THE NATION
Molly Ivins, that passionate defender of the
underdog, died recently from breast cancer at age 62,
leaving behind hilarious books skewering the Texas Legislature and
a Texas homeboy named George W. Bush. The word
“scrappy” doesn’t begin to describe her style.
John Nichols, in a tribute to Ivins in the
Nation, called her a “wisecracking,
pot-stirring populist,” who wrote columns carried by some 350
papers, large and tiny, while also touring the country to give
unpaid talks about the meaning of democracy. Nichols said the best
thing that ever happened to Ivins was irritating her boss, A. M.
Rosenthal, the imperious and stuffy New York
Times editor, 25 years ago. She did it by calling a
small-town chicken-killing festival a “gang pluck.”
After that contretemps, she went back to Texas to cover politics
her way. Just before her death, Ivins wrote one more column about
the war in Iraq, telling her readers that each of us in a democracy
must be a “decider.” “Keep fightin’ for
freedom and justice, beloveds,” she urged in a column a few
years ago, “but don’t you forget to have fun
doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous,
ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom
can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and
celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell
those who come after how much fun it was.”
UTAH
Back in 1982,
the Bureau of Land Management found that off-road vehicle drivers
were grinding up the desert, pulverizing the land and the
cactuses trying to survive around iconic Factory Butte, east of
Capitol Reef National Park. But the agency couldn’t muster
the moxie to limit ORV use until September 2006, when it announced
that off-roaders had to stay on designated routes on 142,000 acres
around Factory Butte. It had been a long struggle for local
environmentalists and some public officials, and for them the
agency’s decision was a huge victory over those who consider
public land nothing more than a free-for-all jungle gym. For ORV
groups, of course, the end of complete freedom was a bitter defeat.
The newsletter of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance,
Redrock Wilderness, collected some enraged
comments from off-roaders, including this one: “What if we
just burn the cactus and get rid of the problem all together? If
it’s an endangered species, then it has obviously outlived
its usefulness…there should be a new open hunting season on
SUWA members. …” And from another rider: “Who besides
environmental weirdos cares about a stinking cactus? … Kill
the cactus, let people enjoy the open space!” The
newsletter’s editor responded: “This one puts us in
mind of Mo Udall’s classic definition of the difference
between cactuses and caucuses: ‘With cactuses, the pricks are
on the outside.’” SUWA congratulated all those who
worked hard to protect the area, including the Richland Field
Office of the BLM.
CALIFORNIA
For the 22nd year,
volunteers organized by the Northcoast Environmental Center
patrolled more than 90 miles of beach in Humboldt County,
outfitted with tough gloves, plastic bags, and cards on which to
record all the junk they picked up. Seven hundred and forty-one
people removed everything from a car bumper and a World War II
ammunition container to 4,108 cigarette butts and other smoking
debris, but they couldn’t budge a port-a-potty stuffed with
garbage. One good sign: Smoking seems to be in decline in Northern
California. Just two years ago, reports the center’s
newspaper ECONEWS, based in Arcata, volunteers
patrolling the coastline picked up more than 7,500 butts.
ARIZONA
It might be
everyone’s nightmare: Rats popping up out of the water in the
toilet. That happened in a neighborhood next to the
University of Arizona in Tucson, reports The Associated Press. The
swimming animals were white, like lab rats or the kind sold in pet
stores, but even so, the county health department said it’s
not smart to “handle or touch a toilet-surfing rat, though
the chance of getting rabies or plague is low in this
situation.” The situation is certainly puzzling, since rats
coming into a house would have to hold their breath and swim
against the current, so to speak, of a sewer pipe leaving a house.
A spokesman for Arizona’s Health Sciences Center said the
rats were certainly not from academe, “and I wouldn’t
want that to become an urban myth.”
COLORADO
What do you do when
your city golf course has become a haven for deer? You
ask golfers to stay home and invite hunters in to kill the animals,
reports the Valley Courier in southern Colorado.
Alamosa did just that in late January, selecting 30 hunters by
lottery to cull the nearly tame deer that had been causing car
accidents and spearing pets. There was a constraint: Only archers
were allowed on the golf course to bump off the animals.
Betsy Marston is editor of Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard around the West.
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