If we’re going to limit the coming climate change impacts, we surely need to harness a lot of solar electricity. But proposals from Los Angeles to spread four square miles of solar panels across rural Owens Valley have local people saying: “Whoa! Doesn’t the sun shine in L.A.?” Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power […]
Andy Selters
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Adding a height surcharge
Dear HCN, To add a user-fee note from California: On Mount Shasta, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is charging climbers $15 each to go above 10,000 feet, plus $5 per day to park at backcountry trailheads. The information officer at the ranger station told me that the fees were being put in place to avoid placing […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
At war with a bunch of mice: Confessions of an ex-pacifist
Six years ago I bought a cabin in the mountains of eastern California. Though my fortunes rise and fall, almost every night I’ve thanked the millions of stars that I could look to the high crests and hear birdsong in the Jeffrey pines. A year ago my illusion of haven fell apart. One of my […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
On Stephen Lyons’ knee-jerk reactions
Dear HCN, I was starting to get bored reading another superficial diatribe – Stephen Lyons’ “Have a Kokopelli Day” (HCN, 9/18/95) – against the new colonizers of the West and indigenous imagery. I perked up, however, at the reference to the picture in the Patagonia catalog of Norbu with his donkeys “laden to the hilt, […]