Idaho’s beautiful Silver Valley and Lake Coeur d’Alene build a new resort economy on a toxic stew of mining waste.
The “tough love’ trial is over
After Arizona teenager Aaron Bacon died of perforated ulcers on a wilderness program for wayward teens two years ago, eight North Star employees were charged with felony neglect and abuse of a disabled child (HCN, 6/10/96). Now their trials are over, and only Bacon’s field instructor, 22-year-old Craig Fisher, is guilty as charged. Although Fisher…
Ted Turner makes a deal
Thanks to a land swap, Montana commoners will no longer be able to hunt, fish or hike on state lands nestled deep within the private kingdom of media mogul Ted Turner and his wife, Jane Fonda. Turner didn’t like uninvited guests invading the Flying D Ranch southwest of Bozeman, Mont., so he offered the state…
Clean air for a price
Owners of the Centralia Coal Plant in Washington want as much as $80 million in state tax breaks to stop polluting the air over Mount Rainier National Park and Mount Saint Helens National Monument. Although the Clean Air Act requires the coal plant to install state-of-the-art scrubbers worth $300 million, officials at PacifiCorp, the primary…
Some big birds come back
It didn’t take long for wildlife biologists to swoop down after a court decision cleared the way for bringing California condors back to the Colorado Plateau. A federal judge ruled Oct. 16 that officials from San Juan County in Utah could not stop reintroduction efforts since they could not prove harm from the birds. Less…
Reservoir unleashes more than water
Biologists braved a morass of mud and fish carcasses in early October while investigating a section of the Poudre River near Fort Collins, Colo. More than 4,000 fish were killed when an irrigation company drained its reservoir to check water gates at the bottom of the dam. Mike Cola, a dam-safety engineer for the Colorado…
If politics is a baseball game, I don’t even own a bat
After each election I become the fearful character in a Gary Larson cartoon, peering through window slats to discover that neighboring houses are occupied by large canines, drooling spittle and looking hungrily in my direction. After 12 elections, I ought to have more stomach for the results, but each biennium comes as fresh horror. The…
Dear friends
The aftermath With this issue we get our chance to punditify, prognosticate and otherwise ponder what Western voters meant to do when they each took five or 10 minutes to punch out their preferences: Urban voters may pull down levers in booths with curtains; rural voters tend to stand at open lecterns and punch out…
Cows, ballot measure gunned down in Oregon
JOHN DAY, Ore. – Patrick Shipsey is a tall, thin doctor who loves rural living. A native of the small southern Oregon city of Klamath Falls, he moved to John Day six years ago because he says he was drawn to the surrounding countryside. Although his environmentalism at times made him a pariah in this…
Idaho jury hits 12 Cove-Mallard protesters hard
An Idaho county jury recently assessed $1.15 million in damages against 12 Earth First! protesters, one of the largest civil awards ever levied against environmental rebels. The Oct. 30 verdict was made in connection with construction delays and $20,000 in damage to a D-8 Caterpillar tractor, a rubber-tired skidder and an excavator in the Nez…
New Mexico environmentalists lease state lands
For the first time in the history of the West, environmentalists have won a lease for state-owned land. Forest Guardians and the Southwest Environmental Center submitted a joint bid for the 550-acre tract on the Rio Puerco River in northwestern New Mexico; much to their surprise, they got it. “Now we have to shift from…
Pollution in paradise
A robust service economy can’t bury mining’s toxic waste
Piling a new economy on the old
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For a century, mining and logging drove the economy of Coeur d’Alene. When those industries went bust in the early 1980s, a small group of city leaders began searching for a new engine. Among them was Duane Hagadone, a native son who owns most…
The West is just another ethnic voting bloc
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oh, you folks think you’re so different out there, do you? All these seminars and conferences about the Old West and the New West, the changing West, the future of the West, the culture of the West, even the sovereignty of the West. From the intellectuals in the universities to the anti-intellectuals…
River cleanup is slow, expensive and maybe hopeless
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CANYON CREEK, Idaho – Thick mud gushes beneath Marti Calabretta’s high rubber boots as she walks from her office, a much-used house trailer, to the dirty pickup truck. The raw landscape looks like a construction site before the pouring of a foundation, but Calabretta…
The Republicans now own the West
The morning after the elections, Carl Pope and Deb Callahan, heads of the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters respectively, held a jubilant conference call with the press: “The message from yesterday’s election comes down to two words – environment wins. Voters supported those committed to protecting our environment,” began Callahan. “The nation’s…
Sacred lands shouldn’t smell
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In 1994, the Coeur d’Alene tribe spent $200,000 to remove 1,000 tons of lead-contaminated soil from a riverside area long used by the tribe. But when the tribe wanted to construct a levee on private land to protect the site from floods, the other…
Don’t expect problem solving in 1997-1998
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. How will the elections affect environmental issues in the Congress? One thing is certain, observers say: They won’t make resolving problems any easier. Wilderness: In Utah, the elections seem to bolster the chances of passing a small-acreage wilderness bill. With Democratic Rep.…
A tribe that takes the high road
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. It was the discovery of silver and gold in the hills above Lake Coeur d’Alene that finally pushed the Coeur d’Alene Indians onto a reservation in the 1870s. Now it is the tribe – small, at just 1,450 members – that is pushing back…
The way columnist Ellen Miller saw one ’96 race in Colorado
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. “None of the big-city analysts have tumbled yet to what beat Tom Strickland, the Democrat who ran against Wayne Allard for the Senate in Colorado. What happened was that Strickland, a close but not identical politician in the Tim Wirth mode, lost…
Logging, floods push metals downstream
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Heavy metals don’t recognize state boundaries. That’s why some people in Spokane, Wash., 30 miles downstream from Lake Coeur d’Alene, are worried. “The metals are coming this way, and we hope to slow them down so they don’t also poison the Columbia River Basin,”…
Heard around the West
Visitors to one of north Idaho’s most popular spots – the 200-acre “Samowen” campground on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille – have often been stumped by its Polynesian-sounding name. ” ‘Can you tell me about Samoan campground?’ they ask,” Idaho Panhandle National Forest spokeswoman Judy York told the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Now the area has…