The founders of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity – Robin Silver, Kieran Suckling and Peter Galvin – are uncompromising and obsessive in their goal of preserving endangered species.
101st National Western Mining Conference and Exhibition
The 101st National Western Mining Conference & Exhibition will be held at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo., April 15-18. Speakers include Ronald Cambre, president of Newmont Mining Corp., the largest gold producer in North America, and Rep. Dan Shaefer, R-Colo., who will host a panel discussion on deregulating the electric utility industry. Contact…
Are feedgrounds forever?
Gov. Jim Geringer will join sportsmen, biologists and ranchers to ask: Are Feedgrounds Forever? at the Wyoming Wildlife Federation annual meeting, May 15-17 in Dubois, Wyo. Problems with and alternatives to winter feedgrounds for elk, bighorn sheep and bison will be debated. Contact WWF coordinator Tory Taylor for details at 307/455-2161 or by e-mail: metaylor@wyoming.com.…
North Zone Volunteer and Internship Opportunities Guide
Three Western states need volunteers to help as naturalists, field biologists and wilderness rangers. Public-land agencies in Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska invite high school groups and college students to get hands-on field experience during the 1998 summer season. For a free copy of the North Zone Volunteer and Internship Opportunities Guide, compiled in user-friendly…
Groups sue over microbes
WYOMING, MONTANA Groups sue over microbes Three environmental organizations are suing the National Park Service over plans to allow private “bioprospecting” in Yellowstone National Park. Charging that the park has conducted “closed-door dealing with a part of our national heritage,” the Edmonds Institute of Edmonds, Wash., the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C., and…
High Desert Conference
The 20th annual High Desert Conference, “On the Cusp of Change: Charting a New Century in the High Desert,” is slated for April 30-May 3 at the Malheur Field Station near Burns, Ore. The Oregon Natural Desert Association, Committee for Idaho’s High Desert, and Friends of Nevada Wilderness will host the weekend of field trips,…
The Wayward West
Idaho is not a hotbed of white supremacists and neo-Nazis (HCN, 3/16/98), says Idaho Gov. Phil Batt. His campaign to restore the state’s image has taken him to the slopes of Sun Valley, where the 70-year-old onion farmer told 2,600 members of the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an all-black group, that Idaho has been tarnished…
Locals protest Vail expansion
A long-debated expansion at Colorado’s Vail ski resort gained a go-ahead from the Forest Service, but some locals aren’t so sure they need more ski runs – or the trophy homes they say are sure to follow. Critics charge Vail Associates is using the ski area expansion to make way for profitable base area development.…
Wildlife dollars fund prison
A recent federal audit of Colorado wildlife funding has gotten some people upset. Among other violations, the audit has revealed that license fees intended for state wildlife programs were spent on land for a prison in Rifle, Colo. Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reimburses state agencies for a portion of their wildlife…
The secret’s out
Despite a court order, a grand jury’s “secret” report on the Rocky Flats bomb factory in Colorado is out of the closet. Anti-nuke activists have had copies for years, and the full report has been posted on the World Wide Web at www.downwinders.org/rocky_fl.htm. Nevertheless, few have been privy to what the so-called runaway grand jury…
20 years with the Arapaho
Often photographs of Native Americans stereotype them as victims of poverty or “beads and feathers’ powwow performers, says Lander, Wyo., photographer Sara Wiles. For that reason, she photographs Arapaho people in their everyday lives, both in moments of celebration and moments unadorned. “If I wanted to pick out pictures that made Arapaho tribal members ……
The Four Corners celebrated in photos
Images From an Untamed Land, an exhibit by Moab, Utah, photographer Bruce Hucko, will be at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colo., until May 31. Hucko’s black-and-white pictures, along with excerpts from writers Gary Snyder, Simon Ortiz, Ann Walka and others, celebrate the Four Corners region. “Since I don’t disclose locations (of the photos),…
Exploring Aldo Leopold’s Legacy: The Land Ethic and the American West in the 21st Century
Exploring Aldo Leopold’s Legacy: The Land Ethic and the American West in the 21st Century will be the topic of the third annual Wallace Stegner Center Symposium April 17 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The keynote speaker is Pat Shea, director of the Bureau of Land Management, who will be joined by conservation biologist Curt…
