For nearly a century, the Imperial Valley’s wastewater has kept the Salton Sea alive. Now, the push to make California more watertight may threaten this wildlife haven – and Imperial’s agricultural economy. Also in this issue: The San Juan Basin, on the New Mexico-Colorado border, has long been an oil and gas hotspot. It’s about to get hotter: A new BLM management plan could add nearly 10,000 new wells over the next 20 years.
The Latest Bounce
In Wyoming, the Bureau of Land Management is reconsidering its approval of 5,100 coalbed methane leases in the Powder River Basin (HCN, 5/13/02:Land board says, ‘Look before you lease’). The second look follows a federal review board’s ruling earlier this year that the BLM failed to adequately consider the environmental impacts of three other methane…
Carroll’s nonsensical diatribe
Dear HCN, High Country News disappointed readers of Writers on the Range last month by printing the nonsensical diatribe of Frank Carroll (“Logging is Beginning to Look a Little Better,” Jackson Hole Guide, 7/31/02). He blames the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity, and “their actions over the last two decades” for the recent…
Toxic fish taint tribal diet
Seafaring salmon are struggling against extinction, but they might be safer than some of their neighbors in the Columbia River. During a recent study, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission found that Columbia River fish – especially species like mountain whitefish and white sturgeon, which spend their entire lives in…
Fire story was propaganda
Dear HCN, Normally informative and refreshing, the paper stepped in a hole with “Anatomy of Fire” as a cover article (HCN, 7/8/02:The anatomy of FIRE). As a wildland firefighter and Forest Service employee, I had hoped for the arrival of some scientific (“anatomy” made me think we were really going to get into it) exploration,…
Traveling dunes
It is the largest dune complex in North America, spreading across 1,000 square miles, from Southern California to Mexico. It’s also the locale of the 32,240-acre North Algodones Dunes Wilderness area, where rare species of plants and animals thrive in the basins and flats of the dunescape (HCN, 12/18/00:Feds fight chaos in a desert playground).…
Rough riding
More than mere annoyances, tearing up trails or disturbing the peace, all-terrain vehicles are deadly, according to a report published last month by the Consumer Federation of America, Bluewater Network and the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. The ATV Safety Crisis Report says that ATV accidents have injured more than 111,000 people in the last…
A cow of a time
There’ll be some verbal sparring, rangeland management tips, literary musing and maybe a little bird-watching at this year’s annual RangeNet conference, “Bovines or Biodiversity: The National Campaign to End Abusive Public Lands Ranching.” The three-day-long program in Boise, Idaho, includes talks by Jon Marvel of the Western Watersheds Project * which is sponsoring the conference…
Yes, I’m gonna eat that!
After visiting the Fertile Crescent, where he eats “local” food for the first time, Lebanese-American writer Gary Paul Nabhan returns to the U.S. determined to do the same at his Tucson home. To most of us, that would have meant growing a larger garden and buying a lamb or cow from a neighbor. But Nabhan,…
Learn about everything
Learn about everything from fueling your car with vegetable oil to how Aspen, Colo., manages its “alternative building” at the Fourth Annual Sustainable Communities Symposium, Sept. 20-22 in Crested Butte, Colo. The conference kicks off with words from Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (HCN, 7/6/98:Defining a scientific movement), and features workshops…
With golden cottonwoods
With golden cottonwoods and monsoon-raised waters, fall is a great time for a boat trip down the San Juan River. So Canyonlands Field Institute, working with the national Elderhostel organization, will leave Bluff, Utah, Oct. 5, for a seven-day trip, exploring Ancestral Puebloan sites and the geology and watershed of the river. The trip is…
High Plains Films
High Plains Films, creator of such documentary gems as the prairie dog classic, Varmints, is screening its latest film This is Nowhere at the Temecula Valley International Film Festival in Temecula, Calif. The film investigates the philosophies and motivation of RV enthusiasts who like to camp out in Wal-Mart parking lots. The piece also explores…
The BLM stabs at a tired land
Bush’s push for oil and gas development touches down on the San Juan Basin
Some see economic upside in loss of farm water
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CALEXICO, Calif. – Jose Valles may not know it just yet, but he’s on the cusp of what could be a radically different Imperial Valley economy. Valles, a field worker for 14 of his 32 years, is learning English and training to become a…
Oh, the things you see
Oh, the things you see when the water drops. Right in front of the Nature Center in Pueblo, Colo., ancient cars lurked semi-submerged and jutting up from the Arkansas River, reports the Rocky Mountain News. Thanks to record low flows, a dozen volunteers were able to yank out a 1950s-era Cadillac convertible and a Depression-era…
Drought unearths a water dinosaur
Colorado’s Front Range reaches for a share of the Colorado River
Museum collections hit the roof
‘Curation crisis’ could stall construction projects on public lands
Working among the West’s newcomers
It’s well past midnight on the first night of my new job, and I’m looking out the window of a Ford van heading north on I-25, radio tuned to Radio Romantica, the undisputed slicked-back pompadour of Denver radio stations. We speed through the city and sprawl of the Front Range in these wee hours, just…
Island Hoping
Island hoping In Arizona and New Mexico, a unique complex of 27 mountain ranges encompasses vast stretches of desert scrub, grasslands and oak woodlands, and is home to more than 75 species of reptiles. Called the Sky Islands (HCN, 4/26/99:Can science heal the land?), the landscape inspired Aldo Leopold to write that ” … these…
The Royal Squeeze
For nearly a century, the Imperial Valley’s wastewater has kept the Salton Sea alive. Now, the push to make California more watertight may threaten this wildlife haven – and Imperial’s agricultural economy.
A modest forest proposal for President Bush
President Bush just whistled through southern Oregon for a quick look at our catastrophic wildfires and a high-profile policy address at a county fairgrounds. He repeatedly told a cheering crowd that he’s for “common sense” forest management to stem “endless litigation.” His boldness inspires me to come right out and say it publicly: I, too,…
Balancing act
Balancing Act The cover story in this issue is the first of a two-part series about a topic that High Country News has been covering for a long time: California water. More specifically, it’s a look at the Golden State, post-Bruce Babbitt – the Clinton-era Interior secretary who negotiated massive water agreements in California and…
The big show with braids
The success of his film Smoke Signals offered Native American writer Sherman Alexie an entree into the world of Hollywood. It was a short sojourn. Alexie’s interest in busting stereotypes ran headlong into the film industry’s weird conservatism, which favors target-marketing over story line and big-name stars over talent, casting Filipino actor Lou Diamond Phillips…
A legend of the land
A legend of the land He’s been described by writer John McPhee as the “grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology,” and by longtime friend and HCN founder Tom Bell as a man you meet “once in a lifetime.” Born in Riverton, Wyo., in 1913, and raised in the rich landscape that became his life’s…
Sherman Alexie in his own words
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “The big show with braids.” On Hollywood: “Hollywood is the most liberal community in the history of the world. And yet the way they conduct their business is Machiavellian. Donald Trump and the Enron executives would fit…