Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Catron County’s politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt Mark Unverzagt, a doctor in Reserve, N.M., took up Melinda Garcia’s challenge and became key to the formation of Concerned Citizens for Catron County. The group, comprised of some 18 ranchers, local politicians, Forest […]
Lisa Jones
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Heard around the West
At least once a day, High Country News is mistaken for the local High Country Shopper. In the Shopper you can find goats, chain-link fence, slightly used wedding dresses and the like for bargain prices. Depending on your blood sugar level, the headlines for ads in the Shopper can seem anything from commonplace to hallucinatory […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Heard around the West
The West has no shortage of strange juxtapositions: Gold prospectors and mountain bikers, Utah’s tabernacle and Nevada’s casinos, Denver International Airport and airplanes. But a new pair of strange bedfellows has recently sprung up: The Forest Service and Wal-Mart. The federal agency and the retail behemoth are going to spend the summer jointly promoting environmental […]
Posted inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
Heard Around the West
Ah, spring. Tender new buds of May. Raging rivers. Baseball. Senior prom. And, in at least one Western county, an explosion in teen pregnancies. “Going to the prom does not mean that you have to have sex,” Terrie Guthrie of Campbell County, Wyoming’s Planned Approach to Community Health coalition, pointed out to the Associated Press. […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Howdy, neighbor!
As a last resort, Westerners start talking to each other
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Some not-so-easy steps to successful collaboration
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Howdy, neighbor!, about collaboration efforts in the West. Can citizen collaboration solve every environmental conflict? Nope. “This isn’t a magic bullet,” says Gerald Mueller of Missoula, Mont., who has been a mediator since 1988. It is successful under limited circumstances, he says, […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Heard Around the West
A new logic is unfolding in Montana: If too many quality-of-lifers find your state attractive, get really, really unattractive. The much-publicized stakeout of the Freemen and the arrest of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski have helped Montana step off its pedestal as the compulsory destination for those Americans who can lay claim to a laptop computer, […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Heard around the West
In North Dakota, when they say extension agents have contacts in high places, they aren’t talking about the halls of North Dakota State University. They’re talking about heaven. Flood-prone Devils Lake, N.D., has inundated thousands of acres in recent years. When an uncharacteristically warm spell caused an anxiety outbreak among local residents last month, extension […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Heard around the West
Being a senator is a rough job. It takes a good deal of toughing it out, sucking it up, upper-lip stiffening and other-cheek turning. Take Mark Hatfield, the Republican senator from Oregon who recently lobbied to extend the “logging-without-laws” salvage rider: “Seeing the photos (of fallen ancient forest trees) chills my blood,” he said on […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
What does the West need to know?
Note: this article in one of several feature stories in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. In a burst of energy early this century, land-grant universities sent extension agents to America’s rural counties. Their mission: to modernize and civilize those counties by teaching the latest in breeding cows, […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
What is cooperative extension?
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. The West’s extension agents cover some ground: They counsel Colorado wheat farmers whose crops are being nibbled by antelope, broadcast advice […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Taking a stand for New Mexico’s small farmers
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, What does the West need to know?, in a special issue about the West’s land grant universities and their extension programs. Edmund Gomez worked for years on the Dulce, Colo., ranch his great-grandfather homesteaded in 1887. When his family sold the ranch […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Heard around the West
First, a quiz: The West is a land of wide spaces, deep forests and infinite skies. It’s an easy place to lose track of (a) your way; (b) your mail; (c) billions of dollars in Indian trust funds; (d) 24 million acres of public land; (e) salmon; (f) your career prospects; or (g) all of […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
Heard around the West
Greg Leichner of Placitas, N.M., spent 20 years trying to take himself seriously as an artist – a pursuit that bought him so much mental anguish he finally cracked and traded it in for two new aspirations: Starting a newsletter called Citizens For A Poodle-Free Montana and running for president of the United States. He […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Heard around the West
Television has brought its own set of icons into our world: O.J. as hero, O.J. as anti-hero; the Super Bowl as football game, the Super Bowl as cultural landmark. And for the first time this year, the Super Bowl as intergenerational Navajo entertainment. Ernie Manuelito of KTNN, the tribe’s 50,000-watt radio station, provided a play-by-play […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Facts take a beating on the range
A New Mexico State University press release saying part of the controversial Diamond Bar allotment was not overgrazed has critics crying “pseudoscience.” The allotment straddling two wilderness areas has been home to squalls among ranchers, the Forest Service, the university, environmentalists and politicians for years (HCN, 7/24/95). In the wake of persistent disagreements, the Forest […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Critics say an Idaho think tank could be more scholarly
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Two views of forest health at the University of Idaho, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. Controversy comes with the territory in Jay O’Laughlin’s job. He directs the University of Idaho’s Policy Analysis Group, which is charged with explaining natural […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The end of certainty
Western universities learn there is more to forestry than chainsaws
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Environmental paradigm spurs collaborative research
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, The end of certainty, in a special issue about the West’s forestry schools. For many years, the federal government spent more money studying the breeding and production of corn than it did studying forests. Yale Forestry Professor John Gordon speculates this was related to […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Two views of forest health at the University of Idaho
Are the forests sick or well?