Colorado’s Animas-La Plata project – the last of the big BuRec projects, and the most mired in controversy – is tackled by opponents and proponents who seek consensus.
Power is no longer everything
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed a historic record of decision Oct. 9 that aims to protect the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. The new rule calls for regulating flow rates from Glen Canyon Dam to minimize erosion and unnatural water-level fluctuations, and it makes Glen Canyon the first hydroelectric dam mandated to generate power…
Newspaper sues Forest Service
When Forest Service agents broke up a logging blockade several months ago at Oregon’s Warner Creek, they arrested five protesters plus two journalists from the Eugene Register Guard who were caught in the fray. Although no charges were ever filed against the journalists, the newspaper has now sued the Forest Service, citing violations of constitutional…
Utah tells Babbitt to back off
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has been sued by the state of Utah for his decision to reopen the process of wilderness designation (HCN, 9/2/96). Filed Oct. 14 in federal court, the suit challenges the legality of Babbitt’s “re-inventory” of Bureau of Land Management lands in Utah without public involvement. Babbitt announced on July 24 that…
One win, one loss
Fall brought both good and bad news for the Telluride Ski and Golf Company. The western Colorado company got another green light Oct. 22, to double its skiing terrain, when the Forest Service rejected an appeal by environmentalists. But in a separate agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, Telski will pay a $1.1 million fine…
What’s not on the label
The “secret” ingredients in a few widely used pesticides won’t be secret anymore, thanks to a small nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore. The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides won a lawsuit in U.S. District Court Oct. 16 against both the Environmental Protection Agency and the pesticide industry, which had claimed that “inert” ingredients are…
Eyes of fire
It was March 7, 1996, on the fourth day of a 10-day lion hunt in the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona, when rancher Warner Glenn and his hunting dogs happened on a big cat they’d never seen before in America. It was a jaguar, and Glenn, in this quickly produced little booklet, tells us he…
Californians stay home
After five years of stirring up the real estate pot, Californians have stopped moving east, and newcomers are moving to the coast again. That’s the conclusion of private researchers who studied surrendered drivers’ licenses in the Golden State. It marks the first time in six years that more people are moving into the state than…
Help find Pyramid Lake
Locals around Pyramid Lake, Nev., have wondered for years how explorer John C. Fremont first discovered this body of water in 1842. To test some hypotheses and to publicize the area, the nonprofit Friends of Pyramid Lake is sponsoring a two-part essay contest: Writers are invited to submit essays by Dec. 31 describing how Fremont…
Urgent news from the front
The battle over whether to industrialize Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front has heated up, thanks to a proposal from the Forest Service to allow new oil and gas leases in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement would make 52 percent of the 1.8 million-acre forest available for…
A listing and a delay
Faced with a court-imposed deadline, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed only one West Coast coho salmon population as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The agency announced Oct. 25 that coho along coastal Central California deserved threatened status under the law, but two populations in Northern California and Oregon will be studied for another…
Montana’s Wild Landscapes: New Perspectives and Traditional Values
Public-land controversies will spice up the Montana Wilderness Association three-day convention, Montana’s Wild Landscapes: New Perspectives and Traditional Values, in Bozeman Dec. 6-7. Topics include the debate over motorized trail use, planning for Glacier National Park and the effects of Montana’s growing tourism industry on public lands. Retiring Rep. Pat Williams, D, will deliver the…
Through Hells and high water
Jetboats will be banned for 21 days each summer on a 21-mile stretch of the Snake River through Hells Canyon, according to a Forest Service plan that’s been a decade in the making. Environmentalists and recreationists who float the river between Idaho and Oregon praised the restriction as a long-overdue first step toward returning quiet…
Conflict or Collaboration
The Intermountain Forest Industry Association will talk about “Conflict or Collaboration” Dec. 12 at its annual meeting in Idaho. Speakers include Idaho Rep. Mike Crapo; former Gov. Cecil Andrus; Tom Tuchman, President Clinton’s representative for forestry issues in the Northwest, and High Country News publisher Ed Marston. For more information, contact Intermountain Forest Industry Association,…
The West in Motion: Navigating the Shifting Currents of Change
This year’s annual meeting of the Council of State Governments-WEST will focus on what makes the West go, from the information super highway to cement byways. Kicking off the meeting Nov. 16 to 19 in Santa Fe, N.M., is keynote speaker Neil Goldschmidt, former governor of Oregon and chair of the council’s task force on…
BLM fills a hot job
As the first boss of the newly created national monument in southern Utah, the Bureau of Land Management’s Jerry Meredith won’t have to worry about filling anyone else’s shoes. But he’ll have plenty of other headaches. President Clinton’s recent designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sparked anger among locals and a flurry of controversial…
Agriculture, education key to Indian prosperity
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Native Soil: Lakotas garden for health and independence.” In 1994, only one Native American received a doctorate in agricultural science. It’s not as if the country’s Indian reservations couldn’t use the expertise. They encompass 54.5 million acres…
