Along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, pueblo tribes are working to bring back the disappearing bosque – the cottonwood gallery forest that once lined the river, offering habitat, shade and leafy bounty to a dry landscape.
Mining reform gets the shaft
When then-secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt shepherded a new set of hard-rock mining regulations into law on Jan. 20, mining critics and reformers hoped the new rules would usher in an era of more environmentally responsible mining. But President Bush’s inauguration brought a new cast of characters into the Interior Department. Faced with three…
Shocking inaccuracy
Dear HCN, I was shocked to find myself quoted as saying that environmentalists are “bayoneting the wounded” in your piece on the Eagle Timber Sale (HCN, 9/24/01: The timber sale that won’t die). These were not my words and I thought that I had made that clear to the reporter. In retrospect, I regret having…
ESA shuts down collaboration
Dear HCN, Paul Larmer’s opinion, “The enduring Endangered Species Act,” left me bewildered (HCN, 9/24/01: The enduring Endangered Species Act). From the trenches of the rural West, the ESA doesn’t seem to be accomplishing nearly the wonders that you claim. In fact, it appears to be doing the opposite. You wrote, “We need both litigation…
The Latest Bounce
The battle over Canadian softwood lumber imports is heating up (HCN, 3/26/01: U.S. mills fall under Canadian ax). In August, the U.S. Commerce Department slapped a 19 percent countervailing duty on Canadian wood and followed it up with a 13 percent anti-dumping duty on Oct. 31; the agency is investigating subsidy and dumping allegations and…
Romanticizing rodeo abuse
Dear HCN, Rebecca Clarren’s review of the book Riders of the West (HCN, 10/8/01: Indians are cowboys), about the Indian rodeo circuit, contained a sentence I found most disturbing: “It depicts how rodeo helps Indian youth create a legacy of hope and pride, transcending the severe poverty and rampant alcoholism that often await them beyond…
Homeland security drafts rangers
Scores of Western public-land rangers are no longer at their regular jobs, patrolling rangeland for illegal off-road activities or investigating endangered species smuggling. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, rangers from the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service have been assigned to guard federal buildings in Washington, D.C.,…
A capital offense in Canada
Dear HCN, As an American who immigrated to Canada a couple years ago, I was curious to read your story about efforts to protect the Rocky Mountain Front on our side of the border (HCN, 10/8/01: Whoa! Canada!). While I thought the article was generally fairly good, there were two obvious errors of fact that…
Sabotage isn’t terrorism
Dear HCN, Your article on alleged “ecoterrorism” is misleading and perpetuates the propaganda of polluting industry representatives who have already co-opted mass media (HCN, 10/8/01: Terrorist attacks echo in the West). The Vail fires of 1998, which are better categorized as sabotage, have little to do with terrorism. Terrorism is “best defined as the use…
Pollution pickle sours landowner
NORTH DAKOTA Like tremolite asbestos fibers, the Montana-based W.R. Grace & Co. vermiculite contamination problem gets stickier with time. Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered asbestos-laden soil around a storage warehouse owned by the Minot Park District in Minot, N.D. While the agency is currently testing the extent of the contamination, EPA coordinator…
Cows to heat homes
OREGON This winter, manure from 400 Holstein cows will begin generating enough electricity to power 65 homes in the Willamette Valley. The manure will be stored above ground in “digester” tanks where, in heated, airtight conditions, bacteria produce gas in a few weeks. The methane is siphoned off to fuel generators that convert the gas…
Bonneville trout denied protection
GREAT BASIN Environmental groups have stepped up to the plate three times for the Bonneville cutthroat trout since 1979, asking the Fish and Wildlife Service to grant the trout a slot on the endangered species list. On Oct. 9, the agency threw the fish’s defenders their third strike. Officials said that threats to cutthroat habitat,…
Savage controversy peacefully resolved
OREGON After a decade of political discord and legal brawls with conservationists, an Oregon irrigation district has agreed to breach the Savage Rapids Dam (HCN, 6/22/98: Locals stand behind an aging dam). The dam’s sole function is to provide irrigation water from the Rogue River to local farmers, but according to federal agencies, it kills…
Will the circle be broken?
WASHINGTON Washington may log land formerly set aside for the endangered northern spotted owl. In 1997, the state implemented a Habitat Conservation Plan, which allowed the state to log some owl territories if it set aside other land for habitat. As an extra layer of protection, then-Department of Natural Resources Public Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher…
Bringing back the bosque
Pueblo tribes take the lead in restoring the Rio Grande’s riverside forest
We are the Oil Tribe
I’ve been visiting drilling rigs lately. For an environmentalist, it’s an education. Rugged tattooed men, macho diesel pickups and in-your-face bumper stickers: EARTH FIRST! WE’LL DRILL THE OTHER PLANETS LATER. In a country with 210 million automobiles, only 250 rigs search for oil in America. That seems a small number until you realize that the…
Dear Friends
Balmy weather It’s been an unusual fall here on Colorado’s West Slope. Unseasonably warm days and nights not only prolonged the vivid display of blazing aspens in the high country, but also kept the equally resplendent river-bottom color alive all the way into early November. The balmy air seemed to ripen leaves like fruit: Foliage…
‘Scholarship, sainthood and simplicity’
Frank C. Craighead Jr., a world-renowned grizzly bear researcher, environmentalist and author, died in Jackson, Wyo., on Oct 21. He was 85. Craighead and his brother, John, who lives in Missoula, Mont., were best known for their pioneering research on the great bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. Among the first people to track wildlife using radio…
Outspoken Yellowstone ranger gagged
Bob Jackson silenced on salt lick problem
Heard around the West
Reading a book in these tense times can get you kicked off an airplane – not just once but twice. It happened in Philadelphia to 22-year-old Neil Godfrey. The book was Hayduke Lives! by Edward Abbey, and Godfrey was carrying it when he tried to board a plane to Phoenix. Noticing a security guard staring…
Global market squeezes sheep ranchers
Foreign competition, low prices drive some ranchers out
Resort counties push for legal workers
Proposal from Colorado resort towns would expand guest-worker program
The importance of being nowhere
The day felt like rain and smelled like rain. The sky held the soft gray of a winter storm, the kind of weather Mexicans describe as equipatas, equal steps, to capture that idle way the rain on a December day can slowly drizzle across the land. It was 1957, and I was your basic 12-year-old,…
Nuclear storage site splinters Goshutes
Pressure from inside and outside could derail waste plan
Will salt sink an agricultural empire?
Feds still plugged up over disposal of irrigation waters