Albuquerque, N.M., Mayor Jim Baca, always outspoken,
is hopping mad. President Clinton recently signed an emergency
spending bill that included chopping 8 1/2 acres out of the city’s
Petroglyph National Monument. It’s “dishonest and cheating,” Baca
told the Albuquerque Journal, “but that’s life in Washington.” The
deleted acreage will go for a road extension to new homes;
opponents, including Baca, say they still hope to stop the
road.
When picking
replacements for the board of the Central Utah Water Conservancy
District, which oversees the $2 billion Central Utah Project, Utah
Gov. Mike Leavitt passed over an environmentalist and a lawyer with
“environmental leanings,” writes the Salt Lake Tribune. Instead,
the governor selected two real estate
developers.
Two young men have
died from hantavirus recently, the first fatalities since 1993,
when more than a dozen people died during an outbreak of the
airborne disease. The Cortez Sentinel reports the victims were a
17-year-old near Colorado Springs, Colo., and a 23-year-old man in
the Four Corners area of New
Mexico.
Rural residents in
eastern Colorado say they’re going to take their fight against
gigantic hog farms to the state’s voters. Calling themselves
STENCH, which stands for Stop the Environmental Nuisance of
Corporate Hogfarms, the group has begun gathering signatures to get
pig-farm regulations on this November’s statewide
ballot.
Another thing to blame
on El Niûo: Killer bees have made it from South America to
Nevada, their farthest point north so far, says AP. The
ill-tempered bees tend to attack in swarms and have been blamed for
killing 1,000 people since
1956.
The nays have it: the
U.S. Department of Agriculture will revamp its proposed standards
for what constitutes organically grown food (HCN, 4/13/98). Some
200,000 people told the agency that its organic label was too
permissive about allowing irradiation, sewage-sludge fertilizer and
bioengineering.
* Betsy Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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