Across the Interior West, as the sagebrush sea recedes under the environmental stress of human impacts, its emblematic bird, the sage grouse, is also in decline, and no one seems to know what to do about it.
Looking for the Language of Red
Even in its hardcover form, Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, is small enough to fit easily into your backpack, the one you might carry if you happened to be taking a trip through, say, the redrock country of southern Utah. The book’s size is no accident. A collection…
The Latest Bounce
Utah’s Skull Valley nuclear storage site is moving forward (HCN, 11/19/01: Nuclear storage site splinters Goshutes). In early January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a final environmental impact statement that moves the project one step closer to reality. The NRC will hold hearings in April, the same month that a federal judge will hear a…
Sparring over elk imports
COLORADO Elk ranchers and lawmakers are worried sick about chronic wasting disease. The fatal brain malady has occurred at low levels in wild populations of elk and deer in northeastern Colorado for three decades, but is now spreading in herds of domestic elk that live in close contact with one another (HCN, 11/5/01: Wasting disease…
Grand Canyon plan relaunched
ARIZONA The Grand Canyon stretch of the Colorado River has become an ideological and regulatory war zone, as debates rage over the use of motorized boats, and private and commercial boaters fight for their share of the river-permit pie. In 1997, the Park Service tried to chart the future of the Colorado by starting work…
Post-cowboy economy not a Barbie Doll world
Dear HCN, We offer the following comments in response to Ed Marston’s cultural critique of our recent book, Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New West (HCN, 12/17/01: Economics with a heart, but no soul). Healthy natural landscapes do not merely provide “playgrounds” and “pretty” amenities for “soulless” in-migrants. They provide a broad range…
Heard around the West
It’s good to be queen – the food is better – but then you get stale and lay fewer eggs, and pretty soon you’re out of a job. Buying new queens is what honeybee breeders face every year, reports Capital Press, and “requeening” has usually been no big deal. Queens can easily be shipped from…
Last dance for the sage grouse?
GUNNISON, Colo. – The way to see sagebrush is not as most people do, through the windshield of a vehicle speeding toward someplace else. Slow down and get out of the car; walk in the midst of it. Then the sagebrush in the cold, dry Gunnison Valley can have a scraggly beauty. It rolls across…
The West can govern itself
Democrat Daniel Kemmis has been the minority leader and the speaker of the Montana House of Representatives. He has been mayor of the university town of Missoula. He is an environmentalist. Yet in This Sovereign Land, Kemmis, now head of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, argues that the national government must transfer power…
Dear Friends
Spreading the News You may notice that the middle four pages of this issue look a bit different than usual. We’re using this special pull-out section to announce our Spreading the News fund-raising campaign, which is designed to support this organization’s evolution from a newspaper into a full-fledged multimedia organization. We’re already on our way.…
A Great Old Broad
Celia Hunter, legendary wilderness advocate, died peacefully at home in her log cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Dec. 1. She was 82. Though Celia’s work has been lauded by the nation’s major environmental groups, nothing speaks more about her life than how she lived her last days on earth. Last summer, Celia donned a drysuit…
No game plan for the public lands
Has the Bush administration forgotten about the West?
Snowmobilers rev up for roadless riding
Forest Service delays decision to close Montana’s Mount Jefferson to “hot-rod highmarkers”
Scoot over, farms – ducks are moving in
A restoration effort in northern Idaho recreates wetlands
Indian trust is anything but
When I was a girl, the grownups on our reservation, the Blackfeet Indian Nation in Montana, complained about their troubles with the individual Indian trust. It was a mess. Royalties for allowing oil and gas, grazing and logging on Indian-owned lands were collected by the Interior Department. The funds were held by the Treasury Department,…
Why the bad rap for Mormons?
If you live in the Intermountain West, you know at least a few of them. If you live in Utah, they’re everywhere. If you are also a nonmember, or “gentile,” as Mormons call the rest of us, you bear a special burden when you leave home. Once people hear I’m from Utah, they invariably ask,…
Yucca Mountain debate goes nuclear
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Atoms have an irresistible inclination to combine. Good thing, too. If, for instance, two atoms of hydrogen did not regularly combine with one of oxygen, water would not exist, and we would not be having this conversation. As with physics, so with politics, including the politics of atomic energy, which reared its…
Chick-a-boom-boom at the lek
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Male sage grouse congregate on leks for the same reason young men go to singles bars: They’re hoping to get lucky. For the grouse, sex is very much a one-night stand, which explains why the males gather in late winter at traditional sites to…
Can cows and grouse coexist on the range?
Brad Phelps remembers sage grouse numbering in the hundreds in the uplands of his family’s 700-acre cattle ranch when he was a teenager. “Twenty years later, it was 12 birds,” Phelps says. But Phelps, a fourth-generation rancher in the Gunnison Valley and a member of the Colorado Wildlife Commission, doesn’t think the grouse’s problems can…