The first-ever manmade flood of the Colorado River through Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam is intended to help repair the river in Grand Canyon – and perhaps to signal the end of the “technocratic utopia” dream.
Keep it on the ground
Dear HCN, I read with interest your issue featuring community-based approaches to conservation (HCN, 5/13/96). Mike McCloskey’s essay illustrates the concerns of many since, in his view, locally based conservation would disempower the heavily urban constituencies of the Sierra Club, and by extension, other national environmental organizations. That concern is perhaps the most compelling reason…
Winning hearts and minds through local action
Dear HCN, Sierra Club leader Michael McCloskey was correct when he told his board that community collaboration processes “have the effect of transferring influence to the very communities where we are least organized and potent.” He went on to note that local environmentalists often lack experience, training, skills and money. So what is the correct…
We are regulating ourselves at last
Dear HCN, As a professional in the field of outdoor-adventure education, I appreciated your well-balanced, thorough discussion of outdoor education (HCN, 6/10/96). As wilderness becomes the place for personal growth, team-building and therapeutic purposes, industry regulation becomes increasingly critical. This is evidenced by the toll of teenage fatalities in “tough love” programs such as North…
The history of two canyons, in photographs
Out of the flood of books on the Colorado River, two recent illustrated volumes caught our eye. Robert H. Webb’s Grand Canyon, a Century of Change features pairs of matched photos, old and new. The author, a hydrologist involved with Glen Canyon Environmental Studies, spent seven months replicating hundreds of photographic views from the Stanton…
Story’s comparison was wrongheaded
Dear HCN, Your May 13 article on dams and Northwest salmon quoted a Boise teacher to the effect that removing dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers would only affect “15,000 jobs connected to the BPA, the Army Corps, the navigation industry, three lower Snake ports, eight aluminum companies, and 500 farms served by the…
Getting the lead out
The nonprofit Inland Empire Public Lands Council, based in Washington state, broke new ground in public outreach when it dropped 10,000 video cassettes on Spokane Valley doorsteps in May. It produced the 10-minute video, “Get the LEAD out!” to alert residents to the legacy of toxins from mining in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene watershed. “We want…
How we did them in
Anyone interested in understanding the ongoing salmon debacle should read The Northwest Salmon Crisis: A Documentary History. Editors Joseph Cone and Sandy Ridlington have compiled over 80 documents from the last 140 years to lead us through the salmon’s decline. They remind us that this tragedy occurred even though red flags were waving every step…
Canyon trip turns fatal
When Robin Phillips of Bountiful, Utah, planned a six-day hiking trip into the Grand Canyon for his troop of Boy Scouts last month, he knew the remote route would be waterless. But maps and guidebooks couldn’t tell him it would prove deadly. Three days into the trip, which, as it turned out, Phillips could not…
Mine your own business
When a Canadian mining subsidiary showed up last year in the 1,500-person mountain community of Yarnell, Ariz., mine officials announced they were re-opening an open-pit gold mine that had been closed since 1942. Angry locals immediately formed Guardians for the Rural Environment, and members hope they can halt the cyanide heap-leach mine. They’ve asked the…
Sharing a clouded past
Thousands of people exposed to radiation from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington during decades of Cold War experiments have had health problems and wondered: “Am I the only one?” Now they will have a chance to share their experiences, says Bea Kelleigh, of the Hanford Health Information Network. Formed by Congress in 1991,…
Forgotten, but not gone – yet
Few people know that the American marten, a forest-dwelling weasel the size of a house cat, hunts small mammals in cavities under snow, and “is so exquisitely tuned to its surroundings that it can depress its body temperature … minimizing energy expenditures in the stressful winter months.” Or that the wolverine, the largest of the…
Drought ‘ heat = fire
Drought ‘ heat = fire This year’s fire season started fast and furiously. Across the parched states of Arizona and New Mexico, 3,600 fires have scorched some 324,000 acres. As a precautionary measure, 10 of 11 national forests in the region declared at least part of their acreage off-limits to recreationists in June. The most…
From the Canyons to the Stars
If you’ve read Terry Tempest Williams and would like to hear her in person, come to a free reading and talk at 5:30 p.m. on July 30 at Aspen’s Harris Hall. The event is sponsored by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance as part of the Aspen Music Festival’s “From the Canyons to the Stars,” a…
Instream Flows: Minimum Doctrine/Maximum Controversy
The 21st annual Colorado Water Workshop at Western State College in Gunnison Aug. 7-9 focuses this year on Instream Flows: Minimum Doctrine/ Maximum Controversy. For more information, contact the Colorado Water Workshop, Aspinall Wilson Center, Western State College, Gunnison, CO 81231 or call Pam Ayers at 970/ 943-7156. For those whose job requires detailed knowledge…
Endangered Species Act Conference