The Last Ranch: The truth is stranger than the book
In 1992, I followed a year in the life of a third-generation ranch family named Whitten in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. I was exploring an idea. I supposed that a fresh understanding of nature might save the world from becoming desert. The impetus came from a long association with the ideas of…
Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
ARVADA, Colo. – It is a more and more common scene in the West. People who are personal and professional enemies, people who let no opportunity pass to say something nasty about each other, are this morning sitting together at tables arranged in a large, hollow square. Behind them are colleagues and supporters who occasionally…
A rodent that can outlast a camel in the desert
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to as essay, “‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’.” It was a quote from naturalist J.R. Mead in 1859 that got University of Montana zoology professor Bert Pfeiffer curious about prairie dogs. Mead wrote: “Not a drop (of water)…
The rules
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Colorado Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler’s ground rules for A-LP consensus: * Don’t attack; be positive. * Work to develop a feeling of collaboration. * No legal nitpicking (nervous laughter since more than half the people at the table are lawyers). * Listen to each…
Meanwhile, on the street
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In the negotiating room, old enemies were trying to get along. But in A-LP’s hometown of Durango, Colo., passions still run high. Jeff Morrissey, a former Durango mayor and present board member of the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District, was cited by police for…
What $710 million buys
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. It’s fitting that the story of Reclamation’s last big project should also be a story about one of the West’s last free-flowing rivers. From its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains near the Continental Divide, the Animas River descends about 125 miles south through…
Stella Montoya, La Plata Conservancy District
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “My husband worked on the A-LP project all his life and was in Washington in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the A-LP project. He chaired the conservancy district for over 30 years, and now I hold the position. “The La Plata River has…
Ray Frost, Southern Ute councilman
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “I have always been against the A-LP project, even when I was running for a seat on the tribal council three years ago. “The Southern Ute Grassroots Organization believes that the development of the Animas-La Plata project, as currently thought about, is not in…
Maggie Fox, Sierra Club
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “It’s interesting how we see history differently. Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., talked about the settlement 10 years ago as if everyone in the whole world was there. In fact, the conservation community was not there because we were expressly excluded. I think if we…
Dear reader
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. We don’t think anyone has written a book about Animas-La Plata, but we’ve come close over the years. If you want more background on A-LP, sign onto HCN’s Web site (www.hcn.org), where we’ve collected most of the paper’s A-LP articles. If you’d prefer, send…
Dear friends
What happened? Unlike you, we don’t have a clue as to how the elections came out. Did Bob Dole come out of nowhere to upset Bill Clinton? Did Walt Minnick pull a similar feat in Idaho? Is it now illegal for cows to pee in Oregon’s streams? Do parents have new rights in Colorado? Did…
Will ‘wanton killer’ lope into Colorado?
EAGLE, Colo. – Wes Schlegel, a lifelong rancher, just couldn’t figure it out: “If my dad and granddad could have heard what was said here tonight, they’d be rolling in their graves.” What he’d heard was praise for wolves, now gone from the Flat Tops Wilderness some 30 miles from here. Schlegel lives about 15…
Corporate giants slurp up a tiny town’s pure water
OLANCHA, Calif. – Crystal Geyser’s 100,000-square-foot bottling facility sticks out incongruously in this Owens Valley town of some 200 people. In the late 1980s, the company spent two years tasting water from all over the West, searching for a spot to build a new bottling plant. Crystal Geyser, one of the nation’s top sellers of…
‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’
The dirt two-track rises quickly from the river to a ridge of pines. After a few miles the track veers out onto the sagebrush flats of this high desert plain in Montana, and there, on a patch of ground where grass and sage thin out, I spot what I have come looking for: small mounds…
Shake-up: Greens inside the Beltway
WASHINGTON, D.C. – When the news leaked that Bill Meadows had been chosen to head The Wilderness Society, everyone called friends to commiserate. All anyone knew about Meadows was that “III” followed his name and he had raised $92 million for the Sierra Club. “He’s a fund raiser,” was the usual comment, followed by laments…
Native Soil: Lakotas garden for health and independence
PINE RIDGE, S.D. – One morning in May 1988, Leonard Little Finger woke up with a slight pain in his chest. But he went to his job as an administrator at the local hospital, and made only a casual mention of it to a doctor there. A quickly administered electrocardiogram revealed a predictable diagnosis for…
Heard around the West
When two grizzlies in Glacier National Park began snuggling up to tourists, the agency brought in a pack of Karelian bear dogs. These black-and-white canines specialize in chasing their fellow carnivores in a very aggressive way. At least one grizzly has taken the hint. A bear biologist told the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls,…