Water efficiency has long been touted as a silver bullet for the West?s water problems, but too much efficiency can cause problems of its own, especially in the fragile Colorado River Delta.
Also in this issue: In Idaho and Wyoming, old eminent domain laws allow private entities to condemn landowners? property ? as Peter and Judy Riede discovered when J.R. Simplot Co. announced plans to expand its phosphate mine and build a road across their ranch.
Two weeks in the West
As more people play in the snow, skirmishes heat up.
Condemned
Out on the range, old eminent domain laws erode private property rights
Red Feather builds homes and communities
NAME Red Feather Development Group HOMETOWN Bozeman, Montana FOUNDED IN 1994 FOUNDED BY Rob Young NOTED FOR Building straw-bale homes on Indian reservations across the West. In recent years, Red Feather has focused on Hopiland in Arizona, and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. FAVORITE FOOD Pop-Tarts. Legend has it that the two-dimensional pastries fueled…
Energy illusions
A new report seems to show that more land is off-limits to energy exploration, but appearances can be deceiving
The West’s public lands are open for business
The 2003 EPCA report considered five Western regions. The 2006 report looked at 11, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and southern Florida. The difference in scope skews comparison of the reports, especially considering that ANWR’s 19 million acres are (still) off-limits to drilling. But a look at the five Western regions included in both…
Fiddling while oil burns
In a society that reportedly has a per capita resource consumption 25 times larger than the global average, it is not surprising that the gritty piece by Hannah Nordhaus has more than a grain of truth. To some degree, however, Nordhaus’ cozy interviews with the various perpetrators obscure the fact that pots and kettles come…
New leaders, new future
I was very disappointed in the “Confessions of a Methane Floozy” article. The writer almost sounds like an energy industry hack. Her limited viewpoint and knowledge sound like another propaganda tool from the Bush administration: “You use the energy so accept the consequences.” I’m not sure where the numbers came from regarding the estimated percentage…
Forest management in 3-D
Pepper Trail’s opinion column on salvage logging misses the mark, casting forest management in a one-dimensional, ecological way. Rather, forest management and salvage logging must be driven by sustainability. We live in a three-dimensional world — ecological, social and economic. It’s not a matter of balancing these, for balance implies they are separate. They are…
Something’s rotten in the state of user fees
I am shocked when I read letters like Linda Knowlton’s, supporting recreation user fees. The greatest period of public-land recreation-related infrastructure development in the United States occurred during and just after the Great Depression, when the nation was at its poorest. Now that we have experienced huge growth in the GDP and in the number…
Enviros: Lose the ‘tude
A story in “Heard around the West” disappointed me. As an avid hunter, environmentalist and military officer, I found that the piece, which derisively described the buffoonery of “hunters” in connection with an anti-poaching operation in a Western state, demonstrated one of the fundamental weaknesses of the increasingly ineffective environmental movement. Attitudes of many environmentalists…
A Western historian and a Western hero
Hal Rothman is dying. You can hear it in his voice — what’s left of it. The historian of the New West, defender of Las Vegas as the poster child for what the region will become as it continues to boom, fights a losing battle. Every day, says Lauralee Rothman, there’s something else her husband…
Don’t part out our national parks
When I worked as a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone National Park some years ago, I came to believe that magnificent places like this should remain free from commercial exploitation. Yellowstone and our other national parks belong to all of us as a public commons to be protected for future generations. Park rangers tell visitors to…
Notes from a place of risk and hope
Writer Kevin Holdsworth copped Wyoming’s tourist slogan “Big Wonderful” to describe a place of both risk and hope, a beautiful, battered landscape rich in myth and fact. He presents it through the complementary perspectives of a mountain climber, family man and friend, describing both Utah, the state of his birth, and Wyoming, the home of…
A tale of shame and glory in the Southwest
Hampton Sides’ latest book, Blood and Thunder, is an expansive treatise on an expansive subject: Manifest Destiny and the opening of the desert Southwest. Sides uses Kit Carson — with his distinctive combination of chivalry, heroism, cruelty and unflinching complicity with inhumane policies — as a sort of thread to weave together the history of…
Against the current
When I moved to Phoenix in the early 1990s, my first home was an apartment in a complex with a courtyard dominated by what seemed to be a football-field’s worth of vigorously green lawn. That lawn was no anomaly. The neighborhood I lived in over the next four years had a Leave It to Beaver…
Winter Prayer
Snowshoeing alone at night in the forest, a woman thinks – and prays – about the friends she loves, and the families they worry about.
Heard around the West
WASHINGTON At the edge of his Soap Lake, Wash., backyard, Rick Froebe has lined up seven toilets and some old bathtubs and water heaters — all to annoy the golfers whose proximity makes his four dogs bark, which, in turn, annoys his neighbors. Froebe has even placed “three scarecrow-like dummies” on the toilets to look…
The Efficiency Paradox
Why water conservation along the Colorado River — a much-vaunted silver bullet for the West’s coming era of shortage — could have devastating environmental costs
Dear Friends
WINTER BOARD MEETING High Country News board members and staff traveled to Berkeley in late January to do some work, enjoy a little sunshine, and — with help from some old friends — put on a show for our Bay Area readers, present and future. Our idea of a show is, of course, fairly serious:…