The many newsletters put out by small environmental grassroots groups reveal a West that is complex, quirky and deeply committed.
A Culture to Sustain Us: Creating a Center that Holds
The Island Institute, located in the town of Sitka on Alaska’s Baranof Island, will host its 15th annual symposium on human values and the written word, June 18-24 , this time devoted to A Culture to Sustain Us: Creating a Center that Holds. Speakers include Cecilia Martz, a bilingual Cup’ik Eskimo educator, and Ray Rasker,…
Outfitter bill may be missing the boat
Guiding hunting expeditions and rafting trips is a risky business, but some commercial outfitters think that some challenges shouldn’t be part of the job: They say the changing policies of federal agencies make it difficult to get guiding permits. They’re hoping a new bill, sponsored by Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., will…
Sheep is Life
A celebration of Shepherds and Weavers: Sheep is Life (Dibe-Diné bi½ iina½ in Navajo) invites those interested in Navajo-Churro sheep, wool processing and weaving techniques to spend June 25-28 at San Juan College in Farmington, N.M. Speakers include Lyle and Nancy McNeal, directors of the Navajo Sheep Project, and ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan, from the…
National Wildlife Federation
The National Wildlife Federation likes to recognize young people, educators, the occasional legislator and others who contribute significantly to protecting the natural world. The process is not complicated; contact the group’s Communications Dept. at 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, VA 22184-0001 (703/790-4085). The deadline for nominations is July 10. This article appeared in the print edition…
‘Meltdown’ continues at state agency
Goodbyes are getting more and more frequent at the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. When attorney Ashley Olivero resigned from the agency at the end of March, describing a “museum of degradations inflicted upon the rank and file DEQ employees,” she joined seven other staffers who have angrily quit since the agency was formed three…
Green and Gold
The University of California at Santa Cruz will host Green and Gold, July 31-Aug. 2, a conference to commemorate both the 150th anniversary of the 1848 discovery of gold and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For information call Carolyn Merchant at 510/642-0326, or check the conference Web site at www.cnr.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/. This article…
Philosophy, History and Ethics of the Hunt
Orion: The Hunter’s Institute and Montana State University will host a Philosophy, History and Ethics of the Hunt conference July 25-Aug. 1 in Bozeman, Mont. Writers Mary Stange and Ted Kerasote are among those who will lead workshops on the role of hunters and hunting in the modern conservation movement. For more information, call 406/994-6683.…
1998 National Wilderness Conference
Over 80 conservation groups are sending representatives to the 1998 National Wilderness Conference in Seattle, Wash., May 29-31, where David Brower is the featured speaker and Walkin” Jim Stoltz the balladeer of lands prowled by grizzlies and wolves. Contact the National Wilderness Conference, 12730 9th Avenue NW, Seattle, WA 98177 or e-mail wildcon@twsnw.org. This article…
Smart Growth
Smart Growth Regional Partnerships, a new grant and assistance program in Colorado, gives grants of up to $75,000 to towns and counties to help address a host of growth-related issues, including rural and urban sprawl, and loss of open space, agricultural land and habitat for wildlife. To apply, write Smart Growth Regional Partnerships Program, 1313…
Cows get eviction notice
In what the Forest Guardians’ John Horning calls “evidence of an agency that’s finally getting it,” the Forest Service has agreed to begin removing cattle from 230 miles of Southwestern streams. The Tucson, Ariz.-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity and the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Forest Guardians filed separate lawsuits against the Forest Service last year,…
Hanford’s full of holes
Hanford’s full of holes Whistleblowers at the Hanford nuclear reservation in central Washington now have the federal General Accounting Office on their side. Although nearly a million gallons of waste are seeping from Hanford’s underground storage tanks toward the Columbia River, the Department of Energy has long downplayed the problem, assuring critics that the soil…
Buffering buffalo
BUFFERING BUFFALO Don’t expect brucellosis to disappear from the Yellowstone area anytime soon, says a draft report issued by the National Academy of Sciences. The disease, common among bison and elk, led the state of Montana to shoot or slaughter nearly one-third of the Yellowstone bison herd last winter when the animals moved outside park…
Bison sleek, but suspect
MONTANA Bison sleek, but suspect West Yellowstone, Mont. – It’s been an easy winter for Yellowstone National Park’s bison. Only 11 of the shaggy giants have been killed, a fraction of the nearly 1,100 that were shot or shipped to slaughter in the brutal winter of 1996-97. Protruding ribs and jutting hip bones were bison…
New in the watershed
When the nonprofit Western Ancient Forest Campaign (WAFC) sent Brian Vincent to California to set up a new office, he had a lot of terrain to choose from. He settled on Nevada City, Calif., one evening during a Watershed Council meeting, impressed by the sight of local Sierra Club and Earth First! members coming together…
Water in rivers is OK
Water can remain in New Mexican rivers and still be “beneficial,” says state Attorney General Tom Udall. Up until his decision last month, water rights could be lost unless water was diverted from a stream, and thereby put to beneficial use. Udall’s ruling opens the door to marketing water rights for environmental protection, which also…
Program gets a C
When the 1993 Northwest Forest Plan reduced timber production in California, Washington and Oregon, the Clinton administration began the “Jobs in the Woods’ program to retrain timber workers. It sounded like a great idea: Former loggers would work with the Forest Service and other agencies to close abandoned roads and restore streams for native fish,…
Jet Skis: Thrill or scourge?
