The Hispanic livestock cooperative, Ganados del Valle, wins a lawsuit against the Sierra Club Foundation in New Mexico’s Chama Valley.
Looking for a quiet, old neighborhood?
If a proposal by Utah’s Trust Lands Administration goes through, state-owned lots containing Native American ruins will go on the block to provide money for public schools. One lot includes an Anasazi house structure probably dating to the time of Christ; another contains a Fremont culture dwelling dating back 1,000 years. State officials say they…
Shh… don’t tell, can be a good defense
Dear HCN, I lived and worked in and near Zion Canyon for 12 years, and during that time the two old pioneer towns at the mouth of the canyon experienced rapidly rising population pressures, both from visitors and new residents. Most of the work available in the canyon entailed contact with a portion of the…
Dam project could get a free ride
A Colorado senator wants to make sure the controversial and long-delayed Animas-La Plata water project begins next year. Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell hopes to attach a rider to an appropriations bill that requires Congress to proceed with dam construction “notwithstanding any other provisions of the law.” The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which has…
On Stephen Lyons’ knee-jerk reactions
Dear HCN, I was starting to get bored reading another superficial diatribe – Stephen Lyons’ “Have a Kokopelli Day” (HCN, 9/18/95) – against the new colonizers of the West and indigenous imagery. I perked up, however, at the reference to the picture in the Patagonia catalog of Norbu with his donkeys “laden to the hilt,…
From sawing logs to serving cappuccino?
One hundred and forty-two years ago, a timber company built a sawmill and the town to operate it, Port Gamble, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, Wash. This October, the nation’s oldest continually operating sawmill is closing. The company, Pope & Talbot, that built the mill and now leases it from Pope Resources Co., says…
Advice from Jim Stiles
Dear HCN, I’d like to respond to William Corcoran’s attack on guidebook critics like myself (HCN, 10/2/95). Mr. Corcoran says I should spend more of my energy on Planned Parenthood “instead of preaching perfection to an imperfect world” and in part he’s right. The fact is, there are just too damn many people out there.…
Two freshmen from Arizona blasted
Dear HCN, Two freshmen Republican members of Don Young’s House Resource Committee from Arizona are working day and night to extend that committee’s endangered species listing moratorium (HCN, 7/24/95). If these men had their way, they would be publishing menus for cooking the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. Arizona congressmen John Shadegg and J.D. Hayworth…
ATVs shred redds
If endangered salmon trying to reach central Idaho didn’t have enough to worry about, now they need to dodge tires. Over the Labor Day weekend, drivers of all-terrain vehicles blasted through two miles of prime spawning grounds for salmon and bull trout along the upper Salmon River. The marauders tore up gravel and algae in…
Public lands for needy ski resorts
In Summit County, Colo., where housing prices force ski area service workers into trailer parks and long commutes (HCN, 4/17/95), a national forest supervisor has proposed a solution. He is Sonny LaSalle, who says the Forest Service could offer some of its public land to ski areas or other local businesses to build low-cost rental…
Alberta proves deadly for wolves
Though the wolf population in northern Canada is strong, southwestern Alberta – with ranch land bordering on wilderness – is becoming a killing ground for wolves. Biologists on both sides of the border fear that if the open shooting season there continues, the 100 or so wolves that have migrated on their own into western…
Just ask the loggers
Though environmentalists feared the worst when President Clinton signed a controversial timber-salvage law this summer, the Forest Service told them not to worry: The agency would take every precaution to protect the environment. A memo sent to regional foresters Sept. 21 from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., suggests otherwise. Citing a lack of government…
The exhaustion of a metaphor
THE EXHAUSTION OF A METAPHOR Skinheads in the Northwest, migrants pouring into California, 1,000 American factories just over the border in Mexico, coffee vendors in Seattle: Are these images of the Western frontier? Journalist Richard Rodriguez says they are, and they’re replacing the old idea of a land without limits. He will consider this transformation…
Saying please at Devils Tower
Rock climbers routinely conquer obstacles and they don’t take kindly to “no.” But the conflict between rock climbers and Native American tribes over Devils Tower in Wyoming may be easing, thanks to a voluntary climbing ban. The National Park Service says 85 percent of the tower’s climbers complied with the trial ban in June. The…
Life on the edge
LIFE ON THE EDGE The joke is that California went from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. A new book demonstrates otherwise. Life on the Edge: A Guide to California’s Endangered Natural Resources is a rarity: a work of coffee-table beauty and quality that tells a wonderful, although heartbreaking, story. It is a story…
Bears forced to defer to cows
A plan by Wyoming officials to relocate two grizzly bears with a taste for beef has environmentalists concerned. They say cows are taking precedence over bears in important grizzly habitat near Jackson, Wyo. In mid-September, Wyoming officials decided to move one bear from a grazing allotment inside Grand Teton National Park and another from the…
Peak preserved
