Elaborate marijuana gardens created and managed by Mexican drug lords are turning California’s public lands into a dangerous, illegal, industrial-style landscape.
Also in this issue: The Forest Service’s claim that a recent court order would suspend routine activities – such as cutting Christmas trees or picking mushrooms – has been dismissed by the judge as the agency’s attempt to blow the issue out of proportion.
Pro-environment doesn’t always mean anti-Bush
I enjoyed reading Pepper Trail’s essay on reality versus belief in the teaching of evolution debate, until he decided to assert his own liberal beliefs regarding the liberation of Iraq (HCN, 10/3/05: What’s at stake in the evolution debate). Don’t assume that just because many of your readers may oppose the president’s environmental policies that…
The Latest Bounce
The Department of Labor has denied a whistleblower’s complaint that the BLM fired him in retaliation for exposing violations of federal law in a mine-cleanup project in Yerington, Nev. (HCN, 12/20/04: Conscientious Objectors). Earle Dixon supervised the cleanup of the abandoned copper mine for the BLM, and repeatedly complained publicly about inadequate efforts to deal…
Odes to an urban mountain range
Like other mountain ranges that dominate city skylines, Albuquerque’s Sandia Mountains are too easily taken for granted. The Sandias’ diverse hiking trails range from the lung-busters that scale the west side’s granite face to lush trails on the east that meander through mixed conifers. But how many of the city’s half-million residents take advantage of…
A long walk into hope
This is a book by a tall skinny guy with a goofy warm smile who took “a long walk across America’s most hopeful landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.” Along the way, he meets up with old friends, many of whom also seem to be tall skinny guys with goofy warm smiles, who…
Toothy nuisance moves north
Global warming may be one of the reasons behind the recent appearance of football-sized, orange-toothed aquatic rodents in the Skagit River Valley of northwestern Washington. Nutria, beaver-like creatures native to South America, are notorious for destroying flood-control levees and chewing through wetlands in the Southeastern United States. Fur entrepreneurs brought them to this country in…
Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland
Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland Laurance D. Linford 318 pages, softcover: $19.95 University of Utah Press, 2005. Fans of Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, will delight in Laurance Linford’s obsessively detailed guide to every single mesa, pueblo, trading post and gully mentioned in the books. This second edition adds 45 new…
Homeland Security gets to bypass environmental laws
On Sept. 14, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff used a new anti-terrorism and immigration-control bill to waive environmental laws along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Real ID Act, passed by Congress in May, permits Chertoff to bypass any federal or state law — including environmental, safety and labor laws — that might hinder the construction of…
Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming
Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming Winona LaDuke 294 pages, softcover: $18 South End Press, 2005. Environmental and Indian rights activist Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe, was the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. In this book, she examines the struggle of American Indians to reclaim their sacred sites and…
Forest Service greases the skids for oil and gas
U.S. Forest Service officials say they’re overwhelmed by the recent flood of permit applications from energy companies. On the Dakota Prairie National Grassland alone, drilling permit applications have jumped from 20 to 110 during the past year. To ease the workload, the agency wants to stop doing full-scale environmental assessments on smaller energy projects. The…
Cougar Management Guidelines
Cougar Management Guidelines Cougar Management Guidelines Working Group 137 pages, softcover: $21.95 WildFutures, 2005. Wildlife managers and citizen activists alike will find this book useful. It collects current cougar research into a set of guidelines for managing these secretive and increasingly rare big cats. Full of charts and figures, the book explores topics such as…
Will the BLM Web site shutdown ever end?
