Small towns once complained that children were their biggest export. “You can’t keep them home once they’ve seen bright lights,” residents would lament as their towns shrank. People in small towns still complain – it’s their nature. But today they complain because not only their kids, but everyone else’s kids, are moving to their dimly […]
Ed Marston
Posted inDecember 25, 1995: Utah hearings misfire
The delegation’s bill gets shellacked
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Utah hearings misfire. In a Christmas gift to Utah environmentalists, Rep. James V. Hansen, R-Utah, unceremoniously yanked the Utah delegation’s wilderness bill off the House floor Dec. 14. Hansen said he pulled the bill because there wasn’t enough time to properly debate it. […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Thou shalt not build a dam
After a several-week delay, the Roman Catholic bishop of Pueblo, Colo., has spoken, and not to the liking of backers of the Animas-La Plata water project. In early November, a nine-person citizens’ group, the Human Development Commission of the Pueblo Diocese, blasted the project proposed for southern Colorado as wasteful and destructive (HCN, 11/27/95). Outraged […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Heard Around the West
America’s national parks – its crown jewels – now include a lot of costume jewelry, says a Nov. 20 Forbes magazine article on the National Park Service. The system is so bloated with second-rate parks here, there and everywhere, there is little money to maintain such real treasures as Yosemite, Glacier or Grand Canyon. Writer […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Dam project called a “bungle’ and a “porker’
A committee of the Catholic Diocese of Pueblo, Colo., surprised everyone, including Pueblo Bishop Arthur Tafoya, by blasting the proposed Animas-La Plata water project as an “environmental, economic and social bungle.” The Human Development Commission of the diocese also asked, “Who is responsible for the continuing agitation to support a project so badly conceived? We […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Heard Around the West
Rep. James V. Hansen of Utah spent 24 happy years – he didn’t know how happy – in the U.S. Congress as a minority member. Then, a year ago, Republicans won the House, and Hansen became chairman of a subcommittee. With the appearance of power came trouble. His bill to sell Forest Service mountainsides to […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Heard around the West
When you buy Nikes, you get more than shoes. You become part of the wise-use movement, or perhaps of your local militia, judging by a Nike ad printed in the November Outside and elsewhere. The ad leads with: “Boundaries are set by dictators. Created to regulate cattle grazing and employ tollbooth attendants. With no regard […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Dear Friends
A near visitor He was probably looking for the High Country News office. Where else would a bear go in Paonia? But it got distracted by its stomach and began lunching on discarded produce at neighboring Don’s Market on Oct. 14. The bear temporarily eluded the town’s entire police and public works departments – all […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
Heard Around the West
Jim Peacock, president of the Utah Petroleum Association, was apparently kidnapped on his way to a meeting with state officials in September. An impostor was sent on in his place. It is the only way to explain why the head of Utah’s free-market petroleum industry, in free-market Utah, would be asking the state for welfare […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Life on the edge
LIFE ON THE EDGE The joke is that California went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. A new book demonstrates otherwise. Life on the Edge: A Guide to California’s Endangered Natural Resources is a rarity: a work of coffee-table beauty and quality that tells a wonderful, although heartbreaking, story. It is a story […]
Posted inOctober 16, 1995: In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
Heard Around The West
Paul Rauber of the Sierra Club wrote to say “I am a great fan of “Heard Around the West.” There is, however, something that drives me crazy about it: your habit of putting random phrases into boldface… Otherwise, I love you dearly.” We hear you, Paul. — Patricia A. McColm of California’s Bay Area likes […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 1995: The West's fisheries spin out of control
Heard around the West
The national forests are lands of many uses, but not all uses are created equal. Every once in a while, one use trumps another. On the Helena National Forest recently, 22 Herefords drank too deeply from an arsenic-laced tailings pond at an abandoned mine near Helena, Mont. Fearful lest the dead cows poison bears and […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
How to get rural people to stand proud and tall
It usually takes something substantial – a dam or the earth’s 5 billion people – to annoy David Brower. But just credit him with having founded the Sierra Club and watch the scowl form. The annoyance is part vanity. The Sierra Club is now 103; Brower is a youthful 83. His reaction is also part […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Heard around the West
Everyone agrees that environmentalism has been hit out of the ballpark by “Wise Users’ and Republicans. But no one knew why we’d whiffed until Glen Martin of the San Francisco Chronicle did an analysis. Deconstructing his article (it used to be called reading between the lines) shows that Greens spend too much time hiking and […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 1995: I came, I saw, I wrote a guidebook
Dear readers
High Country News is put together every two weeks in much the way a Jackson Pollock-type painting is put together. And that is the approach we have taken to the ceremony marking the paper’s 25 years in the West: impromptu, short on formal presentations and long on directness. We’re thinking of Saturday, Sept. 9, as […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Tom Bell: outraged by the outrageous
If I were a consultant to the West’s energy and mineral companies and ranchers, and to their politicians and bureaucrats, I would give them one piece of advice: “Don’t get crosswise with Tom Bell. Early on in your ‘process’ tell Tom your plans. If he reacts with a strong no, change them. It will save […]
Posted inAugust 21, 1995: HCN's founder fights his last fight, yet again
Heard around the West
Like many Americans, Evelyn and Don Irvine enjoy camping out on public land. Evening after evening after evening, they sit by their small trailer on the banks of the Green River in Utah, watching the water and rafters flow by. Thus far, they’ve been camped on the Green for 20 years, ever since a doctor […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
The spoken word
THE SPOKEN WORD If you haven’t heard Page Stegner, the son of Wallace Stegner, read the long story, “Genesis,” from Wolf Willow, you are in for a wonderful three and one-half hours. (Or seven hours, if, like me, you listen twice.) The same is true of another father-son combination, as John Maclean reads Norman Maclean’s […]
Posted inAugust 7, 1995: Fighting fires, and indignities
Tilley was a Westerner
TILLEY WAS A WESTERNER In the United States, weather moves from west to east, while culture generally travels from east to west. But in the case of The New Yorker, culture moved with the weather. The New Yorker was created by a Westerner – Harold Ross, a Coloradan from Aspen, when Aspen was a mining […]
Posted inJuly 24, 1995: Making a mountain into a starbase
A progressive bureaucrat signs off
Daniel P. Beard, who resigns as commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation effective Sept. 1, snorted when asked the question he’d already heard dozens of times: “Why are you really resigning?” But the long-time reader of High Country News loosened up, and then talked for a half-hour, when publisher Ed Marston noted: “You’ve been one […]