PEAK PRESERVED Hikers on the summit of 13,462-foot Treasury Mountain, near Crested Butte, Colo., may not have known it, but until recently they were standing on private property. That changed Aug. 21 when the Wilderness Land Trust purchased 200 acres of private land inside the Raggeds and Maroon Bells-Snowmass wilderness areas. Much of the land,…
Buy some shorts: Save a salamander
BUY SOME SHORTS: SAVE A SALAMANDER All 50 state wildlife agencies have joined a campaign to add user fees to outdoor products. Their aim: to save wildlife that isn’t hunted or endangered but still in need of habitat. The International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and seven conservation groups, including the World Wildlife Fund…
Timber sales are throwbacks to beastly days
Though the science of forestry has advanced over the past decade, green timber sales in forests west of the Cascades in Washington and Oregon don’t show it. Take the Roman Dunn timber sale, a tract of old-growth Douglas fir managed by the Bureau of Land Management along the central coast of Oregon near Eugene. A…
Saving salmon
Saving Salmon Billy Frank, chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, said it was now or never: “You going to wait until the last salmon is gone from the last spawning bed?” Frank was speaking at a ceremony in Seattle, Wash., marking the formation of For the Sake of Salmon, an organization of Northwest government,…
In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one
CHAMA VALLEY, N.M. – Even as this high and stormy valley goes the way of the changing West, its course remains eccentric, defined by cross-cultural grudges. Agricultural land is going fast as middle-class Anglos convert ranches to cabin subdivisions or resorts, but the Jicarilla Apaches are also buying up land to add to their reservation.…
Congress is reworking 100 years of federal policy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Right-wing conservatives, who have long argued that the nation would be best served if public lands and resources were in private hands, believed that their hour had come. On Sept. 19, a bill reached the floor of House of Representatives to create a commission recommending the sale of selected lands now managed…
The disagreement is total
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, To save a Utah canyon, a BLM ranger quits and turns activist. When it comes to his Westwater mining claims, Ron Pene and the BLM disagree on nearly everything. To begin with, Pene believes BLM staffers overlooked man-made disturbances when they surveyed the…
How the West was won, and won, and …
When did the following take place? A conservative wave sweeps the nation, and Republicans take control of the government. Western ranchers, furious about a proposed increase in the grazing fee on public lands, complain about the bloated federal bureaucracy. Members of Congress from the 12 Western states decide they have had enough of Eastern domination…
South Dakota pulls plug on Missouri River meetings
Blaming a bureaucratic process that has dragged on for too long without progress, South Dakota officials have withdrawn their state from the Missouri River Basin Association. Nettie Myers, secretary of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said, “It seems like we have the same meetings over and over, and nothing is accomplished.” The…
It’s unAmerican, or at best unWestern, but cooperation works
My mailbox is sounding the call to arms again. Since a Republican majority was elected to Congress, it’s been bulging with warnings that Newt Gingrich and his munchkins will dismantle most of the environmental gains made since the 1960s. Send more money and write more letters, the warnings trumpet, or risk seeing this environmental “dark…
Heard Around The West
Paul Rauber of the Sierra Club wrote to say “I am a great fan of “Heard Around the West.” There is, however, something that drives me crazy about it: your habit of putting random phrases into boldface… Otherwise, I love you dearly.” We hear you, Paul. — Patricia A. McColm of California’s Bay Area likes…
Fifteen people march in Idaho to mourn the vanishing salmon
There is a chaos theory adage about the movement of a butterfly’s wings setting off a hurricane on the other side of the globe. It is an interesting notion; for every action, a reaction. It has about it a certain humility, a recognition that we know very little about the potential impact of our doings.…
Dear friends
Pear wars We’re not sure how to describe the $5 “Pear Insurance Contract” High Country News just signed. But two Paonia High School students assured us that after the “time of combat,” which in the past has meant teenagers gathering at night to hurl fruit at each other, “all you need to do is let…
Cut to the past: logging wars resume
Less than three years after the Clinton administration devised a plan to protect most of the remaining ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, the big trees have started to fall again. Taking advantage of an obscure provision in a salvage logging bill recently signed by the president, loggers have begun cutting healthy old-growth forests west…
Who knows best: grassroots or foundations?
The symbolism and coincidences were heavy. The day after Labor Day, the National Audubon Society fired the staff of the Endangered Species Coalition – the group created by the environmental movement to protect the Endangered Species Act from Congress. And as if it were waiting for the firings, three days after former Indiana Congressman Jim…
To save a Utah canyon, a BLM ranger quits and turns activist
Floating past cottonwood trees and tamarisk just before dusk, Skip Edwards deftly keeps his raft within earshot of ours so he can pummel us with facts about the 1964 Wilderness Act. But around the next bend, the former Bureau of Land Management river ranger falls silent and points to a massive red and orange sandstone…