Scientists are struggling to understand winter in the West: the effects of the unusual weather on water and wildlife, and whether the changes are linked to global warming
Also in this issue: Recently released e-mails show that federal employees falsified information about the safety of the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Troubled — and shallow — waters on the West’s largest river
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “What happened to winter?“ Mountains, it is often said, are the West’s water towers. If snowfall fails to fill the towers, or warm temperatures empty them too early in the year, fish, farmers and other water users face a dry summer. That’s especially true…
Wind farm raises real concerns
The wind farm issue is far less simplistic than Joshua Zaffos would have us believe (HCN, 3/7/05: Easterners tilt at windmills while Westerners joust with a real foe). Yes, there are wealthy people on Nantucket just as there are wealthy people in the West, but they are not the majority. The greater number of people…
Westerns don’t protect their own
The essay on the Eastern wind farm clearly belongs to the Real Westerners vs. Effete Easterners genre (HCN, 3/7/05: Easterners tilt at windmills while Westerners joust with a real foe). The fact that wind power has many positive features does not mean that wind turbines should be sited wherever winds are particularly favorable. Easterners like…
Stereotyping sets us back
Jim Stiles’ stereotyping is nothing less than ignorance in its purest form (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). Mr. Stiles, as a journalist, you should know better. It takes but one person to make a change in the world. One woman chose to ride at the front of the bus,…
Dudes and locals need to work together
I smiled at Jim Stiles’ essay (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). In the late 1950s, my mother ripped my sister and me out of New York City and moved us to Wyoming. My mother was tenacious and proud of her “Western” life, but despite over 30 years of living…
The old urban West speaks out
Perhaps most HCN staff and readers will recognize themselves in Stiles’ essay (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). I did not recognize myself or my neighbors. We are the Old Urban West. I am a fourth-generation Northwesterner living in the urban neighborhood where I was born, a neighborhood as strained…
Moving beyond stereotypes
Kudos to Jim Stiles for his essay on Old and New Westerners (HCN, 3/21/05: A look at the West, in the funhouse mirror). Right on target. For 12 years, I have been fortunate to be a member of a group of Old and New Westerners that has, not easily, gotten mostly beyond the typical attitudes…
Follow-up
The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, plans to investigate allegations that bunk science led to her agency’s claim that hydraulic fracturing poses “little or no threat” to drinking water. “Frac’ing,” a technique pioneered by Halliburton, increases the production of a gas or oil well by injecting it with liquid, which can include…
The artist, her caretaker, and eight years of letters
The initial draw of Maria Chabot — Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949 is its promise of a peek into the artist’s personal life. But the surprise of these collected letters between two women in the 1940s — one of them in northern New Mexico, cleaning out acequias, planting fruit trees and commenting on the “bloodsucker” artists…
No room for democracy on California farms
Remember high school history class, and all that jive about Thomas Jefferson and his dream of a democracy based around small family farms? When it comes to California, you can toss that dream right out the window. So writes Richard Walker in The Conquest of Bread, a sweeping new take on agriculture in California. “The…
Surprise bequest to protect Columbia Gorge
A scrappy conservation group in Portland has received a giant gift. The $4 million windfall for the Friends of the Columbia Gorge came from Norman Yeon, the son of a legendary Oregon timber and real estate baron. Yeon’s father, John Baptiste Yeon, earned $2.50 a day as a logger when he first arrived in Oregon…
The World’s Water 2004-2005: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources
The World’s Water 2004-2005: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources Edited by Peter Gleick 320 pages, softcover $35. Island Press, 2004. The fourth installment of this annual report covers water issues that span the globe. Gleick — president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security — and other water brainiacs contemplate…
Climate model may help farmers know what to grow
What farmer hasn’t wished for a weather-predicting crystal ball? Now, growers in the Yakima Valley have the next best thing: a high-tech climate model that may benefit the entire West. The climate model is adapted from a West-wide model developed by the Department of Energy, which predicts that, over the next 50 years, Western snowpack…
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate Robert Bryce 327 pages, hardcover $26.00. PublicAffairs, 2004 “I’m all for business. I’m all for government. I just don’t want them to be the same thing,” says Robert Bryce, taking on the state of Texas and its enormous political influence over American life, from…
D-Day for dam decommissioning approaches
Preparations have begun to bring down the dam that has withheld water from 14 miles of Fossil Creek in central Arizona for almost a hundred years. In 1908, laborers built Arizona’s first commercial hydroelectric plant, which diverted more than 95 percent of Fossil Creek’s water. The plant, along with a second facility built nearby in…
The Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources
The Western Confluence: A Guide to Governing Natural Resources Matthew McKinney and William Harmon 297 pages, softcover $30, hardcover $60. Island Press, 2004 Authors McKinney and Harmon look at the West’s endless tug-of-wars over water, land use, fire management and wildlife — issues, they say, best resolved through collaboration, negotiation, or consensus. That’s not easy,…
Farmers and ranchers say city is stealing water
Steel pumps and filter towers may soon rise from the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico — and that has a small agricultural community seriously concerned. The growing city of Alamogordo wants to draw water from deep within the Tularosa Basin aquifer. But that water is salty. To make it drinkable, the city plans to…
A mountain of books becomes a library of the land
Names Jeff Lee and Ann Martin Vocations Bookseller and graphic artist Home Base Denver, Colorado Claim to Fame Founders of the Rocky Mountain Land Library She says “This is just Jeff’s kind of project. I go day to day, he has the big vision.” “To really know the West, to be at home here,” says…
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA California’s Highway Patrol sees a lot of silly stuff, like the guy crouched down in an open trunk, gamely trying to hang on to lawn chairs, or the driver in the carpool lane pretending that a life-size doll of “SpongeBob SquarePants” was a passenger. Officer Rob Rusconi says he watched a driver struggle to…
Drought and spring rains portend an explosive summer
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “What happened to winter?“ Where there’s drought, there’s fire, and this year, the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies are bracing for a fierce summer. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, D, whose Department of Ecology declared a statewide drought emergency on March 10, has requested…
What happened to winter?
A bizarre season leaves Westerners wondering what’s next
On the trail of global warming
Weird weather stole the headlines in Western newspapers this winter. We read about a mudslide in the Grand Canyon, Seattle’s jet stream showing up in southern Utah, and the appearance of shorts in Bozeman, Mont., in February. The weather has been downright bizarre, and the media have been there to report every dramatic detail. But…
Dear friends
KIDS THESE DAYS … Nature, with a capital N, is going to hell — or so we’re told. The venerable wilderness warhorse Dave Foreman recently e-mailed around an essay detailing exactly how it’s doing so, and why. Among other culprits, he blames High Country News (too preoccupied with “happy little resource-extraction communities”), The Nature Conservancy…
‘Sound science’ in doubt at Yucca Mountain
E-mails show federal employees circumvented quality assurance procedures
Montana tells the federal government to butt out
No one knows just when the West decided it had had enough of being run from Washington, D.C. The indications that Montanans have had it with federal mandates became evident in the state Legislature this March. Although the capital routinely ignores the opinions of a state like Montana, which boasts fewer than a million people…
A chemical cocktail pollutes Western water
Traces of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, other compounds turn up in streams and wells
Skiing, or wheeling and dealing?
New resorts smell a lot like real estate bonanzas
Death Valley wakes up with a bang
I stood among the multicolored stones of Death Valley, gazing at the greatest wildflower bloom I’ve ever seen — the greatest bloom of a generation. I had driven from my home in Oregon through the night to see this spectacle, and now that I’d arrived, I found I was unprepared for the power of its…