A reporter travels through Washington state’s 5th congressional district to try to understand the November election defeat of Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley after 30 years in office.
Californians talk too much trash
As co-chairs of the Kanab (Utah) Beautification Committee, California retirees Ken and Pat Nute discovered it takes more than good intentions and a little elbow grease to clean up a town. Tact would have helped, say city council members, who voted to disband the committee in March after Ken Nute flashed photos of houses he…
Stand up for reason in rural Utah
Dear HCN, I couldn’t agree more with you that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was perceptive enough to know he was taking on a no-win challenge as secretary of Interior (HCN, 5/1/95). In that regard, I would like to address a misconception about rural politics in Utah. It is easy to point toward county governing bodies…
Montana man charged in wolf killing
A 42-year-old unemployed Red Lodge, Mont., man has been charged with killing one of 15 wolves restored to Yellowstone National Park. Chad McKittrick appeared in U.S. District Court on May 18, where he faced misdemeanor charges of illegally killing the large male wolf. A hunting partner turned McKittrick over to authorities, who found the wolf’s…
Quintessential Westerner
Dear HCN, One item in Ed Marston’s piece on Bruce Babbitt (HCN, 5/1/95) cries out for correction. It wasn’t Easterners who presided over setting aside “huge tracts of Alaska as natural.” It was Congressman Morris King Udall, born in Arizona, descendent of Mormon pioneers, quintessential Westerner and ultimate pragmatist. As we listen to the ranting…
Bessie and Smokey are sweethearts
Dear HCN: Your story about the Forest Service’s demonization of fire (HCN, 3/6/95) was a fascinating account but failed to mention the well-documented but little publicized role of domestic livestock in the suppression of fire throughout the West. By removing grasses, especially in ponderosa pine forests, livestock have removed the fine fuels that enable fires.…
Citizen action gets results
Spurred by a Sierra Club lawsuit, Texaco has agreed to prevent further contamination of the North Platte River by its defunct oil refinery near Casper, Wyo. If the EPA and Justice Department approve the consent decree next month, Texaco must clean up the river, report monthly to the Sierra Club, and step up efforts to…
New rules, less protection?
New rules, LESS PROTECTION? The Forest Service says its revamped regulations under the National Forest Management Act will streamline planning for recreation, logging, grazing and other activities and better integrate ecosystem management. Critics say the new rules, published April 13 in the Federal Register, strike a blow at environmental protection. One requirement, to maintain “viable”…
Booming county looks for trust
Fremont County, Idaho, is booming, and Grant Chandler doesn’t like what he sees on the horizon. “To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in seeing another 50,000 people move in – or even another 10,000,” says Chandler, current chairman of the county commission. But he acknowledges that he can’t stop a development boom in…
Wonder hemp
Wonder hemp “Make the most of hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” * George Washington, 1794 Did you know that canvas was named for cannabis, the Latin term for hemp, because Renaissance artists used hemp cloth for their paintings? Or that our founding fathers wrote the first two drafts of the Declaration of Independence on…
A royal cover-up
A New Mexico-based oil company has shortchanged the government a possible $22 million a year in lost taxes and royalties. Meridian Oil Inc., the country’s largest independent oil company with 1,073 public-land leases in the San Juan Basin, has consistently under-reported production amounts since 1989, according to a Bureau of Land Management investigation. Two years…
Water and the West
WATER AND THE WEST In the face of rapid development, how will the West maintain and manage its water? A conference on Sustainable Use of the West’s Water will address the problems of water rights, June 12-14 at the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder. Twenty-six speakers are on tap, including Molly Harriss…
Booming in ski country
BOOMING IN SKI COUNTRY They may disagree on many issues but ski resort operators, environmentalists and real estate developers have one thing in common: They are often unable to manage the problems of employee housing and traffic congestion caused by rapid growth. A conference at Colorado’s Keystone Ski Resort June 7-10 aims to resolve those…
Grazing settlement favors ranchers
After intensive negotiations, environmentalists, ranchers and the Forest Service settled a lawsuit over cattle grazing on Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest. But compared to an earlier agreement, ranchers gained the upper hand. The dispute began when the National Wildlife Federation sued the Forest Service for failing to assess grazing impacts on the forest, streams and wildlife…
Rivers in jeopardy
RIVERS IN JEOPARDY It sounds like an honor, but it’s not. This year, the West contains four of the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers, chosen annually by American Rivers, a river conservation group. Because of a proposed gold mine near Yellowstone Park in Montana, the group voted the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River the…
Forest forestalls squatters
The housing crunch in Jackson, Wyo., is expected to get even tighter this summer. Bridger-Teton National Forest officials announced in April that camping on forest land in the Jackson district this summer will be limited to five days, cut from 16. This worries the Jackson Hole chamber of commerce, since 1,200 seasonal workers usually move…
Give “em an award
