The next time you drink a Coke, take a second to consider that you’re suckling from the teat of evil. The culprit is not, despite what you’ve been taught to think, a soft-drink-peddling Fortune 500 company, but agriculture itself. And Richard Manning goes after it with a vengeance in his book Against the Grain: How […]
Matt Jenkins
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Hidden Waters resurfaces
These days, Charles Bowden is known as a grizzled, pistol-packing scout of the Southwest’s dark side, a man who chronicles the lives and deaths of the border’s most infamous drug runners. A quarter century ago, however, Bowden wrote an unpretentious book, Killing the Hidden Waters, that was equal parts ethnography, mysticism, hydrology and thermodynamics. That […]
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
Follow-up
President Bush’s proposal to offer work visas to undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has opened a window of opportunity, and many are rushing to take advantage of it (HCN, 2/2/04: Immigration reform from Washington, DC). The Border Patrol says that the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border had declined over the last four years, […]
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
Dear Friends
New Interns Zach Smith arrived in Paonia just in time to escape the blistering summer heat of Santa Fe, N.M., where he wrote for the Santa Fe Reporter and volunteered for the Audubon Society, teaching elementary school kids the basics of geology and birding. A Denver native who has lived in six states and studied […]
Posted inMay 10, 2004: Shooting Spree
Follow-up
Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative — a group of ranchers, environmentalists and off-road vehicle users — has unveiled a wilderness proposal for the Owyhee Canyonlands (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the middle path). The plan would protect 511,000 acres, including 40,000 acres that would be cow-free. U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, hopes to introduce a bill in early June […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Follow-up
The Duwamish Indians have had their land confiscated by the United States government and then by the city of Seattle (which is named after a Duwamish chief), and their status as a federally-recognized tribe rescinded by the Bush administration, but the tribe is determined to keep fighting (HCN, 6/10/02: Duwamish? Duwamish who?). The 560-member tribe […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Making rivers work
The problem with books about Western water history is that — being books about how we’ve dammed, diverted and even reversed the flow of rivers all over the West — they’re full of bad ideas. Every once in awhile, though, somebody dares to offer some better ideas for the future. Sandra Postel and Brian Richter […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
The other bottom line
One of the Bush administration’s trademarks is its absolute determination to run government like a business. Economic efficiency is job number one, and government is being ruthlessly pared down — and shopped out — in the pursuit of that goal. It’s increasingly obvious that the strategy has gotten us into deep trouble in Iraq, where […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Dear Friends
Visitors A rite of winter here is climbing out of bed to tune in to the morning avalanche report, which is usually delivered with aplomb by Knox Williams, the head of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. We were pleasantly surprised when Williams and Vince Matthews, the director of the Colorado Geological Survey, showed up on […]
Posted inApril 26, 2004: Outsourced
Green investor Hal Brill: Bringing the Money Home
PAONIA, COLORADO — In a house stuffed with green-building books, astrologic calendars and a world-spanning array of wooden drums, a basement office is one of the few signs that Hal Brill’s life has headed squarely into the world of high finance and asset management. “I’m definitely one of the more unlikely candidates to be an […]
Posted inMarch 29, 2004: Who Will Take Over the Ranch?
Dear friends
An important anniversary On Sept. 3, the Wilderness Act will turn 40 years old — an anniversary that comes as the Bush administration’s shift away from wildlands protection has highlighted just how political wilderness can be. And that’s exactly what the Wallace Stegner Center’s Ninth Annual Symposium is all about. “Wilderness: Preserving Nature in a […]
Posted inMarch 15, 2004: The New Water Czars
A tempered victory
For once, it seems that the West’s Indian tribes stand to win big. Armed with a century-old legal doctrine which holds that Indians’ water rights supersede those of practically everyone else, tribes are claiming their place at the top of the Western water rights hierarchy. In this issue’s feature story, Daniel Kraker writes about the […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2004: The Last Open Range
Postscript to a water war
Nearly a decade after an attempted water grab in California’s Imperial Valley, the saga takes a strange new twist
Posted inFebruary 16, 2004: Courting Disaster
Park Service wilderness in disarray
Departing wilderness boss blasts the agency
Posted inFebruary 2, 2004: Mending the Nets
Dear Friends
COLORADO INTERNS Colorado native and high-tech refugee Jodi Peterson has decided to write about her passion, the beautiful but threatened American West. After 15 years of penning online help and users’ guides for Hewlett-Packard, she has taken a sabbatical to become an intern at HCN. Now, Jodi looks forward to the freedom of writing without […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Wilderness activists look on as the Bush administration gives oil and gas drillers first crack at the West’s last wild lands
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Energy bill would pry open public lands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Two decades of hard work, plowed under.” The energy bill, which is currently stalled in Congress but likely to be resurrected early this year, would put major emphasis on public-lands energy development: It creates the Office of Federal Energy Project Coordination within the White […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Proposed wilderness on the auction block
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Two decades of hard work, plowed under.” The following areas, which are proposed by citizens for wilderness protection, will be up for grabs during the BLM’s January/February 2004 lease sale. WIA = wilderness inventory area CWP = citizens’ wilderness proposal New Mexico (Jan. 21) […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2003: Being Green in the Land of the Saints
Big development gets bought out
California has agreed to buy the site of one of the most controversial housing projects ever proposed in the state — and to preserve the land as open space. Since 1986, a series of home builders has tried to develop the 3,000-acre Ahmanson Ranch, north of Los Angeles on the Ventura County line. But the […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2003: Being Green in the Land of the Saints
A near-miss for California’s clean-air rules
California’s newest clean-air law narrowly escaped an attempt to shoot it down in the U.S. Congress. Faced with the worst air pollution in the nation, the state has led the way in enacting tough air-quality regulations. But although California has made progress in combating auto emissions, pollution from small engines like lawnmowers and weed whackers […]