When the dairy industry invades rural Idaho, communities face the dilemma of what to do with the waste cows produce. The huge dairy operations are contaminating local air and water.
Raising a stink
Factory dairies catch Idaho’s Magic Valley by surprise
Those darn capitalist tendencies
Dear HCN, I appreciated George Sibley’s essay, “How I lost my town” (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town), and I can certainly empathize with his loss. In 1981, I spent a month near Crested Butte as a student on an environmental policy field course. Locals were celebrating AMAX’s cancellation of the proposed Mount Emmons…
The Latest Bounce
The U.S. Forest Service revoked its approval of the Rock Creek Mine in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness – at least temporarily (HCN, 2/18/02: Battle brews over a wilderness mother lode). The agency’s decision came a day after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, facing a lawsuit and intense criticism from local activists, withdrew a biological…
Silver Valley residents sue for damages
IDAHO Residents of Idaho’s Silver Valley want five former mining companies to pay for a medical monitoring program that would detect health effects from lead and arsenic contamination for up to 100,000 people in the Coeur d’Alene Basin. Filed in January in state court, the residents’ class action suit alleges that five mining companies in…
Fashion faux-pas in the forest
COLORADO Designer Ralph Lauren’s proposal for a land swap with the U.S. Forest Service has been sent back to the drawing board after encountering fierce local opposition. The swap called for the Forest Service to give Lauren 525 acres, including part of a public-access road that runs through his Double RL ranch near Ridgway, Colo.…
City gets in the zone for fish
OREGON Portland is one of a few urban areas where endangered fish swim in the shadows of high-rises. In an effort to prevent eroding stream banks and rising water temperatures that harm fish, the city’s planning bureau designated zones along its streams that impose building and landscape regulations on 19,000 acres of residential property. That…
Sibley a brilliant equivocator
Dear HCN, An absolutely brilliant essay by George Sibley (HCN, 3/18/02: How I lost my town). Memorable lines, sweeping flourishes, paragraphs that could stand alone as poetry. But when you take it all in, Sibley never “had” a town or “had” any place else. Missing was some call to action. It was kind of nihilistic.…
Land exchange could short-change monuments
ARIZONA A land-exchange referendum slated for the November ballot could set the stage for shifting the borders of the Sonoran Desert and Ironwoods national monuments, two of President Clinton’s 11th-hour designations (HCN, 1/29/01: Monumental changes). Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Arizona Gov. Jane Hull have conferred several times in the past year about how to…
Eucalyptus smells nice, anyway
Dear HCN, I was amused by the vehemence of Ted Williams’ essay, “The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?” (HCN, 2/18/02: The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?) as a native Californian living on the other coast. My moldering 1968 copy of Munz’s A California Flora and Supplement lists four species of eucalyptus as native. At the time the…
Elk and deer disease could waste Western Slope
COLORADO Chronic wasting disease, the fatal brain malady found in elk and deer, has jumped west across the Continental Divide despite efforts by Colorado wildlife and agriculture agencies to contain it (HCN, 11/5/01: Wasting disease spreads in Colorado). In late March, wildlife officials determined that two wild deer illegally penned on the Motherwell elk ranch…
Getting better all the time
Dear HCN, As a long-time reader of HCN, I must say that your paper just keeps on getting better all the time. The last two issues were, in my opinion, great! Not to say all of them aren’t, these just seemed to appeal to me on a different level. Keep on doing what you do…
Ranchers offer hospitality
In Park County, Colo., ranchers who want to maintain their traditional land uses are saying “no, thank you” to housing developers. Instead, they’re welcoming tourists. Seven years ago, several ranchers and county officials formed the South Park Heritage Area Board. The board, along with six partner organizations, aims to protect ranchers with conservation easements, and…
For the love of spoons
What does frilly Victorian flatware have to do with Navajo silversmithing? More than you might imagine. In her new book, Navajo Spoons, Cindra Kline uncovers the unlikely convergence of Victorian America’s obsession for commemorative spoons, love of tourism, and the “classic period” of Navajo silversmithing. In the late 1800s, when the railroad reached the West,…
Saving tired tires