For those whose job requires detailed knowledge of the Endangered Species Act, there will be a technical conference Aug. 8-9 at the Hyatt Regency in Denver, Colo. Sponsored by CLE International, a company that hosts environmental law seminars, the third annual Endangered Species Act Conference will explain how the law works and how it affects…
Helping Small Towns Survive
Jackson, Wyo., will host the fifth annual training institute for community development specialists, sponsored by the Heartland Center for Leadership Development, Oct. 10-14. This year’s focus is Helping Small Towns Survive. Contact the Jackson Hole Institute, care of the Heartland Center for Leadership Development, 941 “O” Street, Suite 920, Lincoln, NE 68508 (800/927-1115). This article…
Kids know where to look
Dear HCN, This spring I had the pleasure of leading a group of fifth-graders from Portland, Ore., on a hike through the Opal Creek Ancient Forest. These are the future hellions which our politicians have been scrambling to build prisons for. Kids from not-so-normal families. Their neighborhood is known as “felony flats.” My kind of…
Postscripts from a Californian
Dear HCN, Regarding the Quincy Library Group efforts described in HCN May 13, there are consequences to the Clinton administration’s well-meaning decision to provide the promised $4.7 million to fund the library group’s agreement. The funding was taken off the top of an already impoverished Region 5 resources budget. Range management programs which have never…
Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river
In the context of the place, it was a very strange idea. We were sitting in a boat on dark green water deep in a red-walled canyon, a few hundred yards downstream from a 10 million-ton mirage. The mirage of smooth brilliant white looked curiously fragile in that otherwise raw landscape of red sandstone, green…
Deciding what kind of river we want
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: Glen Canyon: Using a dam to heal a river It is too early to predict whether the river now will be run in peace and harmony. The Glen Canyon environmental impact statement recommends to the secretary of the Interior that an “Adaptive…
Dear friends
Back with a bang Staff is back on the job, returning just in time for the 4th of July parade up Paonia’s Grand Avenue, an event which usually requires 30 minutes, tops. This time it took an hour for more than 100 entries to pass, what with past Cherry Days queens representing five decades, Shriners,…
Santa Fe mayor’s friends now foes
When the Santa Fe activists who are organizing an overhaul of the town’s government discuss Mayor Debbie Jaramillo, they sound like initiates to a self-help group. “I spent 14 years of my life promoting her. It’s grossly sad and disappointing,” says activist Don Brayfield. “I worked with her for six years like a lapdog. I…
The salvage rider – down, but not quite out
For environmentalists concerned about public forests, this was supposed to the summer of dread. Timber companies, shielded by a salvage logging law, were expected to have a free-for-all on thousands of acres of roadless land. But now, with summer half over, environmentalists have reason for optimism. They may even salvage a victory. Congress passed the…
Drought cuts to the bone on Southwest range
RESERVE, N.M. – To hear Ed Werheim tell it, 1993 was a lifetime ago. That’s when he took out a mortgage on a ranch in the mountains of southern New Mexico. The range was wet, cattle prices were high and the 57-year-old cabinet maker was looking forward to running cattle on the Gila National Forest…
The art of control
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: Drought cuts to the bone on Southwest range Jim Winder ranches near Hatch, N.M. He rotates his cattle through 62 fenced pastures on an 18,300-acre BLM allotment. When the customary winter rains didn’t fall in January, he started looking for lusher pastures for…
Droughts come, droughts go
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories: Drought cuts to the bone on Southwest range Quentin Hulse moved onto his ranch on Canyon Creek in the Gila National Forest in 1933, when he was 7 years old. He still lives there. We asked him how his cattle did in the…
Trapping initiative may snare Colorado ranchers
Carol Buchanan raises chickens on her small farm in rural western Colorado, and the mounted heads of deer, bear and elk hang from the walls of her house. But on her desk lie copies of a petition which aims to ban all trapping, snaring and poisoning of animals in the state. “I’m not against hunting,”…
Heard around the West
As people like you and me swarm through the West’s national parks and forests, transmuting into that dreaded specimen, the summer tourist, agency staffers resort to trading quotes by e-mail to make the hot, hectic days pass more pleasantly. We are deliciously quotable because we are uninformed, stubborn, and we lie a lot. Darryl Stone,…
This was the revolution that wasn’t
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Here are two basic truths about revolutions: First, like comedy, revolutions are easy to plan, but very, very hard to pull off. Second, we don’t do them in America. Well, we started with one, and perhaps it continues. Since then there has been lots of change, most of it incremental. For this…
Budget crisis may doom Oregon’s state parks
LINCOLN CITY, Ore. – At first glance, Road’s End Wayside Rest Area here is simply a big asphalt parking lot, complete with a bathroom and stairs winding downhill. But the stairs lead to a huge, sandy beach, making it one of more than 60 public access points on the Oregon coast. Public beach access has…