He found spotted owls; the agency ignored them
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Peter Galvin: “I had cancer when I was 15, and it very much changed my life. I had been captain of my junior varsity basketball team, but after that, things just changed. I didn’t want to go out and get drunk on Friday night.…
Staffers say their agency betrayed the land
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In his 28 years of working for the U.S. Forest Service, fish biologist Jim Cooper never thought of himself as an idealist. Even when he was starting out, he says, he thought a rising human population would continually stress the national forests, yet he…
Dear Friends
A class act Circulation staffer Kathy Martinez recently traveled to Las Vegas to attend the USPS National Postal Forum; there she learned that HCN is a very small fish in a very large ocean. According to Kathy, “When I told one postal official how much we spend on postage a year, she just turned away…
River heritage plan sent downstream
PAONIA, Colo. – When water engineer Jeff Crane learned about a new program called the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, he thought he’d found something his community could rally behind. Over the past three years, Crane has been working to build consensus among landowners, fruit farmers and gravel miners along western Colorado’s North Fork of the…
Heard around the West
There’s hot news from Anchorage, Alaska, and many hikers are going to recoil in horror when they hear it. The red pepper spray that’s supposed to ward off black bears may do just the opposite – attract them. Evidence so far is anecdotal, but U.S. Geological Survey researcher Tom Smith (contact him on the Internet…
We can have electricity, jobs and clean air
There are big problems with the Mohave power plant. From the Hopi mesas of my people, we notice it all the time. Until the late 1960s we could see the sacred San Francisco Peaks clearly from my home near old Oraibi on the Hopi mesas, 80 miles away as the crow flies. It is the…
‘Ecotourism’ – a gold mine for ailing agencies?
STEAMBOAT, Ore. – They huddled under the massive rock overhang, sheltered from the rain, trying to imagine the Native American shaman who painted these pictographs 150 years ago. On the rock’s belly are drawings of riders on horseback and strange ghostlike people. Some are clearly visible, but many are not, due to years of vandalism…
A giant plume into the air
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to a back-page opinion piece, “We can have electricity, jobs and clean air.” Hard by the Colorado River at Laughlin, Nev., Southern California Edison’s controversial Mohave power plant began generating electricity in 1971. Its 500-foot stack throws a giant plume into…
Some tourists opt for a dose of reality
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”‘Ecotourism’ – a gold mine for ailing agencies?“ While many of us bolt to the beach or head for the hills when vacation time rolls around, a few groups around the West have discovered that some crave a…
The New West spawns a new kind of range war
DURANGO, Colo. – The lawyers outnumber the sheep in the Shenandoah sheep war. It started one morning about three years ago, when Edward and Adalou Dunne woke up to find eight sheep grazing in the yard next to theirs in Shenandoah, a subdivision of large lots where green pastures roll and dirt roads unwind in…
Mined-over region resents EPA scrutiny
For 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has removed mine tailings, covered contaminated lawns and monitored people’s blood for lead and other dangerous heavy metals found within the 21-mile-long Bunker Hill Superfund Site in northern Idaho. Now, with the work nearly done, the federal agency has set its sights on something much bigger – the…
A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Note: see end of this feature story for a list of four accompanying sidebar articles. PHOENIX, Ariz. – It sounds like the set-up for a joke: A doctor, a philosopher and a biologist go into the woods, and … But nine years later, the coming together of these three environmental activists has staggered the timber…
In pursuit of crooked feds
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Robin Silver: “The key to our success? Corrupt government officials and a Justice Department that condones corruption. Even conservative judges are consistently recognizing that the federal land managers are criminals. We’re dealing with dishonest federal officials. Period. “We also prepare compulsively. We’ve got a…
Modern ‘civilization’ is a doomsday machine
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Kieran Suckling: “Our critics talk about “consensus.” But a consensus of who? When we had a timber injunction shutting down all logging in the Southwest, a poll by a professional polling company found that every sector of the public supported a complete ban on…