Ernest Cordova is “burning rubber” to come up with new ways to put old tires to use. His family-owned business, Cordova and Sons of Cuba, N.M., collects and recycles used tires to make bales for landscaping and building projects. Americans discard 270 million tires each year, says the Department of Environmental Quality, a huge burden…
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest is Mary Sojourner’s timely and occasionally quirky reckoning of loss and resilience. Throughout these 50 vignettes, some new, some previously published, the Flagstaff, Ariz., author and High Country News contributor weaves personal stories into a compelling history of her hometown’s growing pains. Bonelight’s intimate musings on environmental…
Wire Song sticks in your mind
Mark Todd’s often lyrical poems are about the reality of the work, the moments of recognition, and even the reveries of an everyday, outdoor life on a ranch. As such, they may have an innate appeal to those of us who recognize both the romance and the tough reality of a life in those parts…
Salmon poison
Ten years after Pacific salmon were first given federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, the fish are still swimming in pesticide-laced water, and the Environmental Protection Agency is ignoring the problem, says a report recently issued by the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides and the Washington Toxics Coalition. Besides directly killing the fish,…
Evicted terns get new habitat
OREGON Caspian terns, much maligned for feasting on declining salmon runs on the Columbia River, just got a wing up. Displaced by development along the Pacific Coast, the world’s largest tern colony settled several years ago on an island composed of dredging material disposed of by the Army Corps of Engineers. There, near the mouth…
Charter forests and the Valles Caldera don’t mix
Dear HCN, While there’s no question that U.S. Forest Service management and decision making could use some progressive reform, the Bush administration’s proposal to establish “charter forests” takes it in the wrong direction (HCN, 3/18/02: Can ‘charter forests’ remake an agency?). Putting the future of our public national forests in the hands of any narrow…
Water threat inspires a rare alliance
Proposed power plants could draw down aWashington/Idaho aquifer
‘You start over new’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Dean Swager moved his dairy farm from Southern California’s Chino Valley to Idaho’s Magic Valley in October of 2000. Dean Swager: “My father started in the dairy business in 1943 in the Bellflower area (in Southern California). He moved several times in that area…
Habitat protection takes a critical hit
Developers’ lawsuits force government to revise critical-habitat designations
‘The odors were beyond description’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Until recently, Sena McKnight lived in the middle of several dairy farms outside Twin Falls, Idaho. Sena McKnight: “We moved here six years ago, and at the time there was not much development. Two years ago, Hank Hafliger’s dairy started up, a mile to…
‘Big for the sake of big is not good’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Bill Stoltzfus owns a small registered Holstein dairy in Buhl, Idaho. He moved to the Magic Valley from Pennsylvania in 1992. Bill Stoltzfus: “(We have) about 85 milk cows. Everybody has a name and they are all individuals. A few of them are actually…
Heard around the West
Here’s some good news: So many people turned out to work for free at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that the Games will turn a profit. That’s a rare event, reports the Wall Street Journal, and it’s all due to the “kindness and good cheer” of 20,000 volunteers. They took on jobs as…
The oldest living thing is a quiet survivor
The oldest living thing in the world is hard to find, and soon I’m lost. I drive out a rutted dirt road south of Barstow, Calif., in search of “King Clone,” a creosote bush identified as the oldest living thing on Earth. Said to be 11,700 years old, that makes it centuries older than the…
Dear Friends
Mixing our media Centuries from now, when historians dig through HCN’s fossil record, they may discover that this week’s cover story was a metamorphic moment in the paper’s evolution into a multimedia endeavor. The genesis for the story was a recent board meeting, where board member, rancher and Idaho state senator Brad Little told staff…
Developers push revisionist history
In March 2000, the people of Flagstaff, Ariz., won a big one. Development of a treasured crater and wetland known as Dry Lake into a gated, high-end golf-course subdivision was stopped dead. This is especially significant because the property was private and already zoned for a planned community. The four-year battle was complicated, including a…