GIVE “EM AN AWARD Do you know a group or individual who deserves recognition for efforts to protect the environment? If so, send a nomination to the National Wildlife Federation by June 15 for the federation’s 1995 national conservation achievement awards, which range from communications and corporate leadership to an outstanding affiliate. The group will…
Wyoming refuses to join rebels
When the Wyoming Outdoor Council heard that state officials planned to meet with representatives from Nevada’s rebellious Nye County, the environmental group decided that people needed to know what Wyoming was up to. Nye County, Nev., gained notoriety when Commissioner Dick Carver bulldozed his way onto federal land and the justice department filed suit against…
Save wild connections
SAVE WILD CONNECTIONS “In every biotic community, there are story lines which fiction writers would give their eyeteeth for: Desert tortoises with allegiances to place that have lasted upward of 40,000 years, dwarfing any dynasty in Yoknapatawpha County. Fidelities between hummingbird and montane penstemon that make the fidelities of Port William, Kentucky, seem like puppy…
Cohabiting in Yellowstone
Cohabiting in Yellowstone While wolves dominate the news, another predator takes top billing at the Yellowstone Grizzly Foundation’s annual summit June 2-3 in Jackson, Wyo. Participants at the conference Bears and Ecosystems: A Period of Transition will discuss ongoing research and how grizzlies are adapting to the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Speakers…
Change at the top is just a beginning
Dear HCN, Marc Reisner’s recent story explained that some things have changed dramatically at the Bureau of Reclamation. Commissioner Dan Beard has little in common with his dam-building predecessors such as Floyd Dominy. Reisner portrayed Beard – accurately, I think – as someone firmly committed to making Reclamation more responsible to the environment and the…
HCN doesn’t cover the real issue
Dear HCN, After years of subscribing to HCN, I have decided to drop my subscription and will instead give to population groups. The United States is the third most populous nation behind China and India and 13th fastest-growing nation on Earth. The West is growing as fast as the fastest-growing areas in the world. Yet,…
Ranchers charge tourists for a dose of reality
SALINA, Utah – Jeff Powell and Susan Rottman are schooling about 60 ranchers in the vocabulary of the New West: Family farms are destination vacations, chores are recreational activities and cattle drives are adventure tourism. This is a crash course in “recreation ranching,” a fledgling industry in the mountain states and, some say, the economic…
Wyoming tribes get support to keep a river wet
As the Wind River slices through the 2.2 million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, home to some 8,000 Shoshone and Arapaho tribal members, it becomes the “most abused water system in the Western United States,” says Tom Dougherty of the National Wildlife Federation. But Indians aren’t the abusers. Dougherty says the culprits are non-Indian…
Huge snowmelt may lift salmon past killer dams
Just when everything looked dim for endangered salmon in 1995, the snow gods came through. They hurled tons of snow at the central mountains of Idaho, which, combined with heavy spring rain, should mean big runoff in the creeks and rivers in the weeks ahead. By the beginning of May, the floodwaters were already beginning…
Flip-flop on storing nuclear waste shakes up tribe
MESCALERO, N.M. – On a wind-whipped spring afternoon, tears streamed down the face of anti-nuclear activist Rufina Laws as she stood in the tribal parking lot. Leda Bob, a former tribal secretary, had just hurled a bagful of campaign literature at Laws and cursed her. The scene symbolized the nastiness that overtook this southern New…
This budget cut is destructive
Business isn’t being conducted as usual on Capitol Hill these days, and no better example exists than the perils besetting the Land and Water Conservation Fund The fund, created in 1965 at the height of the Great Society, was designed to finance federal purchases of land for recreation and habitat enhancement, and to give states…
Legislature votes to hamstring Washington state
By late July, Washington state could have the most far-reaching “takings” law in the nation – one so dramatic that even zoning might require landowner compensation. The Washington Legislature’s recent approval of Initiative 164 has elated its backers. “It is a crushing blow for big-government advocates, over-zealous state and federal bureaucrats, and cash-laden, well-heeled environmental…
Heard Around the West
The House of the Utah Legislature has voted 69-2 to exempt the smoke of Native American ceremonial pipes from the state’s Clean Air Act. According to the Associated Press, one nay vote came from a “white Republican Mormon,” Gerry Adair, who won’t okay any form of smoking because his father died of emphysema. The other…
Politics 101
The new politics has no room for a giant gentleman
Just a moment! Can we learn from a bogus book?
A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, by Gregg Easterbrook, 745 pages, $27.95; cloth, Viking. At no extra charge, you get with Gregg Easterbrook’s 745-page, $27.95 book, A Moment on the Earth, an erratum. Easterbrook had incorrectly written that the Environmental Defense Fund had sold, instead of given, its advice to…
Dear Friends
Ramon in Paonia We’re a little upset with Ramon – an activist against logging clearcuts whose 20 acres of private land is the staging ground for the continuing fight against fragmenting the Cove/Mallard area in central Idaho (HCN, 3/6/95). If we had known the exact day of Ramon’s visit, we would have organized a public…
The pendulum swings from dry to wet
Westerners who have been praying for an end to a decade of drought may have prayed a little too hard. The West is wet once again, and in some places downright soggy. Many states have been so loaded with snow this winter that residents are keeping their fingers crossed as rivers surge to the flooding…