Public-land managers in the era of global warming face uncomfortable choices: Do they intervene to protect dying plants and animals, or stand back and let this new version of “nature” take its course?
Unnatural Preservation
In the age of global warming, public-land managers face a stark choice: They can let national parks and other wildlands lose their most cherished wildlife. Or they can become gardeners and zookeepers.
Standing up for catron county
Though we ourselves are not in the wolf recovery area, we have quite a few long-standing friends in Catron County (HCN, 12/24/07). So even though wolves haven’t eaten my dogs in my yard, or killed my horse in my corral, or stalked my children while waiting for the school bus, I have followed the issue…
Fight the good fight
Thank you, Jim Detterline, for your fight against arbitrary and capricious workplace rules, and thank you High Country News for reporting Jim’s story (HCN, 12/10/07). Two of the kids you are fighting for are my daughters, 7 and 10, both of whom were born hard of hearing. Both love being outdoors; the 7-year-old is already…
Outen the lights
I am glad to know someone with the Park Service is concerned about preserving the night sky (HCN, 12/10/07). My husband and I have sat on the edge of Bryce Canyon as well as Mesa Verde, both rims of the Grand Canyon and Zion at night enjoying the starlit sky and seeing the Milky Way,…
A bad idea hits the gas pumps
A quiet invasion is under way near my home in Colorado. Inconspicuous black stickers are appearing on gas pumps to announce the arrival of a new molecule looking to occupy gas tanks. It goes by the name of C2H5OH – ethanol. Typically, my consumption of ethanol is strictly oral, in the form of alcoholic beverages.…
Time to call the gas industry’s bluff
There’s been a steep falloff in friendly chit-chat around the local gas pumps, and no wonder. With diesel at $3.40 a gallon and gasoline only somewhat cheaper, it’s common to see someone drop $100 on a tankful. The Pump N Pay is as glum as a morgue. A typical American family will spend more than…
Die with me
“Indians must either fall in with the march of civilization and progress,” wrote Major James McLaughlin, military director of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 1889, “or be crushed by the passage of the multitude.” More than a century later, three writers uncomfortably assess that prediction, and find that Native Americans have indeed fallen into…
Planning for uncertainty
On an unseasonably cold night in late January, more than 250 Phoenix-area residents packed the Arizona State University Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale. There, they found more than just physical warmth: High Country News was sponsoring a heated conversation on the uncertain future of their desert kingdom. Author and moderator Craig Childs posed the central…
Standing outside, late, in a charcoal forest
When my bladder provokes me out of the cabin, the Montana night is deep. The door closes behind me. I step down two stairs to the frozen, scoured ground. It is warm and breezy. The wind sounds like river current moving among the black stalks of tree trunks. An acrid hint of fire is in…
Heard around the West
UTAH Jim Stiles, publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr in Moab, has been called cynical, chronically ticked off, dour and – more kindly perhaps – curmudgeonly. He is greatly annoyed by the Lycra-clad bicyclists that invade his part of the world, and he’d like the rip-’em-up crowd of ATV and four-wheel-drivers to take a hike.…
Two weeks in the West
Updated 2/4/2008 A groan must have risen from some Western developers at the end of last year, as a flurry of conservation easements yanked hundreds of thousands of acres out of their reach. The rush was at least partly due to a federal tax incentive that expired at the end of 2007. (Congress is considering…
Nevada stakes its salmon claim
Snake River dams run up against a powerful alliance in an unlikely place
The Chaparralian
California’s raging fires fuel one man’s fight for the much-maligned “elfin forest”
More, more, more
Ray Ring’s Western campaign speech was a start, but I was crossing my fingers and hoping that it wouldn’t be 98 percent MORE (meaning “let’s generate more electricity for more people, using alternative energy sources”) with only one brief mention of efficiency and conservation (HCN, 1/21/08). I also hoped it wouldn’t offer the false hope…
Walk the talk, libs
I am a native of Colorado and consider myself an environmentalist, but the anti-oil tone of modern “environmentalists,” coupled with their lifestyle of hypocrisy, has alienated many independent and moderate Republicans (like myself) that would otherwise support pro-nature agendas. This isn’t a taunt so much as it is a reality check from outside of the…
Limit one per household, please
That Somali’s tie may be straight (and he’s lucky to get into the U.S. from such a Godforsaken country); but he has eight kids (HCN, 1/21/08)! In an overpopulated world and country, this constitutes gross environmental irresponsibility. Every time I read about somebody with such an enormous family, I get mad. Besides the “green” movement,…
Ah, diversity …
High Country News could devote an entire issue to examining the cultural diversity of the West. Or, as you did, print just three of the responses to “Last Chance for the Lobo” (HCN, 1/21/08). The two letters from Reserve, N.M., remind me of the quote, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a…
Dear friends
WELCOME, NEW HCN INTERNS New winter interns Evelyn Schlatter and Francisco Tharp will be the last set of interns to spend a four-month stint at High Country News. We’ve found that most interns spend the first month or so just figuring out what HCN is all about and where we keep the coffee. So, starting…
Hold the salt
The largest wetland restoration project on the West Coast shifts into gear