Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Reuben Scolnik is a longtime Death Valley National Park volunteer: “In order to accomplish their mission, (the Park Service) is slowly making it less interesting for the average person to visit the park. As I look at it, I don’t think it’s as interesting […]
Michelle Nijhuis
Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing editor of HCN and the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Follow @nijhuism.
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
‘By and large, they’re heroes’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Dick Martin is the superintendent of Death Valley National Park: “In my mind, (rangers) are heroes. Once in a while they have to tell someone to do something they don’t want to hear, but, by and large, they’re heroes. They respond to people in […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
So much land, so little money
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When the Mojave National Preserve was created by the Desert Protection Act in 1994, its enemies in Congress hit it where it hurts (HCN, 4/14/97). In 1996, California Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis led a successful effort to reduce the preserve’s annual budget to a […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
‘It didn’t need to be saved’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Janice Allen is a member of the Death Valley Advisory Commission. Since the 1860s, her family has grazed cattle on lands that are now within Death Valley National Park: “To me, it’s tremendously sad that lots of local people won’t even go (to the […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
‘We were created to serve all’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Scot McElveen is the chief ranger at Death Valley National Park: “It’s somewhat unrealistic to say we’re going to move land from more human-oriented uses to (management emphasizing) a stricter group of laws, but we’re not going to give you any staff to make […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
No go for a gold mine
Despite its reputation, the 1872 Mining Law may no longer be a friend of the mining industry. On March 26, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture denied the plan of operations for a proposed open-pit gold mine in north-central Washington (HCN, 8/31/98), saying it failed to meet the requirements of the century-old […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Charting the course of the San Pedro
In the hot, dry grasslands of southeastern Arizona, the San Pedro River is an oasis. Unlike many other desert rivers, the shallow San Pedro is free-flowing, and its banks are soil – not concrete. Cottonwood and willow forests line the northward-flowing river, from its origins in Sonora, Mexico, to its confluence with the Gila River, […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Just go away
-So what’s the American Dream for the people out here?” I asked. “To be left alone,” Baker replied. “Just to be left alone?” I asked. “But that’s not possible, is it?” “Nope,” Baker said. “How do they react when they find it’s not possible?” I asked. “They get really mad,” and (she) broke up laughing. […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Deciphering the ditches
It is widely acknowledged that conventional approaches to economic development in the rural West, based on mineral extraction, industrial relocation, and capital-intensive tourism, have met with dismal results. Jobs may be created, but the benefits are inequitably distributed; growth may or may not occur, but poverty and underdevelopment persist, and in the process, the community […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
The Wayward West
Missing: more than 600 boxes of documents from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in southern Idaho (HCN, 9/29/97). Federal scientists studying the effects of the laboratory’s underground radioactive storage facility on downwinders fear the boxes were lost or destroyed by past INEEL employees; they say that at least 60 of the boxes may […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Not such a cold fish
When the Endangered Species Act was signed 25 years ago, one of the first species to gain protection was the humpback chub. The chub, a warm-water fish native to the Colorado River system, has been headed downhill since 1967, when the construction of Glen Canyon Dam near the Arizona-Utah border cooled the downstream section of […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Flagstaff searches for its forests’ future
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It was June of 1996, and temperatures had already cracked the 100-degree mark all over the Southwest. The brief winter rains were a dim memory, the sky was cloudless, and ponderosa pine forests near this northern Arizona town were choked with dry underbrush and spindly trees. Forest Service firefighters geared up for […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘It’s really a sales program’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Henry Carey is the executive director of the Forest Trust, a nonprofit community forestry group based in Santa Fe, N.M.“The Forest Service is trying to get political support for a thinning program, but the fire problem is no more huge than it was 10 […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
‘We need to get this stuff on the table’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Brett KenCairn is the coordinator of the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership. Before joining the Grand Canyon Trust this fall, he was the executive director of the Rogue Institute for Ecology and Economy in Ashland, Ore., and a board member of the Applegate Partnership, a […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Is there a market for tiny trees?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Flagstaff isn’t the first place to try its hand at manipulating forests. One southwestern Colorado county has already learned some hard lessons about restoration’s bottom line. Like the forests around Flagstaff, the ponderosa pine forests in Montezuma County, Colo., show the effects of fire […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
The Wayward West
All those cries of “5.7 Wild!” may have paid off for the Utah Wilderness Coalition. The Bureau of Land Management took a look at the public lands proposed for wilderness status by Utah environmental groups – and, in early February, announced that all 5.7 million acres have wilderness characteristics. “We’re pretty tickled,” says Mike Matz, […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
ELF strikes again
The Earth Liberation Front is keeping busy. On Jan. 16, it claimed responsibility for an arson fire in southern Oregon – its seventh attack in just over two years. On Dec. 27, a fire destroyed the corporate headquarters of U.S. Forest Industries in Medford, Ore. Less than a month later, the Associated Press office in […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
Fees feed volunteers
Years of budget-cutting have taken their toll on the trails and roads of the national parks, and the Park Service is using a windfall from increased user fees to clean up its act. Two million dollars in park user fees have jump-started the Public Land Corps, a program administered by the nonprofit Student Conservation Association. […]
Posted inJanuary 18, 1999: Desert sprawl
Keystone snowmakers get thirsty
Ski resorts are working overtime to beef up the sparse early season snowfall in the Central Rockies, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board thinks snowmakers at the Keystone Ski Area might be working a little too hard. In early December, the Summit County resort pulled more than its share of water out of the nearby […]
Posted inDecember 21, 1998: Grand Canyon Gridlock
Uphill for these Idahoans
Gene Bray and Irene Wright of Meridian, Idaho, stopped by the HCN office just before Election Day with an insiders’ view of Idaho politics. Bray is a board member of the Idaho Watersheds Project, well known in the state for its confrontational anti-grazing billboards. The 900-member group aims to give state grazing allotments a break […]