Earlier this month, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals approved a controversial permit for uranium mining operations at sites in Church Rock, New Mexico. The operation includes a site associated with the largest release of liquid radioactive waste in United States History — a catastrophe which continues, a generation later, to negatively impact the lives […]
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Forged on a Rough Frontier
One thing is certain: High Country News founder Tom Bell wasn’t afraid of poking a finger in someone’s chest. He openly criticized Wyoming’s ranchers and industry and the politicians that looked after them. The state’s pro-development governor, Stanley K. Hathaway, was a frequent target, as were a pair of Casper-area ranchers who shot and poisoned […]
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Location, location, location
Last week, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter announced a preliminary agreement between the state, Xcel Energy, and some of the region’s traditional environmental groups over a plan to reduce air pollution along the Front Range by retrofitting, repowering (with natural gas), and even possibility retiring a number of urban coal-fired power plants. Although we have to […]
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The Front Line of Climate Justice
Last December in Copenhagen, corporate heads of state failed to make the necessary agreements to save us from ourselves by agreeing to cap greenhouse gas emissions. If we learned anything from the recent national healthcare reform debate, it’s that we can’t count on the U.S. Congress either given the tens of millions of dollars and […]
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The Crusade Continues
“Dear Mr. Bell: “I travel so much that I’m always behind in my reading. So you can well have imagined my surprise when I found out you were going to fold the paper. Well, Hell man, I don’t always agree with you, but for God’s sake let’s keep the paper going for awhile yet. Enclosed […]
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Tackling environmental justice on the Front Range
Two years ago I relocated to Denver and inherited from a friend what might possibly be the best job in the world – the directorship of the University of Denver’s Environmental Law Clinic. In the two decades before my arrival, the clinic had established an impeccable reputation for its work fighting to protect endangered species […]
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What Tom Bell Had to Say
Passionate, feisty, courageous, “just another nutty prophet of doom” — all have been used to describe Tom Bell, the Wyoming rancher and wildlife biologist who founded High Country News in 1970. High Country News’ first years were tumultuous as Bell struggled to keep it alive. Twice, he threw away the paste-up sheets for the next […]
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Saying “yes” to climate justice
It’s Sunday morning and I’m on my way home from the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Ore., the annual convergence of lefty lawyers, scientists, and policy advocates on the frontlines of the fight to preserve the earth. As usual, the conference afforded a tremendous array of opportunities to learn and be inspired; every […]
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The First Scrappy Years
“Americans are great people. But I think the readers of High Country News are the greatest,” wrote Tom Bell in the March 5, 1971, issue. He was responding to the letters and donations that readers and subscribers had sent following a grim assessment of the paper’s future. Click for larger version Bell had been at […]
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Environmental justice, one neighborhood at a time
With the exception of vocal critics who deny the science behind climate change, most of the world is painfully aware that our industrial activities over recent decades have raised the earth’s average temperature. Our warming atmosphere is putting at risk life as we know it, prompting the people of the world to action. But long-standing […]
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Environmental harmony
“Environmental justice” is a pleasant euphemism for racism. Just as we couched the fight for racial equality during the 1960s comfortably under the guise of civil rights, today we continue to deny our culpability in a bad situation with semantics. In 1988 when a Harlem neighborhood was targeted for the ill-advised location of a sewage […]
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“Messy and unstructured, relentless and global”
Environmental justice law is unlike most other areas of the law. It may not even be amenable to definition as a single, discrete field of practice. Instead, environmental justice lawyering is as close as we come to modern-day alchemy: lawyers work in alliance with communities to summon forth justice from a shifting patchwork of unfavorable […]
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Wilderness environmentalism
The environmental movement’s most singular and stunning achievement is the introduction into human history of an awareness of and care for other animals and ecosystems beyond human needs. The refusal to reduce the earth to a storehouse of resources, the insistence on the value of whales beyond meat and redwoods beyond lumber, the love of […]
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Tom Bell, Spaghetti Westerns and HCN
“Once upon a time” is a better start to a bedtime story than it is to a retrospective of 40 years of High Country News. But have you ever watched the old movie “Once Upon a Time in the West?” It’s Italian director Sergio Leone’s best spaghetti western, a three hour epic about the struggle […]
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Environmental justice: A vision for change
“The environment for us is where we live, work and play.” Jeanne Gauna, the SouthWest Organizing Project’s co-founder and longtime co-director, crystallized the inspiration and sentiment of the environmental justice movement with this simple yet profound idea. In addition to transforming and reinvigorating the environmental, labor, indigenous and civil rights movements, environmental justice established a […]
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EPA, Black Caucus announce environmental justice tour
“All environmental protection, like all politics, is quite local,” Environmental Protection Agency director Lisa Jackson told her staff this month. “Very few people come to environmental protection because they wake up one morning and read a book about it. They come to environmental protection because it touches them — the lack of that protection, a […]
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They say it’s your birthday
Two years ago I celebrated my 40th birthday. I wasn’t thrilled about turning 40 (who is?) and couldn’t convince myself that a celebratory shindig was a good idea (all that attention). But in her quiet way, a close friend convinced me it needed to happen. On an April evening, friends filled the upstairs of the […]