I was pushed out of New York 30 years ago. I couldn’t take the city as it was, and I couldn’t change to meet New York on its terms. We moved to Colorado, where a mountain loomed in our backyard. There were challenges, of course. A tiny coal-mining town is alien to someone raised on […]
Ed Marston
Posted inWotr
A lesson in aridity from Wallace Stegner
The wisest man and best writer the West has produced was born this week 94 years ago. He died in 1993, but left us a massive inheritance, including Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Angle of Repose, Wolf Willow and From the Uneasy Chair. You can celebrate his Feb. 18 birthday by reading one of these books […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2003: The death of the Super Hopper
The son of immigrants has a change of heart
It is an urban legend, but I believe it. A traveling salesman wrote to a hotel, complaining that he’d been bitten by bedbugs. He got a lengthy letter of apology back, saying that bedbugs had never been seen on the premises or even within blocks of the hotel. Inside the envelope, he also found a […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 2003: A breath of fresh air
THE GREAT RANCHING DEBATE
Two recently released books, Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West and Ranching West of the 100th Meridian, offer very different visions of ranching’s place in the West. In a special feature, High Country News’ Ed Marston and Forest Guardians executive director John Horning, review the books and reopen the debate on the […]
Posted inWotr
The bedbug letter, as it applies to overpopulation
It is an urban legend, but I believe it. A travelling salesman complained to a hotel that he’d been bitten by bedbugs. He got a lengthy apology back saying that bedbugs had never been seen on the premises or even within blocks of the hotel. Inside the envelope he also found a note: “Send the […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Ranching conference secrets revealed!
Ever wonder what transpires at a ranch and reform conference, but lacked the chance to see for yourself? Now, you can: “Ranching West of the 100th Meridian,” a landmark conference held at Colorado State University, is available on four 50-minute videos. For three days in spring 2000, conferees chewed the cud about ranching in the […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Cow-free crowd ignores science, sprawl
The West is tiny when pitted against our imagining of it. We imagined the buffalo would never be extinguished and the beaver would never be trapped out. We imagined big trees would always stand over the next ridge. But in a short time, the mountain men and buffalo hunters and loggers rolled over this alleged […]
Posted inWotr
Why I’m thankful this Thanksgiving
The things I am thankful for this week are still there: family, health, work, life in the rural West. But I have to scratch beneath world events to find them. I can no longer live as if my well-being depended only on me. In fairness, I never fully lived as if what was immediately around […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2002: Shadow Creatures
Farewell, Blazin’ Ben
On July 11, 1932, “Blazin’ Ben” Eastman appeared on the cover of Time. A few weeks later, the holder of eight world track records (a medley of quarter- and half-mile distances) got more publicity when he won a silver Olympic medal in the 400-meter event at Los Angeles. He got a bit more publicity when […]
Posted inWotr
Retiring to work
Every day I’d leave high school about noon, take the subway to 23rd Street, run down to the basement cafeteria for a nutritious company meal, and then sort and deliver mail. My favorite route was the 40th to 30th floors, up there with the higher-flying Manhattan pigeons. The job was my transition to the adult […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2002: The Royal Squeeze
Yes, I’m gonna eat that!
After visiting the Fertile Crescent, where he eats “local” food for the first time, Lebanese-American writer Gary Paul Nabhan returns to the U.S. determined to do the same at his Tucson home. To most of us, that would have meant growing a larger garden and buying a lamb or cow from a neighbor. But Nabhan, […]
Posted inJuly 8, 2002: The anatomy of fire
Human wildness on the range
Frank Clifford has no trouble holding two clashing ideas in mind. The first is his love of wild country, the second is his love of the wild people most of us see as the enemy of wild country. A gold miner’s son who is now an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Clifford comes […]
Posted inJune 24, 2002: The buzz business
Restoring the West, goat by goat
In the early 1990s, Leslie Barclay bought a ranch a half-hour south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was from back East, and like many newcomers to the West with some money and energy, she was romantic about the region and the land. She understood that it wasn’t in great shape, but she thought it […]
Posted inMay 27, 2002: Wolf at the door
Dear Friends
It’s gut check time for a conservative Western Colorado county The county that has been home to High Country News for the last 19 years has reached a decisive moment. For the last few decades, residents of 1,149-square-mile Delta County have chosen a live-and-let-live approach to land use. Outside of the towns, we have no […]
Posted inApril 29, 2002: The Great Salt Lake Mystery
Wildlife Saloon
In arid areas where streams run only during the spring or during storms, deer, elk and bighorn sheep can have a hard time finding a drink. Now, an artificial water hole called the “Wildlife Saloon” lets animals drink their fill. On the surface, all you can see is a small, mostly buried stock tank. The […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
Will the real Gifford Pinchot please stand up
Char Miller has written a book intended to rescue Forest Service founding chief Gifford Pinchot from the battering he has taken over the flooding of Northern California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. In almost all accounts of that fight, Sierra Club founder John Muir is the defender of the beautiful valley while Pinchot wants to flood it […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
The Natural West
Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond Professor of History at the University of Montana, in Missoula, lives on a 25-acre ranchette some miles outside that small city, in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains. To walk from those foothills to the nearby Forest Service wilderness areas, which he does often with Wily, a canine hybrid that […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
The West can govern itself
Democrat Daniel Kemmis has been the minority leader and the speaker of the Montana House of Representatives. He has been mayor of the university town of Missoula. He is an environmentalist. Yet in This Sovereign Land, Kemmis, now head of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, argues that the national government must transfer power […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
A new vision for the BLM
Two conservation groups have teamed up on a report intended to shift the Bureau of Land Management away from its long-term emphasis on natural-resource extraction and toward conservation of the public lands. This reasonable and readable 74-page report by the National Wildlife Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council sets out a vision for the BLM’s […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Economics with a heart, but no soul
In 1996, Thomas Michael Power wrote Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, an economic study of the Interior West, in which everything that happened was for the good. If the West were not the best of all worlds, it was as good as life would get on the coasts. We had half the money, but twice […]