During the past six months, most Bureau of Land Management Web sites have been unavailable to the public: The agency has disconnected them for the fourth time in five years while officials attend to security concerns. The most recent shutdown resulted from an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by Elouise Cobell on behalf of 500,000 Indians.…
Connections across time
I glanced at the recent cover blurb, “What Happened to the Anasazi?” and felt a familiar and weary irritation (HCN, 10/3/05: Out of the Four Corners). I continue to believe the only adequate response to that question is: “Ask the Hopi, the Paiute, the Havasupai, the Hualapi. They will tell you.” Then, I read the…
Social issues are environmental issues
I hate to continue to belabor the debate regarding what is or is not an appropriate topic for HCN, but when I saw the recent letter from Carol Chipman entitled “Stick to Environmental Topics,” I felt I had to respond (HCN, 10/3/05: Stick to environmental topics). As a planner in the West, I know that…
Keep those pictures coming
Regarding Sandra Hoffman’s letter, though I agree that black-and-white images can be just as effective, if not more so, than color images, especially when production costs are a concern, I find it unfortunate that she can’t equate photographs with editorial content (HCN, 10/3/05: Don’t ‘dumb and numb’ readers). I may be biased, as a photojournalist,…
Amphetamines are nothing new
Regarding methamphetamine use in the oil patch, this is not a new issue (HCN, 10/3/05: Methamphetamine fuels the West’s oil and gas boom). “White crosses” and other stimulants were easy to obtain in Gillette, Wyo., in 1974, when I was working as a roughneck in the Powder River Basin. Drill rigs go 24-7, and graveyard…
Defending evolution and gardening
Bravo for both Pepper Trail and Allen Best (HCN, 10/3/05: What’s at stake in the evolution debate). Mr. Trail wrote a wonderfully simple and direct essay on evolution and detailed the problems entailed when schools attempt to teach intelligent design as a concept on a scientific footing equal to evolution. Mr. Best has reformulated our…
Belief inspires a passion for conservation
In “What’s at stake in the evolution debate,” biologist Pepper Trail attempts to enlist conservationists in the culture wars (HCN, 10/3/05: What’s at stake in the evolution debate). Trail insists that we must side with one warring camp or the other. According to Trail, the good guys are scientists who advance “reality,” while the bad…
Bad science and religion
In “What’s at stake in the evolution debate,” Pepper Trail, Ph.D., tells us there “… is no debate in the scientific world about the validity of evolution … (as an explanation for) … the development and workings of life on Earth” (HCN, 10/3/05: What’s at stake in the evolution debate). Wow, at last! Science free…
Forest Service tries to teach greens a lesson
Agency attempts to bend court order to halt minor projects, but is knocked back
In Bush’s Supreme Court, who’s on first?
He may or may not be the next Bill Klem, but at least John Roberts is no Janice Rogers Brown. OK, these names are not household words, save perhaps in selected households of the political left, the political right, and the baseball-obsessed. So let’s explain. William J. Klem was the first of the great umpires,…
A move to make land trusts more accountable
Land Trust Alliance unveils accreditation program to weed out ‘bad actors’
Oil and gas drilling clouds the West’s air
Energy industry’s air pollution increasing
The end of something really big
As soon as we read about the dead whale, it was clear we were about to take a field trip. “Let’s go,” said my friend Nathan, peering at a newspaper photo of a giant beached vertebrae. He’s a sculptor, so he has an artist’s appreciation for bones. Besides, his mother had recently cracked one of…
For this English chef, home is the Colorado Plateau
On Sunday mornings, all summer long, you can find chef John Sharpe at the Flagstaff Community Market, moving among the outdoor produce stalls with the practiced intensity of a hardcore bargain hunter at an outlet mall. He tests the white peaches Rob Lautze has grown at Garland’s Orchard near Sedona: nice, but not enough of…
Heard around the West
THE WEST If you like nothing better than a good pun, check out the “Endangered Feces” T-shirt that’s advertised on several Web sites for environmentally oriented companies. Twenty scats from wild animals are pictured on the front of the shirt, including the substantial contribution of a grizzly bear, the dainty deposits of a New Mexican…
The Public Lands’ Big Cash Crop
SHINGLETOWN, California — On a cool, late-September morning on the outskirts of this Northern California town, two men board a helicopter in a cow pasture. Each of them holds the title of “special agent,” but the agencies they represent are as different from one another as any two agencies could be. Dave Burns sports a…
The vast, unpatrolled public lands
It was supposed to be “the fishing trip of a lifetime.” Three brothers in their 50s and their teenaged sons hauled their rods and tackle to the Sierra National Forest last summer, in search of a quiet spot where they could spend a few days pulling trout from a mountain stream. It didn’t turn out…
Dear friends
WELCOME, LUTHER! HCN welcomes new board member Luther Propst, the executive director of the Sonoran Institute. The nonprofit institute works with Western communities to promote stewardship, conservation and local economies. VISITORS University of Denver associate geography professor Don Sullivan dropped in with a pack of students after being snowed off nearby Grand Mesa, where the…