As anyone who knows her will tell you, my mother is opinionated. She knows exactly what she wants in life, and — as I recently learned — in death as well. She and I have been discussing her funerary wishes off and on since her own mother passed away a year ago. It was an […]
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Rachel Carson’s redwood dreams, and 50 years of “Silent Spring”
As a child of the 1950s, I remember hot summer nights that were only relieved when a truck came by spraying a cool mist that would kill mosquitoes. We kids ran after that mist like it was the ice cream truck. Several years later, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, parents […]
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The teenagers we’re not helping
This winter, events in two Western states gave supporters of same-sex marriage reason to cheer. First, on Feb. 7, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that California Proposition Eight, the 2008 voter-approved ban on gay marriage, violates the U.S. Constitution. The court said the ban’s only purpose was “to lessen the status and human dignity of […]
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The Pawnee Buttes oversee a changing landscape
Updated 05/11/2012, 4:07 p.m. You don’t go to Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado by chance. Lonely and isolated, they stand several hundred feet above the rolling and sometimes choppy prairie. They’re nearly an hour’s drive away from an interstate highway, either I-80 or I-76, and it’s nearly that far to the nearest gas station. It’s […]
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Selling what’s priceless is the nuttiest idea of all
Of all the nutty ideas floating around the West of late — that Wyoming needs an aircraft carrier to prepare for the coming apocalypse, that Idaho residents should be allowed to lure wolves by using pets as bait, or that Yellowstone bison in Montana are “bio-terrorists” because they might cause brucellosis — none can match […]
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Micah True, born to run
It was less than two years ago that I first met the near-mythical Micah True, also known as “Caballo Blanco,” Spanish for White Horse, and the central character of the bestselling book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen. He recently made headlines when he was […]
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The hoof stops here
Horse slaughter is back on the table, so to speak. What amounted to a congressional ban against the practice ended when the 2011 Agriculture Appropriations bill reinstated federal funding for inspecting horses before they’re sent to a slaughterhouse. But it’s hard to know what will happen next. The Bureau of Land Management’s advisory board overseeing free-ranging […]
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A final hats off to rancher Doc Hatfield
Doc Hatfield died March 20 at his home in Sisters, Ore., just after his 74th birthday, soon after his and his wife Connie’s 49th anniversary, and an extraordinarily long three years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which usually kills within a year of diagnosis. Many Westerners may not have heard of them, but the […]
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The truth about wolves is hard to find
I spent this winter in northwestern Montana close to the border of Idaho’s Panhandle, a place well known for its dense population of wolves. To hear hunters tell it, I should have seen a deer or elk skeleton every few feet on the forest floor and a lurking wolf behind every tree. Game numbers have […]
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Wolf management in Idaho is not ready for prime time
Idaho’s treatment of wolves has not yet sunk to the bygone days of state bounties and federal poisoning that exterminated all the wolves in the Lower 48 states, except for a few in northern Minnesota. But it’s not far off the mark. With at least 378 of the state’s approximately 1,000 wolves already trapped and […]
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When wolf-trapping goes viral
Something new and provocative came through my Facebook feed last month. The anti-trapping organization, Footloose Montana, posted photos of three trappers, all posing with wolves that they’d killed in Idaho. It wasn’t the pictures of dead animals that startled me; to motivate its membership, Footloose Montana regularly posts grotesque images of suffering animals caught in […]
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A good ranger stands up to bad bureaucrats
When a woman ran to the front door of Yellowstone Park Ranger Robert M. Danno with a small bundle in her arms and a panicked look on her face, he grabbed the medical kit the National Park Service had issued to him. Danno, whose duties included emergency medicine as well as law enforcement, carried the […]
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A future of big fires and tiny bugs
My dad was a Forest Service ranger, one of the battle-hardened generation just stepping back into real life from World War II. Rangers like him moved to tiny little towns like Luna, N.M., and Custer, S.D., to work 24-hour days, and their wives were often their chief assistants and sometimes even served as firefighters. The […]
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Face it: All forests are “sluts”
If you think the word “slut” insults women, how about the use of the word “virgin” to describe a forest that’s never been logged? It’s a commonly used term. Dictionary.com, for instance, defines “virgin forest” this way: “a forest in its natural state, before it has been explored or exploited by man.” Still, I was […]
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Dead man working
There are plenty of ways for roughnecks to kill themselves. When I worked as a roofer in Deer Lodge, Mont., the guys on the crew would tell the same joke that’s been amended to every one of my blue-collar jobs: “If you fall off the roof, you’re fired before you hit the ground.” The joke […]
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Solar power works best when it stays small and local
In the spring of 2010, I was minding my own business, directing a small nonprofit whose focus for 15 years has been to fight any and all attempts to privatize public land. From bad land swaps that benefit billionaires and cheat the public to congressional selloff schemes, we thought we’d seen it all. Then along […]
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Conserving water makes more sense than moving it around
Across the West, proposed high-stakes projects to tap new water supplies are generating well-deserved controversy. It’s well-deserved because these projects ignore cheaper alternatives that make a lot more sense in the long term. The building proposals also share extremely large price tags that place uncertain but likely onerous levels of financial burden on present and […]
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How to heat-proof your garden
Across the Midwest, New England and Canada, high-temperature records are being broken by the thousands — 3,350 of them between March 12-18 alone. Meteorologists are scrambling to find anything comparable to weather that has been described as “summer in March.” Two days before the official end of winter, temperatures of 94 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded […]
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Fracking is the big new gun
New technologies are riderless horses. They have a mind of their own and go where they want. Someone invents the personal computer, and 40 years later you spend hours each day surfing the Internet. Travel agents disappear, software engineers are born. Outside Las Vegas, soldiers sit in darkened rooms piloting drones with joysticks, raining hellfire […]
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The lure of skiing in avalanche country
After dancing out on the edge of winter some years ago, I returned to solid ground with a good story. Unfortunately, others haven’t been as lucky. My adventure occurred in thebackcountry beyond Colorado’s Beaver Creek ski area. A buddy and I took the lifts in late afternoon, then crossed throughthe backcountry gates to create our own adventure in the Holy Cross Wilderness. I think […]