are community planners, have written and designed an easily accessible and smartly illustrated book, which is not surprising, since Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck believe that what works to build…
Still here
Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Dear Friends
A skipped issue This is both the last issue of the year and the last issue for a month. In July and in early January, High Country News lets readers catch up on their reading and the staff catch up on their breathing. The next issue will be dated Jan. 15. A new printer and…
People for the USA! disbands
The wise-use movement’s shrillest voice goes silent, but the spirit lives on
When two traditions collide
Controversy surrounds a tribe’s request to gather eagles in a national monument
Feds fight chaos in a desert playground
ORVs are banned from more than half of California’s Algodones Dunes
Troubled harvest
Washington’s fruit industry is a hotbed of federal immigration policy gone wrong
Heard around the West
Oh, to be a stray in San Francisco, where a software billionaire’s gift has made animal homelessness a Cinderella experience. Once picked up from the streets, cats, for example, move to a loft where they can choose to watch mice run on television or loll on top of a six-foot climbing tree. Piped-in air to…
Cure or curse?
As Chronic Wasting Disease appears again, questions arise about the velvet antler trade