It started over the long Labor Day weekend and went on from dawn to dusk — the constant report of gunfire echoing against the Organ Mountains here in southern New Mexico. Another dove-hunting season had descended upon us, and all lovers of wildlife could do was wait for it to end while so-called hunters blasted […]
Robert Rowley
Posted inWotr
Asarco would take us back to a polluted past
I remember the first time I tasted the air near the Asarco copper smelter in El Paso, Texas. It was 1990, and my wife and I had just moved there from Tucson, Ariz., to start teaching jobs in the English Department at the campus of the University of Texas-El Paso. I soon met two professors […]
Posted inWotr
Why I won’t tell the BLM what I think about Otero Mesa
There’s going to be a decision soon about how much of our publicly owned land the Bureau of Land Management will lease to the oil and gas industry on Otero Mesa in New Mexico, but I don’t think I’ll be among those sending public comments. I’m thinking, instead, about writing a private letter to Linda […]
Posted inWotr
My 40 acres of Eden and the planner’s dilemma
In the 1980s, when I was a college teacher in Prescott, Ariz., I often took my history students down to Cordes Junction to visit Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s urban experiment in the high desert. In class, we were studying the rise of the city and reading Kevin Reilly’s The West and the World, so […]
Posted inWotr
NIMPBY: Not in My Paesano’s Backyard
A recent environmental threat to a small town in southern Italy, and the people’s overwhelming response to it, made me wonder if we Americans have lost our zest for protest. The spontaneous uprising by southern Italians forced the government to reverse a decision that would have designated a rural village as the country’s sole repository […]
Posted inWotr
A letter to a rancher named George Bush
Dear Mr. President: We’re back in an energy boom in parts of the West, and this made me wonder how a rancher like yourself might feel if geologists discovered an enormous pocket of natural gas beneath your spread in Texas. What if the story got out, and the press corps suddenly appeared at your Western […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
A graceful gazelle becomes a pest
The exotic oryx is wearing out its welcome in the Chihuahuan Desert