Yes, we are in the post-industrial age, and the production of autos, houses, airliners and other “goods’ can be taken for granted. But Sandra Postel in Pillar of Sand warns that there is no such thing as a “post-agricultural age.” Because irrigated agriculture provides 40 percent of the globe’s food today, and because in the […]
Ed Marston
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Dear Friends
Rendezvous The mountain men had their rendezvous; those who care about the West’s public lands have their High Country News potluck. If you have been to one, you know that while the food is good, the conversation is better. And no one will make a speech or ask you for money. The next potluck will […]
Posted inAugust 30, 1999: Who's stopping sprawl?
In the new West, we’re all tourists
In Wyoming, they say, “We don’t want to become like Jackson.” In Colorado, “We don’t want to become like Aspen.” In Utah, more fervently, “We don’t want to become another Moab.” Yet these same people never say, “I don’t want to be a Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt.” Hal K. Rothman, who is a history […]
Posted inAugust 30, 1999: Who's stopping sprawl?
Dear Friends
Colorful gathering of journalists Assistant editor Greg Hanscom headed to Seattle last month for the Unity Conference, a gathering of 6,000 Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian American journalists. Power-suited journalists packed the Seattle convention center for four days to hear panel discussions, prize-winning authors and four presidential candidates expound on the importance of media […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
Dear Friends
Now hear this The half-hour Radio High Country News is expanding. Starting this month, the interview program that takes the West as its beat can be heard in Carbondale, Colo., on KDNK, Mondays at 4:30 p.m.; in Taos, N.M., and Alamosa, Colo., on KRZA, Fridays at 7 p.m.; and in Telluride, Colo., on KOTO, Tuesdays […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
Tom Chapman: A small-town boy who made good
PAONIA, Colo. – Many Westerners see Tom Chapman as a scourge who extracts millions from taxpayers by threatening to develop private land within national parks and wilderness areas. To me, he is just a local Paonia boy who made good. Starting in the 1980s with nothing more than a real estate broker’s license, an ability […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
The new faces of the West
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature stories. Now that small towns are disappearing from America, we visit Disney theme parks designed to remind us of them. Or we crowd into the first small town we can find and set about changing it into the suburb we came from. This is the last of […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Dear Friends
Count those cows Writer Perri Knize of Missoula was intrigued by a pair of numbers in HCN’s April 27, 1998, issue. According to the article, “livestock” across the West had declined over the last 100 years from 20 million to 2 million. Perri, working on an article on grazing for the July 1999 Atlantic, wanted […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Seeking justice for all on the Colorado Plateau
Charles Wilkinson’s “Fire on the Plateau …” is a tribute to the land and people of the Colorado Plateau, especially the tribes
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Can poverty protect the last, best place?
All who care about the non-metropolitan West should be grateful to Montanans. Within the generous confines of that 145,000 square-mile state, they are asking, in the closing days of the 20th century, whether the good life can be disconnected from the economy. They are testing whether a place that in 50 years has plunged from […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
The Hidden West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Implicit in the late Wallace Stegner’s phrase, “a society to match the scenery,” is the belief that the West is built from the bottom up, and that the health and vitality of the land and its wildlife will be determined by the health and […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Dear Friends
Welcome, Keri New intern Keri Watson arrived at High Country News on Paonia’s first sunny day in what seemed like weeks. She’d just spent time shepherding her German in-laws around Salt Lake City, the city where she was born and where she worked as a camera operator at KUED-TV while also doing research for a […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Dear Friends
30 for $30 In 1992, High Country News raised the price of a personal subscription from $24 a year to $28. Since then, we have held the price line. Now we find ourselves in the position of the rancher who was losing $50 on every calf he sold. He decided to lick his problem by […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Dear Friends
Report from the trash patrol A Saturday morning spent cleaning up two miles of State Highway 133 created a variety of reactions among the participants. Some of us came away satisfied. All of us came away hot and dirty. But Betsy Offermann came away determined: “The next time I see someone litter, I’m going to […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
A history of how a grassroots rebellion won a water war
I made the mistake of reading Peter Carrels’ Uphill Against Water not long after I’d read David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, his account of the fall of the Soviet Union, and at times had trouble remembering whether I was in South Dakota or in the old U.S.S.R. Of course, in South Dakota, political opponents were not […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Working the land back to health
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s two feature stories. The two major stories here open long after crushing environmental defeats occurred. The magnificent ponderosa pine forests around Flagstaff, Ariz., were heavily logged during the past century, and the cut-over land has now sprouted into fire-prone thickets. To the west and north, the once-healthy grasslands […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Dear friends
Goodbye, Linda For a decade, Associate Publisher Linda Bacigalupi – often called Linda B, for obvious reasons – has been the administrative heart of High Country News, ensuring that we operated in ways that were orderly, efficient and, most of all, humane. Nonprofits tend to chew up their staffs, and Linda did her best to […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Dear friends
A very good year The board of directors of the High Country Foundation met in St. George, Utah, on Jan. 23 to review 1998’s circulation and financial results and to consider the 1999 budget proposed by the staff. The past year was better than expected. HCN’s circulation grew by 4 percent, ending the year at […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
A research resource to drown in
Water in the West: Challenge for the Next Century has received a lot of press, including a lengthy description in this paper (HCN, 6/22/98). Much less attention has been paid to the 22 background studies that go with the central report. Not only is the price right (free), but it is almost guaranteed that, whatever […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
Dear friends
Congratulations Congratulations to Ed and Martha Quillen, who will mark the fifth anniversary of their monthly magazine, Colorado Central, on Feb. 13, at Daylight Donuts, at Third and F in downtown Salida. Everyone who has written for the magazine in the last year or so, the Quillens say, is invited. They also say that less […]