A Place to Stand Jimmy Santiago Baca 264 pages, hardcover $24. Grove Press, 2004. If you think your own busy life offers challenges, open Baca’s latest book and be very grateful. Baca is not only New Mexico’s finest poet and homegrown writer, but an ex-con whose memoir will stun those of us who think we […]
Books
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
One with Ninevah: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future
One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich 447 pages, hardcover $27 Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2004. This husband-and-wife team at Stanford University lays out the ways in which the human race is jeopardizing its place on earth. Looking at everything from consumption and birthrates to “sustainable governance” and […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
Moab uranium tailings: should they stay or should they go?
The U.S. Department of Energy is calling for public comment on its plans to clean up a 130-acre pile of uranium tailings and contaminated soils currently leaching ammonia and radioactive materials into groundwater — and the Colorado River — just three miles upstream from Moab, Utah. The Atlas Minerals Corporation had operated the Moab uranium […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
Crimes against workers
Environmental crimes are among the hardest to prosecute. That’s the message authors Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni dramatically deliver in The Cyanide Canary, the true story of chemical contamination in southeastern Idaho. In the summer of 1996, 20-year-old Scott Dominguez, an employee at Evergreen Resources — a company that produced fertilizer from mining waste — […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2004: Where Do We Go From Here?
Toxic waste, tainted justice
Between 1952 and 1989, Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant — just 16 miles outside Denver — was the country’s headquarters for weapons of mass destruction. Workers there produced more than 700 plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs in the Cold War arsenal. But in 1989, following allegations of radioactive groundwater contamination and illegally burned and lost […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2004: Where Do We Go From Here?
Grand plan for Grand Canyon
Every year, more than 22,000 people run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Amazingly, there is still a list of 8,000 private, non-commercial boaters who have waited up to 15 years to get on the ultimate whitewater run in the country. That waiting list is among several reasons the National Park Service has released […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
A beautiful ode to a melting earth
Gretel Ehrlich’s latest book, The Future of Ice, is an intimate “ode and lament” on the effects of global warming. The conclusions are dire, of course: In the Arctic, as billions of gallons of fresh water pour into places like the Greenland Ice Sheet and where, in 2002, “at least 264,400 square miles of ice […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
State loopholes upset Clean Air Act
Six Western states are among those accused of shortchanging public health by ignoring certain hazardous chemical emissions from power plants. A new report from the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Integrity Project reveals that the majority of state regulatory agencies overlook power plant “upset” emissions that exceed federal pollution limits. Gaming the System: How the Off-the-Books Industrial […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
Calling all birders
Ever wonder how your feathered friends are faring in the face of deforestation, farming and other formidable foes? You can find out in the National Audubon Society’s State of the Birds 2004 report. Using 40 years of data collected from the U.S. Geological Survey’s national Breeding Bird Survey, the National Audubon Society assessed population changes […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Think global (warming,) act local
The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a new nonprofit in Colorado, is taking a backyard approach to the global problem of climate change. “Our main thrust is what (global warming) can mean right here, and that is more drought, more fire, and less biodiversity,” says founder Stephen Saunders, a 30-year Colorado resident. “It’s threatening what makes […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
Calendar
The Watershed Management Council’s 10th Biennial Conference will be held in San Diego on Nov. 15-19. Titled “Watershed Management on the Edge: Scarcity, Quality and Distribution,” the conference will include speakers Christine Kehoe, speaker pro tempore of the California Assembly, Andy Horne of the Imperial Irrigation District, and Fred Keeley, the executive director of the […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2004: Keepers of the Flame
An unfinished life in Wyoming
A new novel from Wyoming’s own Mark Spragg relies less on the distinctive landscape of the West and instead explores the more universal territory of a fractured family. Still, most of An Unfinished Life unfolds on a Wyoming ranch near fictional Ishawooa, “elevation 5,313, population 1,783.” Seventy-year-old Einar Gilkyson lives a lonely life on a […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
How to deal with oil and gas development
As America’s thirst for petroleum and natural gas grows, energy companies are scouring the West for new sites to drill. Now, there’s a new guidebook and Web site, Oil and Gas at Your Door, that gives landowners a preparedness primer for the day that an oil and gas company man comes knocking. Produced by the […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2004: Window Shopping: Part-Time Paradise
Despair not one more day
“… My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” — Adrienne Rich History shows that the proverbial rock can be rolled, if not to the top of the mountain, […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
University gets smart about food
In May 2003, two environmental studies graduate students at the University of Montana in Missoula teamed up with the university?s Dining Services, a $2.5 million-per-year business, to start the Farm to College program. Since then, the efforts of Crissie McMullan and Shelly Conner have made large-scale local food purchasing a reality: The university has bought […]
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Wandering into wolf territory
The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently. […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Forgotten borderland
From space, the Black Hills of South Dakota take the unmistakable shape of a heart, marking a region that some consider the spiritual center of the world. But driving into Bennett County, S.D., is more like entering a legal Twilight Zone. This checkerboard of private, tribal and federal land seems to belong to everyone — […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 2004: Life After Old Growth
Dang crazy women
Like the two previous anthologies created by editors Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier and Nancy Curtis, Leaning into the Wind and Woven on the Wind, Crazy Woman Creek gathers hundreds of poems, stories and memories from women all across the West. This latest anthology’s theme is how Western women create and sustain the connections that define […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
A thin, dry border between heaven and hell
“The first impression of the country — one that does not wear off — is that of magnificent confusion,” writes Walter Webb of the southwestern corner of Texas, also known as Big Bend country. Some visitors feel as though they’ve discovered hell on earth. Other people find that this region of vast open spaces, colorful […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
The wages of sprawl
A new documentary, Making Sense of Place: Phoenix, the Urban Desert, uses the Arizona megalopolis to illustrate what happens when suburban sprawl goes unchecked. Historical and current footage shows how cheap land and even cheaper water have encouraged Phoenix to sprawl over more than 1,700 square miles of Sonoran desert. But the resulting generic suburbs, […]