Radio shock jock John Stokes wants to scare environmentalists away from Montana’s Flathead County, but his bullying tactics have led instead to increased unity among his opponents and quiet conservation progress.
Also in this issue:The Earth Liberation Front takes credit for vandalizing Hummers and SUVs at Southern California car dealerships, and an SUV-owners’ group says environmentalists are to blame.
Fish vs. kids? or kids vs. golf carts?
As an Albuquerque resident of 13 years, I read with interest your story “Truce remains elusive in Rio Grande water fight,” (HCN, 8/4/03: Truce remains elusive in Rio Grande water fight). The story was very good, but one bit of relevant information was not in the story. ALL of Albuquerque’s drinking water comes from wells.…
A little democracy in our water?
Your cover story, “Pipe Dreams,” says water always moves to the big money in the cities (HCN, 8/4/03: Pipe Dreams). So does everything else. It’s the way the system works, but it’s not just. Why is it so difficult for the West to install a democratic water distribution system? Because the country doesn’t have a…
Waiving goodbye to wildlife protection
In your recent issue on oil and gas development in the Rockies (HCN, 8/18/03: Gas crisis puts Rockies in hot seat), you printed an industry group chart which purports to display the onerous “seasonal stipulations” attached to many BLM oil and gas leases, an example (in the industry’s view) of the “restrictions and impediments” hindering…
Dave Brower’s spirit lives!
The article “Invasion of the Rock Jocks” presented a stilted picture of the climbing community’s commitment to environmental protection (HCN, 7/7/03: Invasion of the Rock Jocks). While pointing out the importance of educating young climbers and meeting the challenges of new trends in the sport, the article fails miserably to answer its own questions. Are…
Being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
“It’s not easy being rich” — especially when you’re rich in natural resources. So says a new report from the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explaining why the West is smack-dab in the middle of the nation’s energy fight. The report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy,…
Calendar
The Rocky Mountain Land Institute is holding its 12th Annual Land Use Continuing Education Conference on Oct. 16-17 in Denver. For registration information, call 303-871-6239. Do you enjoy storytelling, sheep and Basque culture? Then get thee to Idaho on Oct. 10-12 for the Trailing of the Sheep Festival. The weekend-long festival ends with a parade…
Yellowstone’s grizzly stalker
Chuck Neal is a retired ecologist whose nickname, “Wild Grizzly Stalker,” says it all: For more than 25 years, Neal has followed grizzlies around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — 28,000 square miles in and around Yellowstone National Park. Eschewing bear spray, bells and just about everything else, he has seen more than 3,000 grizzlies, and…
Follow-up
It isn’t easy being Indian, and it’s even harder being Navajo. A special investigator into the mismanagement of Indian money from oil and gas royalties found that companies paid Anglo landowners 20 times what they paid Navajos when building pipelines across the reservation (HCN, 5/12/03: Missing Interior money: Piles or pennies?). Bureau of Indian Affairs…
Another roadside detraction
Next time you’re cruising the open highway or ambling along a backwoods two-track, be wary of hitchhikers with barbed seedlings and spiky thistles. New studies from the University of California, Davis show that roads significantly promote the spread of invasive weeds. Noxious weeds such as cheatgrass, leafy spurge and knapweed already occupy over 133 million…
Toxic waste looms over village
While a toxic waste heap inches toward a northern New Mexico village, a mining company and the state crawl toward a reclamation plan. In the 1960s, the mining company Molycorp dumped wasterock from an open-pit molybdenum mine, leaving a 1.6 million-cubic-yard toxic pile above the small town of Questa (HCN, 8/28/00: The mine that turned…
Showdown at the Four Corners
Visitors to the Southwest know the Four Corners Monument as a bleak, dusty site that tourists flee once they’ve snapped a photo on the slab where four states come together. But that could all change with a proposed $4 million expansion project. Four years ago, Congress authorized $2 million to build an interpretive center, permanent…
Couple buys state land to block development
When a developer threatened to bid on 1,280 acres of school trust land in the redrock country northeast of Moab, Peter Lawson and Anne Wilson laid out $1.3 million to preserve the mouth of Mary Jane Canyon. “The prospect of having this canyon we love so much have houses run through it was more than…
Hatchery runaways add to concerns about fish farms
Farm-raised Atlantic salmon — already discovered in 12 Puget Sound river systems — have infiltrated another Northwestern stream. In July, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife employees spotted 250 juveniles in Scatter Creek, near Olympia. John Kerwin, a state hatchery official, says the fish came from a Cypress Island Inc. hatchery that produces salmon smolts…
From Washington, D.C., comes a new spoils system
Under the guise of flexibility, the Bush administration is quietly engineering a corporate takeover of government. President Bush has ordered all federal agencies to solicit bids from private corporations to replace 425,000 civil service jobs by the next election. That’s nearly one-quarter of the entire permanent federal workforce. The National Park Service has been one…
The West’s Biggest Bully
Environmentalists in Montana’s Flathead County make quiet progress against a 5,000-watt loudmouth
A shock to the system
When Ray Rasker, director of the Sonoran Institute’s SocioEconomics program, traveled to Montana’s Flathead Valley recently to lead a training workshop for local environmentalists, he was pleasantly surprised. “I’d always remembered that the environmental community up there was very divided,” says Rasker, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., “but we had 50 enviros all in the…
Dear Friends
IN FROM THE HEAT When Nancy LaPlaca first became a subscriber to High Country News, she sat in her apartment in Tempe, Ariz., and wondered where Paonia was. Now, 16 years later, she knows exactly where it is: Nancy moved here in July to become HCN’s marketing associate. No stranger to environmental causes, Nancy has…
Delta beast rears its head
The U.S. Department of Interior may be ready to resurrect the Yuma Desalting Plant
The Devil’s Highway was a road to God’s Country
Changing the number won’t change the fortunes of small towns strung across the dusty Southwest … where the future offers little more hope than dry thunderclouds promise rain.
Sin City keeps its fringes wild
Las Vegans rally in an unprecedented fight to preserve open space
Heard Around the West
THE NEW WEST To the question, “What would Jesus drive?” originally asked by the Evangelical Environmental Network, one group has an easy answer: a large SUV, of course. “Most people think it’s a ridiculous question, and that’s the approach we’ve taken toward our own ads,” says a spokesman for the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of…
Burning one for the road
Ecoterrorists strike in Southern California, and an SUV owners’ group lashes out at environmentalists
Conservationists work on cooperation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The West’s Biggest Bully.” KALISPELL, Mont. — “In the past, almost everything you read about (environmentalists) was about lawsuits, appeals and conflict,” says Ben Long. “We’re trying to reframe the debate around what the community agrees on, rather than what splits us up.” Long,…