Loggers and environmental activists are determined to restore Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, with or without the help of the Forest Service.
Who can capture the Forest Service?
As an impressionable teenager who had fallen in love with the wild landscapes of the American West, I was shocked to discover that the vast public lands were not all that wild, nor even fully public. That was particularly true of the deserts, grasslands and forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau…
Mixed greens
Ever since the scraggly mountain-roaming John Muir joined other Californians to found the Sierra Club in 1892, that state has led the country in protecting the environment. California began regulating pesticides back in the horse-and-buggy era. Beginning in the 1950s, it passed comprehensive laws for air and water quality, regulation of toxic substances, tougher emissions…
Welcome, new interns!
Three new interns have arrived for six months of “journalism boot camp” at our Paonia, Colo., office. (For more on the internship program, see hcn.org/about/internships.) Editorial intern Ariana Brocious is thrilled to be embarking on her first full-time journalism job. Last year, she reported on climate change in Argentina for the Arizona Daily Star. A…
Wild Turkey, gunfire and big pipelines
Aaron Million’s quest to pipe Wyoming water to urban Colorado
The stories we believe
Madewell BrownRick Collignon213 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Unbridled Books, 2009. Madewell Brown is the fourth novel in Rick Collignon’s “Guadalupe” series, which is set in an imaginary village in northern New Mexico. But it reads as a stand-alone, even while spiraling back to explore the fate of a character introduced in Perdido, the second in the series.…
Conservation’s First Lady
“Fancy how I trembled.” That was activist Rosalie Edge’s tongue-in-cheek response to an incident in the 1930s, when an Audubon Society attorney accused her of being a “common scold.” A thorn in the conservation organization’s side for decades, Edge badgered board members and directors for bowing to sportsmen’s influence and ignoring dissenting voices. Although her…
Retooling for the next mission
Some vets think their war was for oil. Now they’re working to help us use less.
A tenderfoot in Taos
An exhausted mother. A lively baby. A compassionate drunkard.
Cultural blight
Plant disease threatens traditions of California tribes.
Let’s get bigger
The article “Let’s Get Small” noted some problems with incentives for distributed generation in California — many of which I experience with my 1.2 kilowatt photovoltaic system (HCN, 6/22 & 7/6/09). Two years ago, I generated $25 more electricity than I used. I lost this “credit” at the end of my one-year net metering period.…
Unintended castor-quences
“Voyage of the dammed” by Kevin Taylor doesn’t mention one of the negative impacts of beaver — their indirect influence on native plants and animals when non-native species are present (HCN, 6/8/09). For example, beavers strongly prefer native cottonwoods over non-native salt cedar (tamarisk) and Russian olive. This selective foraging gives a substantial additional advantage…
Biomass is where it’s at
I have checked your “Alternative Alternative Energy: An HCN Special Report” issue over carefully, twice now, and it appears that my eyes are not deceiving me — you really did ignore the potential contributions of woody biomass (HCN, 6/22 & 7/6/09). This is shortsighted, to say the least.Forest biomass is plentiful, carbon-neutral and essential to…
Wavin’ in Oregon
In your otherwise excellent series of articles on renewable energy in the West, a few gaps were evident (HCN, 6/22 & 7/6/09). Your map on page 16 leaves the impression that Oregon is far behind neighboring states in alternative energy projects (see correction, page 11). In fact, many wind energy sites not noted on the…
Bull riders for Jesus
I wish Craig Childs had attended Cowboy Church during his PBR bull riding experience in Billings (HCN, 5/25/09). He might have had a different perspective in his article concerning the “wild life” of bull riders. They are all not drinkers and carousers as implied in his article. Cowboy Church is organized and attended by many…
Even hard-liners want to experiment in Arizona
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Taking control of the machine.” “We squashed the timber industry and the Forest Service, and dictated the terms of surrender” in the Southwest, says Kieran Suckling, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity. He’s talking about a war that began in the 1980s,…
Taking control of the machine
Environmentalists and timber companies push big experiments in national forests