It’s hard to see rural opposition to public-land protection as anything more than a front on the great American culture war (HCN, 4/26/10). To hear, again, the opposition of San Juan County, Utah, commissioners to new national monuments or to wilderness designations confounds economic rationality. National parks and monuments are big drivers of economic activity […]
Tom Ribe
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
Keep power generation close to home
Regarding your Aug. 8 article, “Clearing a path for power,” as a veteran of a successful 11-year battle to stop a 345 KV power line from being built across the Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico, I know how complicated and time-consuming stopping these power lines can be. Sadly, most large new power […]
Posted inJune 13, 2005: Owning a Piece of Paradise
Conservatives compromised by corporations
Bush conservatives believe America must find a free-market energy future. They also believe in “states’ rights” to refuse federal mandates and chart their own course. Yet these same conservatives are now pushing a new era of nuclear power for the U.S., one that would be subsidized by the $8 billion (and counting) federal waste-disposal facility […]
Posted inJune 23, 2003: 'Sound science' goes sour
Let the fires burn
Ray Ring’s HCN article on fire is one of the best pieces on the topic I’ve read anywhere (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle). By promoting an understanding that today’s superfires result from a combination of human insults to the environment and natural climate cycles enhanced by global warming, we can begin to look at the […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
National groups were latecomers
Dear HCN, In his opinion piece on the demise of the New World Mine outside Yellowstone (HCN, 9/2/96), Rocky Barker writes: “Just as important was the fact that the grass roots led the fight. If national environmental groups had taken the lead as they did in the Northwest’s ancient forest campaign, my guess is that […]
Posted inOctober 3, 1994: Subdividing the desert: Should there be a vote?
No rush to log
Dear HCN: Your coverage of the push for salvage logging in the wake of an intense fire season was both timely and insightful (HCN, 9/19/94). Kathie Durbin’s interview with Tom Graham, a rehabilitation worker on the Tyee Creek Fire, exposed one of the central fallacies of public forestry. Mr. Graham suggested that the fire had […]