Canadian activists trying to save Alberta’s Castle-Crown wildlands from rapid oil and gas development are frustrated by their nation’s lack of effective environmental protection laws.
Lessons of an intolerant past
As horrified Americans recover from Sept. 11, 2001, many continue to compare the attack on New York and the Pentagon to the 1941 strike against our military base at Pearl Harbor. But let’s also remember another historically relevant place from the World War II era: A lonely scrap of high desert called Minidoka, Idaho. There,…
Indians are cowboys
In old Western movies, the roles are rigid: characters on horseback are either cowboys or Indians. But these stereotypes, like most, are limiting and untrue. In reality, many Indians are cowboys, as the book, Riders of the West, demonstrates. Photographer Linda MacCannell and writer Peter Iverson set the record straight by following the Indian rodeo…
Tony and the Cows
There is little doubt that conflict over environmental issues will intensify under the twin pressures of population and aspiration. It also seems likely that much of this conflict will involve public lands – those lonely, semi-arid basins and ranges where the cattle roam. From Tony and the Cowsby Will Baker In 1995, journalist and former…
Three fiery reads
In the sixth chapter of his newly released book The Seasons of Fire, David J. Strohmaier pens an articulate elegy for the firefighters who died in Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon Fire. When Strohmaier traveled to the fatality site, “it had been only six weeks since the fire, but already thousands of small, light-green Gambel oak…
A myopic framework
Dear HCN, The unstinting praise for the Sierra Nevada Framework in your last issue is praise for a remarkably one-dimensional and frankly unsound plan. The Sierra Nevada Framework – like virtually every other current national forest planning effort, from the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project to the Quincy Library Group – has a myopic…
No problem for Brad
Dear HCN, In his piece on Brad Powell, the Forest Service’s Regional Forester for California (HCN, 9/10/01: New forest chief becomes a lame duck), Ed Marston makes it sound like Dale Bosworth fired Powell. In fact, Powell is moving to Missoula to become regional forester for the Northern Region (North Idaho, Montana, North Dakota). That’s…
Purchased news costs integrity
Dear HCN, I am a reader with only a single year of experience with your publication. I have learned to enjoy the doom, irritation, pique and hope that your publication brings to my home on a periodic basis. Being a born-and-bred Lexingtonian (“Home of the Revolution,” don’t you know …), my move West opened my…
The Latest Bounce
Amid the national uproar after the Sept. 11 attacks, the California Public Utilities Commission quietly voted to end its experiment in electricity deregulation. In a 3-to-2 vote on Sept. 20, the commission closed down its “direct access” policy, which had allowed consumers to choose their own power providers (HCN, 1/29/01: Power on the loose). Direct…
Coho salmon lose federal protection
OREGON For years, scientists have argued over the differences between hatchery and wild salmon (HCN, 10/9/00: Killing salmon to save the species). When it listed the coho salmon as endangered, the National Marine Fisheries Service included only wild fish, drawing a line between hatchery and wild populations. In fall 1999, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a…
Army Corps wavers on management plan
MISSOURI RIVER BASIN The release of an environmental impact statement on the operation of six dams along the Missouri River has resparked a 12-year-old debate on how to best use the waterway. During the late 1980s, a long drought created hard times for fish and farmers, prompting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate…
The smog is lifting
COLORADO Ask any Denver resident stuck in rush-hour traffic about growth along Colorado’s Front Range, and you may unleash a frustrated tirade. But despite all the new vehicles idling on the highways, Denver residents are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago. In the late 1970s, Denver violated federal health standards for three…
The once and future West
It turns out that this new economy of ours may be as subject to boom and bust as the economy based on cattle, oil and lumber. September 11 emptied Las Vegas, caused hunters to cancel trips to Idaho and Montana, and silenced ski areas’ reservation phone lines in Colorado. The West’s environmental movement was also…
Whoa! Canada!
Activists fight an uphill battle against a gas boom along Canada’s Rocky Mountain Front
Dear Friends
Mountain-grown tomatoes This has been a great summer for tomato plants in Paonia. They grew husky. And the law of the garden jungle was repealed for 2001: The hated, voracious green tomato worms never appeared. Moreover, the plants bore lots of fruit: large, dark-green, rock-hard fruit. In a pre-cholesterol world, that would have been fine.…
Terrorist attacks echo in the West
Tourism sags, energy policy debate simmers
Heard around the West
Quick, cover your eyes, that statue is naked! To avoid offending the sensibilities of some 2,500 parents and their home- schooled children last year, the Convention Center of Sacramento, Calif., agreed to dress its 7-foot-tall statue of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea. Usually, the replica of an ancient work attracts no attention; it has…
Ski resorts pump up ecoterrorism defenses
Hired sentries call the measures ‘kind of a joke’
Salt Woman confronts a coal mine
Zuni Pueblo defends its sacred salt lake from a proposed strip mine
Rebuilding a road to prosperity
Ex-timber town’s plan to resurrect a buried highway worries conservationists
Ranchers sour on Canadian gas plant
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Call the main phone number for the big Shell Canada natural gas processing plant in rural Pincher Creek, and the first thing you hear is an automated greeting that seems to assume you’re calling about an environmental crisis: “Thank you for calling the Shell-Waterton…