They have stayed quietly in the background for decades, watching as their men vainly tried to pound the round peg of European governmental tradition into the square hole of tribal culture. But no longer: The women of Indian Country are speaking up, taking charge, and making things happen, according to a recent series by Montana’s […]
Books
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
A blueprint for better communities
Westerners who are fed up with polluted water and air, strip malls that eat up open space, and automobile-dependent lifestyles can look to a new book by the Natural Resources Defense Council for guidance on how to counter the poorly planned patterns of growth we now know as urban sprawl. In a series of 35 […]
Posted inApril 1, 2002: Move over! Will snowmobile tourism relax its grip on a gateway town?
How to handle the big cats
It’s a typical, sunny Western day, and you’re outside gardening when you notice a big cat eyeing you intently and slinking slowly towards you. What should you do? Don’t act defenseless, says Jon Rachael, regional wildlife manager in Idaho. “Almost invariably, mountain lions attack for food, so if you play dead, that only makes the […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
Will the real Gifford Pinchot please stand up
Char Miller has written a book intended to rescue Forest Service founding chief Gifford Pinchot from the battering he has taken over the flooding of Northern California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. In almost all accounts of that fight, Sierra Club founder John Muir is the defender of the beautiful valley while Pinchot wants to flood it […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2002: How I lost my town
Cactus Ed revisited
In the West, few names elicit as much veneration or revilement as that of Edward Abbey. But those of us who weren’t around during Abbey’s heyday, or never got to meet him, can only turn to books. Thirteen years after Abbey’s death, two new books add depth to the story of Cactus Ed. James Cahalan’s […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
The Natural West
Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond Professor of History at the University of Montana, in Missoula, lives on a 25-acre ranchette some miles outside that small city, in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains. To walk from those foothills to the nearby Forest Service wilderness areas, which he does often with Wily, a canine hybrid that […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
BLM’s coalbed methane plan disappoints enviros
The federal government wants to allow gas companies to drill nearly 40,000 new coalbed methane wells in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin over the next 10 years. That many wells would quadruple the number currently in Wyoming and increase the nationwide tally by almost 70 percent. The plan is outlined in the draft Powder River Basin […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
Bush administration wall hanging
Many environmental organizations send their supporters calendars of desert cacti in bloom, lynx lunging through powder snow or fly fishers casting into roaring mountain streams. Not Earthjustice. This year, the environmental law firm’s 2002 calendar profiles 12 Bush administration appointees in Technicolor rhetoric. Each month features a not always flattering color photograph of a different […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
A wing and a genius grant
After 11 years of quietly helping researchers and environmental activists carry out their projects from the air, Tucson pilot Sandy Lanham was awarded a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation on Oct. 23. Other pilots bill $300 an hour for similar services. But Lanham’s Environmental Flying Services, with the help of charitable foundations, only […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Looking for the Language of Red
Even in its hardcover form, Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, is small enough to fit easily into your backpack, the one you might carry if you happened to be taking a trip through, say, the redrock country of southern Utah. The book’s size is no accident. A collection […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
The West can govern itself
Democrat Daniel Kemmis has been the minority leader and the speaker of the Montana House of Representatives. He has been mayor of the university town of Missoula. He is an environmentalist. Yet in This Sovereign Land, Kemmis, now head of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, argues that the national government must transfer power […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Alternative development goes mainstream
A good hard rain in the Pacific Northwest’s urban areas can be bad news for the environment. Storm water draining off rooftops and through gutters can carry pollutants, damaging streams and wildlife habitat. Now, a group of planners may have a solution. Called low-impact development (LID), it focuses on innovative ways to manage storm water […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Artists paint a Pacific Northwest history
A book this smart makes you wonder why the undertaking hasn’t been done before: telling the story of a region through the paintings it has inspired. No matter, because Sasquatch Books has just released The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, an excellently assembled book edited by Northwest Bookfest founder Kitty Harmon. It presents canvases […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Gaining ground for the buffalo
The prophecy of the return of the American buffalo to the Great Plains has lingered like a whisper among Plains tribes since the emergence of the Ghost Dance in 1880. In the past few years, the Great Plains Restoration Council, a group whose aim is to repair vast tracts of prairie ecosystems for free-ranging buffalo, […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
A new vision for the BLM
Two conservation groups have teamed up on a report intended to shift the Bureau of Land Management away from its long-term emphasis on natural-resource extraction and toward conservation of the public lands. This reasonable and readable 74-page report by the National Wildlife Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council sets out a vision for the BLM’s […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Tribe’s pines fetch clean air credits
Last spring, Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes were happy to improve wildlife habitat and water quality on their Flathead Indian Reservation by replanting 250 acres of burned land with ponderosa pines. But for the London-based company that is funding the restoration, satisfaction comes from how much carbon dioxide the growing trees will suck out […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
National grasslands up for review
The grasslands of the Northern Plains – primarily under U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction – are home to abundant wildlife, from deer and elk to endangered swift foxes, mountain plovers and ferruginous hawks. But they are also the site of promising oil and gas deposits. With the release of the final environmental impact statement for the […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Audible biodiversity
The first few tracks of The Diversity of Animal Sounds take me from the enthusiastic song of a male satin bowerbird in Australia to the deep-toned, primordial growls of the American alligator to the unabashed mating grunts of a jaguar. I am amused, and then deliciously frightened, and finally, slightly embarrassed – I keep the […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
The Buffalo War: a maelstrom of Western issues
If there were one emblem of Western history, it might be the American buffalo. In Matthew Testa’s new documentary, The Buffalo War, that emblem becomes the focal point for an impassioned controversy. “The buffalo provide a mirror,” says Testa. “They reflect how we see ourselves and our place in wilderness. And that reflection is incredibly […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Economics with a heart, but no soul
In 1996, Thomas Michael Power wrote Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies, an economic study of the Interior West, in which everything that happened was for the good. If the West were not the best of all worlds, it was as good as life would get on the coasts. We had half the money, but twice […]