With all the formerly cool, “undiscovered” small towns now caught up in the New West’s booming real estate frenzy, it’s getting hard to find an affordable place to call home.
Also in this issue: A working group of 23 experts convened by the nonprofit Keystone Center could not reach consensus over how to reform the Endangered Species Act’s critical habitat provisions.
With liberty, justice, and locally produced food for all
“Injustice is part of every meal we eat,” writes Jenny Kurzweil in Fields that Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food. In each chapter, Kurzweil tells the story of an organic farmer, fieldworker or marketer based in the Pacific Northwest, illustrating how injustice might be diminished by purchasing food from local and socially…
The Latest Bounce
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has abandoned an internal investigation into its decision not to regulate hydraulic fracturing (HCN, 12/20/04: Conscientious Objectors). In 2004, the EPA said “frac’ing fluid,” an often-toxic mix of chemicals used in natural gas drilling that can contaminate underground drinking-water supplies, should be exempt from the Clean Water Act. But an…
Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods
Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett 176 pages, softcover: $35. Island Press, 2006. Urban sprawl and congestion: We all know it’s a massive problem. But proven, practical solutions often elude planners and developers. Authors Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett, who teach architecture and landscape architecture, examine several case studies of ecologically…
National Parks and the Woman’s Voice
National Parks and the Woman’s Voice Polly Welts Kaufman 344 pages, softcover: $22.95. University of New Mexico Press, 2006. This updated edition of a decade-old book examines the role of women in the National Park Service, from Yellowstone explorers of the late 1800s to present-day park founders and advocates. Women now fill one-quarter of park…
Activists are not terrorists
Please consider not using the term “eco-terrorist” or “eco-terrorism” (HCN, 2/6/06: The Latest Bounce). Individuals taking direct action often break the law. Sometimes they trespass and disobey lawful orders, and sometimes they destroy private and public property. These are crimes and the perpetrators should be charged, tried, and appropriately punished. In general, the worst crimes…
Terrorism cannot be justified
Terrorism: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons. And that was the intention of the individuals charged by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. I do not…
Good hunting requires wild places
Hoo-Wray for Pat Wray for revealing the far right-wing politics of the NRA (HCN, 1/23/06: What’s the NRA’s beef with roadless areas?). Anymore, the NRA is all about amassing dues-paying members to support the group’s anti-conservation lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. One way it does this is by appealing to the interests and pandering to…
History isn’t black and white
Regarding Mary Stange’s essay on place names, I grow very tired of those who want us to discard our history simply because it isn’t the kind of “Hollywood” pretty they demand it might be (HCN, 2/6/06: Living with the Ghosts of the Indian Wars). It is true that those Army generals of the mid-to-late 19th…
Place names help us remember our past
The recent essay by Mary Stange suggested that Western maps are too filled with place names (like Custer’s) that Native Americans in particular find historically offensive, and that it is long past time to change those names (HCN, 2/6/06: Living with the ghosts of the Indian Wars). But I wonder if there might not be…
Hualapai horror
Regarding your article on the economic development plans of the Hualapai Tribe (HCN, 2/20/06: Tribe brings on the tourists): Let me get this straight. You bring a bunch of porcine asses out from Las Vegas in air-conditioned, global-warming Hummer-Dummers to have lunch at a place called “Guano Point,” and then charge them $25 to use…
At home in the valley
In The San Luis Valley, Susan Tweit takes us on an extraordinary spring journey through a place her heart knows as home. It’s a joy to read her keen observations about wild territory — in the outback, in our hearts — and the many ways it feeds the soul. In the tepee-shaped slice of south…
ESA talks end in stalemate
While major disagreements remain, Pombo claims consensus
Reality Check
Misinformation, spin abound in endangered species debate
Spotted owl or red herring?
Pretty much everyone agrees that logging on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest has declined by 80 percent since its heyday in the mid-1980s. Job losses in the region’s timber sector over the past two decades number in the tens of thousands. But don’t blame the critical habitat rule, or even the Endangered Species Act.…
Resurrecting J. Thomas
The skull of J. Thomas rested in my palm. He was buried in the 1870s and my mother had just dug him up from the old pioneer cemetery that rests on the southern edge of our ranch. It’s a small ranch — 100 acres in northern Colorado, below the foothills — but it houses all…
U.S. Department of Energy elbows in on Clean Water Act
Feds challenge Montana’s efforts to establish pollution controls for coalbed methane
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA San Francisco — which is named after St. Francis, the patron saint of animals — plans to put some of the city’s 120,000 dogs to work. The work isn’t hard, though the yuck factor is impressive: All the dogs have to do is poop, reports The Associated Press. The city’s garbage hauler, Norcal Waste,…
Painting for progress
The call of the wilderness sounded more like a holler to Joan Hoffmann in 1963. At 13, already a headstrong artist and budding environmentalist, she was determined to go backpacking with the Sierra Club. Neither her urban family of Southern California golfers, nor the fact that she had to sew her own sleeping bag, could…
Blowing bubbles
Around the region, real estate offers the latest incarnation of the old boom-and-bust
Is everyone a Realtor?
Realtors are everywhere in the West these days — including the seats of power
Town Shopping
Maintaining karmic balance in the New West’s real estate economy
The next boomtown
Consider this issue’s cover an early April Fools’ prank of sorts. We took inspiration from Outside magazine, the home of the “Top 10 Secret Getaways” that are obviously no longer secret by the time the issue comes off the press. Those headlines are the bane of our cover story’s author, M. John Fayhee, who has…
The trouble with the Endangered Species Act is us
With House approval of his “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act” last September, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., got a step closer to his career goal of eradicating the Endangered Species Act. Pombo, a developer posing as a rancher posing as an advocate of the public good, proclaims that the 32-year-old law is “broken” and a…
Dear friends
WE’VE COME A LONG WAY … Pick up a pre-2003 copy of High Country News, and you might find it hard to believe that you’re looking at the same publication. It was in ’03 that we ditched the black-and-white, pick-it-up-for-a-quarter-at-the-local-diner design that had been the paper’s signature since its founding in 1970. We shrank the…