With 750,000 Jet Skis currently in operation, and more than 100,000 new “personal watercraft” sold annually, the industry is pushing the Park Service for access to 62 sites on national park waters – nearly double the number of sites currently available in the parks. But the Park Service and the Department of Interior can’t agree…
No nuclear jeopardy in Wyoming
Will a nuclear waste dump be Wyoming’s economic salvation? No way, says the Wyoming Outdoor Council. Its new report, Nuclear Jeopardy: A Citizen’s Guide to Understanding High Level Radioactive Waste in Wyoming, spells out the group’s opposition to a proposed private dump site. Not only would the Owl Creek Energy Project damage the state’s tourism…
To burn or not to burn
Another 40-foot stick-figure totem will be set ablaze by 12,000 revelers in the desert in Nevada if a federal agency says yes to the San Francisco-based organizers. Last year the Burning Man arts get-together was moved to private land, where county fees, including $308,000 for fire insurance alone, drove the festival into debt. That made…
Wilderness Walks
The Montana Wilderness Association will lead 93 hikes on public lands during its 36th annual Wilderness Walks program from May through September. There’s a frog safari, a wildflower walk and even a hike led by a backcountry cooking expert – samples included. Group size is limited; advance reservations are required. For more information, call the…
The Wayward West
Eleven Mexican gray wolves were released to the wilds of the Arizona-New Mexico border March 29 (HCN, 2/16/98); now one wolf is dead – shot and killed by a camper who said it attacked his family’s dog, reports the Albuquerque Journal. The wolf program faces a lawsuit filed by a coalition of New Mexico ranchers,…
Southwest Citizen Mining Activist Conference
Is your community fighting the 1872 Mining Law? Grassroots activists will get together at the Southwest Citizen Mining Activist Conference in Durango, Colo., May 29-31, to share war stories and talk about community organizing, national networking and technical mining issues. The conference is free to activists, and some travel scholarships are available. Call Aimee Boulanger…
Uniting Communities Concerned About Nuclear Contamination
Being neighbor to a nuclear lab or waste dump isn’t easy; Fight Back! Uniting Communities Concerned About Nuclear Contamination aims to bring activists together with scientists and radiation health professionals in Roswell, N.M., June 5-7. For details, write Center for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping (CARD), 144 Harvard SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106 (505/266-2663). This article appeared…
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
On April 25, Carlos Menendez posed in front of an audience of the press and the Sierra Club leadership and joined the club. The former executive director of EDGE, a now-defunct advocacy group for immigrants, had refused to become a member for years. But Sierra Club president Adam Werbach had just announced that members rejected…
Lingering stereotypes spoken here
“God gives the heavy loads to the big horses,” says Rick Swart. He should know – he’s got a heavy load. Today, at the age of 40, Richard W. Swart may be the most embattled journalist in Oregon. As editor of the Wallowa County Chieftain, a 114-year-old weekly that has been in his family for…
The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
In February, High Country News asked readers to send in samples of newsletters published by grassroots environmental groups. I asked people to send in those newsletters without any clear idea of what I would do with them. And even after 70 individual newsletters had arrived, I still didn’t know what to make of them, except…
A fiery Wyoming newspaper pursues the state’s fat cats
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. If you weren’t around in 1970, when Tom Bell founded the scrappy High Country News in Lander, Wyo., you can catch a late 1990s reincarnation by reading the Grassroots Advocate, published by John Jolley out of Casper, Wyo. Bell in the early 1970s was…
Dear Friends
Busting out When High Country News moved into its new quarters in early 1992 (New Year’s Day, to be exact), we assumed the 3,600 square-foot building would serve us forever. After all, we had come out of 1,000 square feet. But when the architect who designed the building happened to be in Paonia, we asked…
A guide to the glue that keeps the West stuck together
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Caveat lector: The publications listed here are a basket of apples, oranges and walnuts. Some come out regularly, have many pages and are well done. Others appear sporadically and are only a single sheet. The key to the guide is: Publication name, group, address,…
Heard around the West
Maybe Denver International Airport was built to test the tempers of travelers. Flighty state-of-the-art baggage system? No backup. Access road blocked by snowdrifts? No backup. A busted concourse train? No backup – so 30,000 passengers were stalled and enraged Sunday, April 26, some of them trapped for hours in darkened train tunnels without ventilation or…
El Nino sweeps across the West
El Nino’s wrath hit sporadically around the West this winter, leaving more headlines than it did snow or rain. But where it hit, it hit hard, and punches are still being thrown. Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted El Nino would force the global jet streams north, causing warmer and drier weather…
A treatise on columnist Alexander Cockburn
WASHINGTON, D.C. – “Question Authority,” reads the bumper sticker slogan, and good advice it is. But so is this: Question the questioners of authority, who may have their own agenda, perhaps their own racket. Outrageousness sells these days, and as any viewer of “Crossfire” can attest, it sells better unencumbered by prudence or knowledge. Which…