When my friend Kevin passed through my home state of South Dakota on a cross-country road trip a few years back, I did the decent thing as a host and took him to see Mount Rushmore. Why pass the ninth or tenth wonder of the world and not at least stop by? Still, it’s one […]
Josh Garrett-Davis
Posted inWotr
The Far East yearns for the Wild West
When my friend Kevin passed through South Dakota on a cross-country road trip a few years back, I did the decent thing as a host and took him to see Mount Rushmore. Why pass by the ninth or tenth wonder of the world and not at least stop by? Still, it’s one of those things […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
The Greening of the Plains
A conservation movement is stirring on the Great Plains, but farmers are stuck with a stark reality: It pays to plow up virgin ground
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
You can’t plant a prairie
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “The Greening of the Plains.” Once the sod has been busted, prairie restoration becomes extremely difficult, to say the least. “I always say that you can’t plant a prairie,” says Jim Stubbendieck, a grasslands ecologist and the director of the Center for Great Plains […]
Posted inApril 12, 2004: The One-Party West
Jetboats stir up the Frank
IDAHO A new Forest Service management plan for the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness could increase jetboat traffic, and would allow airplanes continued access to four controversial landing strips. Jetboats and airstrips normally aren’t allowed in wilderness areas, but the 1980 act that established “the Frank” allowed those uses to continue there. […]
Posted inWotr
Looking for the curve on the Great Plains
I grew up in South Dakota, but spent my summers in Portland, Ore., with my mom. As an adolescent, I enjoyed how my city experience pushed me ahead of the curve when I got back home for school. I had my classmates beat by at least a year on the overalls-with-one-strap thing. It wasn’t all […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2003: Being Green in the Land of the Saints
Whose thousand words?
Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, is not another coffee-table gallery of black-and-white mountain vistas or solemn American Indian portraits. Rather, Martha Sandweiss’ book looks at how the new art of photography shaped the nation’s view of the West in the 19th century. Photos are not the accurate historical records they appear to […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2003: Riding the middle path
Gas wells wash out habitat
The sheer volume of water that coalbed methane wells pour into streams could wipe out up to 30 aquatic species in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. James Gore, an environmental scientist, presented these dire projections in November at the International Petroleum Environmental Conference in Houston, Texas. Each of the basin’s 15,000 wells […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2003: Riding the middle path
Getting high in class
Taking off from the tiny airport in Glenwood Springs, Colo., with four high school students buckled into his Cessna’s back seats, Bruce Gordon interprets the panorama below: A plaid pattern of golf courses and cul-de-sacs abuts roadless mountains. From the vantage of 2,000 feet, Gordon hopes the students will see the contrast between the developed […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
State struggling to keep up with CBM
Pollution regulations for coalbed methane wells in Wyoming are severely under-enforced, a state task force says. “Basically, there’s one full-time (inspector) covering all coalbed methane activity (in Wyoming),” says Todd Parfitt, who represented the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on the task force. The department’s lone field inspector monitors 3,924 permitted discharge points from […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Logging faces new pollution controls
A recent federal court ruling and a new California law could both curtail stream pollution by the timber industry. On Oct. 12, outgoing Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that allows regional water quality boards to veto logging plans if they would damage streams classified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as “impaired due to […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Park expansion threatened
A ranch that promised to be an important addition to Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills is now for sale on the open market. The 5,555-acre Casey Ranch would increase the park’s land base by 20 percent, and add an 85-year-old homestead and a “buffalo jump” — a cliff from which American Indian […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Activists raise a stink over outhouse
In the latest skirmish over a long-disputed dirt road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Elko county-rights activists are fuming over the Forest Service’s decision to clean a remote outhouse. The county and the Forest Service have clashed since 1995, when the agency closed a 1.5-mile stretch of South Canyon Road after most of it was […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Bee kind, please redesign
If you dread mowing the lawn, maybe you should just give it up altogether next year. Native pollinator insects — bees, butterflies and others — are declining across the nation because of land-management practices that range from vast single-crop farm fields to manicured urban lawns. This is very bad news, because despite their tiny size, […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
A bright spot for illegal workers
About a half-million undocumented immigrant farmworkers may earn legal residency under a bill introduced in Congress in September. Unlike a host of similar efforts in the past, this bill appears likely to pass. “This is very historic,” says Will Hart, a spokesman for Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, R, who co-sponsored the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Gas drilling blamed for smog
Why would Oklahoma City, a town of 500,000 people, have higher levels of some smog-forming hydrocarbons than famously hazy metropolises like Houston, Chicago and New York? A group of atmospheric scientists from the University of California, Irvine collected hundreds of air samples across a 1,000-mile-wide area to find out. Their conclusions, released in the Oct. […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
National monument back under attack
In southern Utah, local officials are escalating their fight against the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On Aug. 25, Kane and Garfield County commissioners and two state legislators sent a letter listing their grievances with the monument to Utah State Bureau of Land Management Director Sally Wisely and national BLM Director Kathleen Clarke, among others. The […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Dear Friends
THE WRITE STUFF The season’s beginning to change here in Paonia, and with crisper days we’ve also got fresh editorial blood for the fall. Hailing from tropical Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, new HCN intern Pua Mench moved to Hawaii’s “polar” opposite to attend Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where the temperatures dipped to minus-40 degrees. Eventually, she […]