The hardscrabble desert town of Carlsbad, N.M. – already home to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant – is brushing aside the fears of environmentalists and arms-control advocates in its eagerness to host the Bush administration’s planned new nuclear bomb factory.
Also in this issue:Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, R, is President Bush’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and some environmentalists fear he will prove little more than a yes-man.
Light them and leave them
When it comes to fire, we need to get going on some concrete changes and stop pussyfooting around (HCN, 5/26/03: A losing battle). I can’t speak for spruce stands in Wyoming, or Doug-fir old growth in Oregon, or redwood groves in California, but let me say this about ponderosa forests and the sky islands of…
We can restore the forests
As a consultant who is involved with restoration silviculture from the ponderosa pine forests of New Mexico to the Oregon white oak forests of the Willamette Valley, I have been frustrated with the lack of understanding by the general public, as well as federal and state land managers, of the reasons behind the increase in…
We’re starving our land managers to pay private companies
Wildfires are again raging as heat and drought continue across the West. Now that Congress has recessed without providing any funding for firefighting, the U.S. Forest Service is expected to keep fighting the fires, and to take the money needed for that task from other areas in its already shrinking budget. Though our national parks…
Digging through the dust of Libby
For decades, the best jobs in Libby, Mont., were to be found at the local vermiculite mine. The work was tough and dusty, but it paid better than anything else in northern Montana. In the 1970s, however, mine workers, their families, and their neighbors started dying of respiratory diseases and rare, painful cancers. Libbyites didn’t…
Calendar
Colorado State University is holding its 10th Annual Conference on Tailings and Mine Waste on Oct. 12-15 in Vail. For more information or to register, call Linda Hinshaw at 970-491-6081, or log onto www.tailings.org. The Environmental Protection Agency is holding its Brownfields 2003: Growing a Greener America Conference in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 27-29. Registration…
A peek over the edge
In the endless arguments over public land, it’s healthy to seek the boggy middle ground. But it’s also worthwhile to stroll out to the edge, out where the arguments define right and wrong. For readers ready for such a stroll, Richard W. Behan has written a provocative travel guide, Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the…
Follow-up
Another Interior Department official is under investigation for a conflict of interest: This time it’s the department’s top lawyer, William Myers (HCN, 6/23/03). Watchdog groups say Myers, who represented public-lands ranching associations as a Boise lawyer and signed a recusal agreement after his appointment as solicitor, met with cattle interests seven times to discuss changes…
NEPA gets short shrift in the courts
For more than a year, environmentalists have been warning that the Bush administration is attempting an unprecedented rollback of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). A recent study of NEPA court cases by the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife indicates that such warnings have merit. Supporters of NEPA describe it as the Magna Carta…
Bush administration stretches a lawsuit to get the cut out
In the Pacific Northwest, trees probably will start falling faster than they have in nearly a decade. In August, the Bush administration committed to more than double the amount of logging in public forests west of the Cascades — including massive old-growth trees. The commitment came in a legal settlement with 18 Oregon counties and…
Feds to Energy Department: Slow down
In the struggle to clean up nuclear waste left by weapons programs and power plants, the West’s men in black robes are ganging up on the U.S. Department of Energy. So far this year, ruling in environmentalist lawsuits, no fewer than three federal judges have ordered the department to do a more careful job. On…
State land no longer just for the cows
For the first time, environmentalists have outbid a rancher to gain control of a grazing allotment on state land in Arizona. The Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians had tried to lease the allotment since 1997. But the state land office repeatedly rejected the applications, saying only ranchers could bid on Arizona’s 8.3 million acres of school-trust…
Developer tries to make a killing off the Black Canyon
Notorious for snapping up private inholdings surrounded by federal land and then reselling them for big profits, Colorado developer Tom Chapman is at it again. Chapman made a name for himself in 1992, when he used a helicopter to carry building supplies for a luxury cabin into a 240-acre inholding within the West Elk Wilderness…
Building a new bomb factory could cause global aftershocks
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Courting the Bomb.” Building a new factory for nuclear bomb triggers could spark another arms race, say opponents of the Department of Energy’s proposed “modern pit facility.” They argue that the facility would violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which went into effect in 1970…
Rocky Flats, the sequel?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Courting the Bomb.” During public hearings this summer, Department of Energy officials repeatedly stated that nuclear bomb triggers could be built safely. Their “modern pit facility” would be, as its name suggests, fully modernized and superior to the department’s previous pit-manufacturing projects. Their insistence…
Courting the Bomb
The Bush administration’s new nuclear bomb factory is looking for a home — and the leaders of Carlsbad, New Mexico, are determined to give it one.
The EPA needs an urban pit bull
You walk past a wrecking yard and see, on the other side of a high chain-link fence, not a pit bull with a mouth full of teeth, but a goldfish in a tank. That’s the image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It’s a nomination that…
The return of the Nuclear West
The American West has always been central to this country’s nuclear weapons program. Our vast and arid landscape is where the first nuclear bomb was developed and tested in 1945. This is where the uranium used in nuclear bombs has been mined, where the components of much of our nuclear arsenal have been designed and…
Dear Friends
Farewell, Radio HCN We’re writing today with both sadness and gratitude. We’re sad because, after years of hard work, we have decided to end our weekly radio program, Radio High Country News. But we’re grateful to you, our dedicated readers, because you believed enough to contribute to the Spreading the News Campaign, which allowed us…
Mr. Middle Ground gets called to Washington
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt nominated to head the EPA
In fire’s aftermath, salvage logging makes a comeback
Bush administration pushes to cut trees burned by Oregon’s Biscuit Fire, science be damned
Like Paul on the road to Damascus
The fact that cynicism and irony are deeply entrenched in popular culture is hardly headline news; most of us indulge in them from time to time, slide into a detached stance if for no other reason than self-defense. Harmless enough, probably, in small doses. But as I was walking past the Toyota dealership some weeks…
BLM sinks local input to drill Roan Plateau
Local and environmental concerns tossed by the wayside in western Colorado
Heard Around the West
UTAH Some Western wag once said that the most dangerous thing in a forest was a bunch of Boy Scouts with hatchets. In Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest, make that heavy equipment instead of hatchets. When his son needed a service project to become an Eagle Scout, Scott Vanleeuwen proposed “cleaning up” an abandoned trail that…
The best little radio show in the West
An appreciation of Radio High Country News,and of the band of brilliant, visionary and completely nuts peoplewho made it possible