Paul Larmer

Last week, as I finished pulling together the essays on Lewis and Clark for this issue of the paper, a press release crossed my desk from the National Council for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. “Not Semantics: Commemorate vs. Celebrate,” read the headline. The release quoted council vice president Roberta Conner, an enrolled member of […]

The sky still held plenty of light at 9:15 p.m., as I pulled off Interstate 90 and headed north on Montana State Highway 89. My destination was a Motel 6, 55 miles away, where two dozen high school teachers were holed up, in between sessions of a weeklong summer field program sponsored by the Montana […]

Two issues back, we invited readers to toss in their “two cents” about HCN’s coverage of the Bush administration’s environmental policies. We got about a million bucks in reply. Readers from all over the West wrote in to tell it like it is. One writer announced that he would not renew his subscription because of […]

A few years ago, my hometown got a taste of the rancor that often comes with growth and development in the West these days. A local businessman wanted to build a subdivision on some hay pastures outside Paonia’s city limits, in an area the town’s comprehensive plan had identified as important for its agricultural value. […]

I took a stroll through our lower pasture the other evening and discovered that April showers had turned it into a riotous weed patch. It wasn’t what my wife and I had planned three years ago, when we bought the badly overgrazed property. Back then, we took the advice of our local cooperative extension agent […]

About a decade ago, I was one of several observers of the Western political scene who latched on to a rather simple theory: With the demise of traditional industries, such as mining and logging, the West — the fastest growing and most beautiful region in the country — would soon attract scads of environmentally and […]

Few issues over the years have stirred up as much dust in the pages of High Country News as the debate over ranching and livestock grazing. “Cattle ruin the land,” shouts one side. “Anti-grazing environmentalists commit cultural genocide against ranchers,” shouts the other. Former HCN publisher Ed Marston decided to look beyond the tiresome hyperbole […]

I remember the first big story I covered for High Country News. It was back in the spring of 1994, and my headline shouted, “The salmon win one: Judge tells agencies to obey the law.” The story focused on federal Judge Malcolm Marsh’s landmark ruling, in which he told the National Marine Fisheries Service that […]

I’ve always gotten a chuckle out of the bumper sticker that says, “Earth First! We’ll mine the other planets later.” But now that President George W. Bush has decided that America should expand its reach to the moon and Mars, my laugh is becoming a groan. Oh, I know that Bush’s plans for a permanent […]

It’s easy enough to get lost in one of the West’s wilderness areas. Just hike off the trail for a half hour, close your eyes and spin around a few times, and you may have no idea where you parked your car. A similar disorientation afflicts anyone trying to navigate the complex thicket of wilderness […]

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” —John Donne, 1623 More than one historian has noted how undeserved is the West’s reputation for rugged, go-it-alone individualism. It took tremendous cooperation for American Indian tribes, early explorers and pioneers to survive in […]

Whenever I feel the need for a strong dose of opinion, I drive up the street to Reedy’s Service Station. There, any time between 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., I’ll find three generations of the Reedy family and their friends, drinking coffee and swapping stories. They’re always happy to tell you what they think about […]

When Ray Rasker, director of the Sonoran Institute’s SocioEconomics program, traveled to Montana’s Flathead Valley recently to lead a training workshop for local environmentalists, he was pleasantly surprised. “I’d always remembered that the environmental community up there was very divided,” says Rasker, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., “but we had 50 enviros all in the […]

The American West has always been central to this country’s nuclear weapons program. Our vast and arid landscape is where the first nuclear bomb was developed and tested in 1945. This is where the uranium used in nuclear bombs has been mined, where the components of much of our nuclear arsenal have been designed and […]

Talk about turning over public resources — timber, minerals, land — to the cold hand of capitalism, and environmentalists get pretty uncomfortable. If nothing else, California’s electricity crisis has taught us to be wary of corporations with the power to manipulate the supply of essential resources. So it’s not surprising that when a private company […]