After a decade and a half without reasonable or effective
leadership,Arizona has become the West’s most incompetently run
state, its politics propelled almost entirely by growth. This
year’s gubernatorial election offers a chance for change.
Also in this issue: The
1994 Northwest Forest Plan was seen as a watershed move to balance
logging with environmental protection. But logging companies say
the plan’s controversial species-management provision has put too
much land off-limits, and now the Bush administration is moving to
relax the rules.
The politics of growth
Note: this is one of several feature stories in this issue about the 2002 election. You think you have a lot to decide this November? Slip into the ballot booth with Arizona’s voters. Then you can vote for a ballot initiative that would require the state police to hand out marijuana for free. You can…
Research, Lake Mead style
It’s a research laboratory, it’s an environmental education center, it’s É another houseboat on Lake Mead in Nevada. “Forever Earth” was dedicated at the lake in early October. The floating laboratory is a specially designed, 70-foot luxury houseboat, furnished with water and air quality monitoring equipment and a myriad of other scientific instruments. A research…
Native Waters
The era of the Indian land treaty ended more than a century ago, but now the West is in the midst of another treaty era – this time focused on water. So writes Daniel McCool, a longtime scholar of federal Indian policy and the head of the University of Utah’s American West Center, in his…
Have you ever seen the cranes?
The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge straddles the Rio Grande south of Socorro, N.M., and serves as the wintering grounds for thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese. Witness this rare spectacle at the 15th annual Festival of the Cranes, a six-day event organized by the Friends of the Bosque del Apache that coincides…
Around the West, the hot races to watch
Note: this is one of several feature stories in this issue about the 2002 election. ARIZONA Hispanics could stage a Democratic comeback Hispanics, who now make up one-fourth of Arizona’s population, may take half of the state’s eight seats in the U.S. House of Representatives for the Democrats. Raœl Grijalva is virtually guaranteed the seat…
Utahns could kill radioactive dump
Note: this is one of several feature stories in this issue about the 2002 election. Writer Chip Ward once called Tooele County, Utah, “the most extensive environmental sacrifice zone in the nation.” Covering a swath of the surreal West Desert nearly the size of Massachusetts, the county is home to a bombing range, chemical-weapons incinerator,…
Wildlife Service bows to home builders
The California red-legged frog, star of Mark Twain’s, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, is bouncing between good news and bad. Once the most abundant frog in California, the species declined in the mid-1800s, when Gold Rush miners devoured it for protein. By 1996, the frog had disappeared from over 70 percent of its…
The Latest Bounce
Proving that open space isn’t only for white suburbanites, Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., has pushed her San Gabriel River Watersheds Study Act through the House (HCN, 8/5/02: L.A.’s rivers get some respect). Solis’ bill, which would study the creation of an urban National Park in her North Los Angeles district, could make it to the…
What were the governors thinking?
Dear HCN, Thank you for your open and honest article by Ray Ring regarding Montana’s governor as a poor choice to lead the West (HCN, 8/5/02). Whatever could the Western Governors’ Association be thinking of to select Gov. Martz as their leader? Ray has written a timely, straightforward commentary that should be a wake-up call…
Don’t beat up Bush, get personal
Dear HCN, Jeff Golden’s “Modest forest proposal for President Bush” (HCN, 9/16/02: A modest forest proposal), while sound in its reasoning, has one fatal flaw: People like George Bush could care less about common sense in regard to public-lands management, Forest Service fire suppression, and forest health policies and practices. The only thing people like…
Indians are more than “special interest” group
Dear HCN, In “This land holds a story the church won’t tell,” (HCN, 9/30/02: The Royal Squeeze) your editor, Ray Ring, writes that “historic preservation advocates and environmental groups … fear the giveaway (that is, the sale of 940 publicly owned acres of the Mormon Trail to the Mormon Church) would set a precedent for…
Save water, drain Lake Powell
Dear HCN, The article on water problems in the Imperial Valley (HCN, 9/16/02: The Royal Squeeze) was interesting, informative, and in my view, a good example of HCN‘s dedication to balanced reporting, which is especially difficult with hot-button issues like water, salmon and prairie dogs. I was struck by one of the figures stated in…
Peer pressure
Violence against National Park Service law enforcement employees – including shootings and assaults – increased 940 percent in 2001. And just this past August, Mexican fugitives killed a park ranger in Organ Pipe National Monument in Arizona. These alarming statistics are included in a report released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a private nonprofit…
The coalbed methane super-prime
Coalbed methane wells are quickly spreading across the West, with the BLM projecting 80,000 to be developed by 2010 (HCN, 9/16/02: Backlash). So the Rocky Mountain Mineral Foundation, a cooperative project of law schools, bar associations and industry associations, is holding a two-day conference in Denver entitled “Regulation and Development of Coalbed Methane.” The program…
Montanans may take back their dams
Initiative would undo some of the damage done by electricity deregulation
Lassoing the West’s polital winds
The HCN staff and board are just back from our fall board meeting in Seattle. In the spirit of eating dessert first, we’ll start with the high point of the meeting, a talk from Tim Egan, national correspondent for The New York Times and author of books such as Lasso the Wind: Away to the…
New Mexico Greens lose steam
Democrats seem united behind Richardson for Governor
He sees the society behind the scenery
I first met Ed Marston when I was a wet-behind-the-ears, wannabe journalist starting an internship at the funky little newspaper called High Country News. It was January 1984, less than a year after the paper had moved to Paonia, Colo., from its birthplace in Lander, Wyo. I arrived fresh from the nation’s capital, where I…
Forest protection under the knife
Industry pushed Bush administration to revise Northwest Forest Plan
State’s big nuke waste fight takes a hit
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, “Utahns could kill radioactive dump.” Like Nevada in its fight to stop the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain (HCN, 8/5/02), Utah has adopted a by-any-means-necessary approach to block storage of high-level nuclear waste within…
Heard Around the West
Utah has been making financial news, though the news is dismal. According to a report from the American Bankruptcy Institute, a resident of Utah is more likely to go bankrupt than a resident of any other state. About one out of every 35 Utah households filed for bankruptcy last year, says The Associated Press, while…
Albuquerque is dragged into Rio Grande fight
Mayor says judge stole water from the silvery minnow
Dead fish clog the low-flowing Klamath
Interior Department denies responsibility for dead salmon and steelhead
What’s in a name? Just ask Dwayne or Trucklene
I was at a country-and-western dance bar. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Y’all wanna dance?” My suitor was a short man whose eyes failed to focus. His aftershave was a heady mixture of Jack Daniels and Old Spice. He wore his cowboy hat absurdly high, as if he were smuggling eggs under it.…
Conversation with a cowboy conservationist
Kick a sagebrush and you’ll find one jackrabbit and two cowboy poets, or so the saying goes nowadays. In the last 20 years, the rhymes that were once shared around a campfire under a lonesome moon have attracted a national spotlight. There are anthologies of cowboy poetry, coffeehouse performances, and an annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering…
A crossed heritage in the modern West
Imagine picking up your paper some morning and reading a story like this: “President George W. Bush called on Americans to support the administration in protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploration. The president also called for designating more wilderness areas, since ‘the destructive fires of last summer all began in areas that…
Democrats kick back
Note: this front-page editor’s note introduces five related articles: “Around the West, the hot races to watch,” “Montanans may take back their dams,” “New Mexico Green lose steam,” “Utahns could kill radioactive dump,” and “State’s big nuke waste fight takes a hit.” This November will be an “off-year” election, but reject the implication that nothing…