I have never visited the Louisiana Gulf Coast or Alaska’s Valdez Bay, but like you, I carry indelible mental images of spewing pipelines and oil-soaked seabirds from the environmental disasters that happened there. Now the images are hitting closer to home. The Yellowstone River runs the length of my home state of Montana like a […]
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Going down the road feeling bad
It’s the morning after surgery. My chest throbs. Is it time for pain medicine? I grit my teeth and roll over to check the clock on the bedside table. Except there is no clock on the bedside table, just a blocky beige phone on an unrecognizable bureau. I remember where I am just before I […]
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Justice delayed but finally delivered
When federal District Judge Thomas F. Hogan approved a $3.4 billion settlement with several hundred thousand Native American plaintiffs last month, it was the largest court-ordered payout in the history of the United States government. The restitution finally closes an unsavory chapter in American history that began more than a century ago, when Congress passed […]
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Shifting gears to a brave new world of Lycra
After riding for 25 years atop my old English 10-speed with the skinny steel wheels and tape-wrapped handlebars, I finally bought one of those fancy, 21-speed mountain bikes. When I got the new bike home — they don’t call them bicycles anymore — and leaned it against the wall in my garage — where did […]
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Tuning out and finding local
Global thinking has its good points; it may broaden our viewpoints or remind us that we could be Haitians or Tunisians. But in the West, the most visible representatives of the global economy are the super-stores where forklifts rearrange cartons of goods made somewhere besides America. Here in South Dakota, we specialize in local experiences, […]
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A fire lookout in a wilderness speaks of our past
If monster mansions in Jackson, Wyo., or Sun Valley, Idaho, can boast million-dollar views, what’s a historic cabin in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness worth? From this cabin that used to be a wildfire lookout, you can see a sea of summits, glaciers, a volcano and hidden lakes mostly surrounded by uncut forests. Green Mountain Lookout, […]
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The adolescent West
Logan, Utah, isn’t too anything. It’s not too big or too small, but it’s also not just right. Like many Western towns and small cities of about 50,000 people, it’s as confused as a hormonally challenged adolescent. Policy moods swing wildly between pro-development mayors and ones that want to go back to family-friendly neighborhoods. We want […]
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Why the Southwest is burning
No big thing happens for just one reason. This season’s fires, cutting broad swaths across the Southwest, result from the convergence of three powerful forces: climatic drought, institutional tunnel vision, and old-fashioned human frailty. On the face of it, the drought is simple: There hasn’t been much rain or snow across much of the region, […]
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Bullies get their way in New Mexico’s wolf recovery program
There’s a sign near my house that reads, “Don’t just stand there, Stop Bullying!” I remember being teased by the cool girls in middle school during the 1980s. Having survived adolescence, I naively assumed that pint-sized tormenters mature before reaching adulthood. But not always: Adult bullies employing the tactics of gossip, misinformation and fear have […]
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ORV riding needs on-the-ground enforcement
Not long ago, the Glamis off-road recreation area in Southern California was notorious for two things: It had become a place where ORV drivers could have a lot of fun and cause a lot of problems. Glamis, whose official name is the Imperial Dunes Recreation Area, came to define what happens when illegal activity on […]
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Monster wildfires have become the new normal
The wildfire historian Stephen Pyne calls Arizona’s Wallow Fire a “monster.” “Burning along the trajectory that every major fire in the region has followed, it will burn until the rains come,”he predicts. In 2002, the 500,000-acre Biscuit Fire in Oregon was a similar monster. Burning largely in the wild, it torched thinned and unthinned timber, […]
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Princess for a Day
Once a year, A Family for Every Child, an Oregon-based nonprofit that works to place foster children in permanent homes, hosts its Princess for a Day fundraiser. For $50, participants get pampered and primped, glittered and gifted with goody bags and gowns and an elegant tea followed by ice cream sundaes and a dance with […]
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The revolution will be motorized
Growing threats of violence; increasing rage; calls to restore liberty by throwing off unjust and unconstitutional government rule. The voices of the angry are loud, and they’re likely coming soon to a BLM Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service office near you. The issue that inspires this fury is closing roads through public lands. […]
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Ordinary wild
The cougar looks thin, his narrow belly dragging close to the ground as he slinks along. Paws as big as saucers on the oil-spotted concrete. Mouth agape in a terrified pant below wild, shifting eyes. Shifting at cars that whoosh by, shifting at men who flicker at the edge of his vision – some pursuing, […]
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A more colorful future awaits Nebraska
The 2010 Census recently revealed that the population of Grand Island, Nebraska’s fourth-largest city, has increased by a whopping 13 percent over the past decade. This was exciting news in a state in which 69 of the 93 counties lost population since 2000, and a third of those counties lost more than 25 percent of […]
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Saving the salmon, saving ourselves
The people of Salmon, Idaho, may have reclaimed their namesake river this spring. It happened during Riverfest 2011, a fund-raising event created to help build a kayak park downtown, where the Salmon River splits into two channels. The event attracted a lot of the 20-something boater crowd of river guides and semi-obsessive kayakers, many of […]
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Local food, local loans
I just loaned $3,000 to a small business in my western Colorado town of Paonia, and I’m looking forward to getting the first installment on the 6 percent interest. I haven’t decided, though, if I want it in the form of a box of fresh-picked veggies or as a gourmet dinner. In six years, provided […]
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Extreme Green
It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My “attack” on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major […]
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its a contrail
When we moved to the Colorado Plateau 20 years ago, I thought I’d be trading an ocean coast for a pristine Western sky. Instead, I was greeted by a nonstop parade of thundering jets roaring along one of the main air-transportation routes in the country, linking the East Coast to San Francisco. Congratulations, I told […]
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Anatomy of a disaster
The hydrologic havoc playing out in the Mississippi Delta is not a freak of nature. This slow-motion, manmade disaster is our inheritance from a previous generation of politicians, farmers and ranchers, who made bad decisions to correct short-term problems even as the best available science warned of long-term consequences. Like it or not, we will […]