In Washington state, Patricia Hoffman’s community group, Save Our Summers, successfully led the fight to end bluegrass-field burning that was choking the city of Spokane (HCN, 12/22/97). Now she’s launched another air-clearing campaign, this time against wheat-stubble burning. “This is the first year that we haven’t had plumes rising in Spokane County,” Hoffman says. “What […]
Climate change
Posted inSeptember 14, 1998: We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight
Dreams of new industry go up in smoke
WILLISTON, N.D. – An empty warehouse, a crooked smokestack and a few tons of hazardous waste in a decayed industrial district on the edge of town are all that remain of a company that five years ago opened to fanfare. This isolated Missouri River town of 14,000 people on the northern prairie had welcomed Dakota […]
Posted inJune 8, 1998: Don't fence me in
All’s not Swell
In a surprise move, Utah Rep. Chris Cannon, R, says he wants to see more wilderness in the San Rafael Swell of southern Utah, and he’s written a new bill to prove it. Cannon’s bill would designate as wilderness about 400,000 acres of BLM land in the San Rafael Swell, and it would also set […]
Posted inJune 8, 1998: Don't fence me in
Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape
Preface by Wendell Berry It is unfortunately supposable that some people will account for these photographic images as “abstract art,” or will see them as “beautiful shapes.” But anybody who troubles to identify in these pictures the things that are readily identifiable (trees, buildings, roads, vehicles, etc.) will see that nothing in them is abstract […]
Posted inMay 11, 1998: The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
El Nino sweeps across the West
El Nino’s wrath hit sporadically around the West this winter, leaving more headlines than it did snow or rain. But where it hit, it hit hard, and punches are still being thrown. Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted El Nino would force the global jet streams north, causing warmer and drier weather […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
We can have electricity, jobs and clean air
There are big problems with the Mohave power plant. From the Hopi mesas of my people, we notice it all the time. Until the late 1960s we could see the sacred San Francisco Peaks clearly from my home near old Oraibi on the Hopi mesas, 80 miles away as the crow flies. It is the […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
A giant plume into the air
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to a back-page opinion piece, “We can have electricity, jobs and clean air.” Hard by the Colorado River at Laughlin, Nev., Southern California Edison’s controversial Mohave power plant began generating electricity in 1971. Its 500-foot stack throws a giant plume into […]
Posted inMarch 2, 1998: Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
A Nevada power plant earns itself a lawsuit
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – South of Las Vegas, Nev., the Mohave Generating Station remains the last coal-fired power plant in the Southwest to resist installing pollution controls. Now, the plant, one of the largest sulfur dioxide polluters in the West and a significant polluter of the Grand Canyon, sits in the crosshairs of the federal […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Superfund strives for accountability
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In 1980, two years after toxins oozed out of a landfill and seeped into a suburban housing development called Love Canal in Niagara Falls in upstate New York, Congress passed the Superfund Law. Officially known as CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Idaho chokes Spokane
Eleven-year old Derek Uphus fears the start of school each year because that’s when local farmers near his Spokane, Wash., home begin burning their fields and fouling the air over the city. He suffers from cystic fibrosis and asthma and when there’s smoke in the air, Uphus coughs constantly. “It’s like someone’s hands are around […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
Park may get trashy neighbor
EAGLE MOUNTAIN, Calif. – Once home to 4,000 people and the largest iron ore mine west of the Mississippi, this desert community now features boarded-up tract homes. Yet every five blocks or so a few houses show signs of life, and down one street, prisoners in orange jumpsuits have just finished building a new playground. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Floods hammer Southwest
A moving wall of water following a severe thunderstorm Aug. 10 forced residents and tourists in a Havasupai Indian village outside Grand Canyon National Park to evacuate. Two days later, thunderstorms southeast of Page, Ariz., near Glen Canyon Dam, pushed a flash flood down a slot canyon, where it drowned 11 hikers. “It was chocolate […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
The West weathers unusually wet times
With a huge snowpack in the high country threatening severe floods this spring, Westerners prepared for the worst. They beefed up dikes and levees and stockpiled sandbags in anticipation of the big melt (HCN, 5/22/97). But for most, the worst never came. Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Mount Zirkel’s acid trip
Two Colorado power plants are cleaning up their act, but it may be a case of too little too late. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey studying the Mount Zirkel Wilderness near Steamboat Springs, Colo., have found that air pollution from coal-burning power plants in the towns of Hayden and Craig harms wildlife. The plants […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Uh, oh – the glaciers are growing
Whitefish, Mont. – Bundled against the driving snow of another January blizzard, the regulars stomped into the Buffalo Cafe for their morning brew. The Flathead Valley was on the verge of exceeding the annual snowfall record with almost three winter months to go. The steamy cafe buzzed with chatter about aching backs, collapsed roofs and […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
The West braces for the big melt
The West is shaking off one of the wettest winters ever, and the snow keeps falling. Instead of April showers, a spring blizzard hit Wyoming early in the month, killing thousands of cattle and sheep trapped in fence-line snowdrifts. Record snowpacks are piled up in the high country, aided by late April storms: Parts of […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Montana train accident derailed a small town
Alberton, Mont. – When sirens pierced the air before dawn last April 11, Lucinda Hodges awoke to find workers in Haz-Mat suits scrambling through the streets in a thick, white fog. Then it hit her. “I’ll never forget that feeling,” she says. “You breathe and there’s no air. You felt like you were suffocating.” In […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cars kill trees
Scientists in California say the evidence is compelling: Air pollution from the fast-growing San Joaquin Valley is responsible for killing thousands of trees in the nearby Sierra Nevadas. The chief culprit is ozone, a pollutant created when exhaust from power plants or cars mixes with hydrocarbons in the presence of sunlight, say federal researchers and […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Burning for a buck
It sounds like an easy way to make a few dollars: Gather up coils of old industrial-gauge wire, pile it in the desert, douse it with diesel and burn off the rubber and lead insulation. The raw copper left behind brings 80 cents to a dollar per pound. The trouble is, it’s illegal and a […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
No nagging or preaching here
Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, Northwest Environment Watch, 1997. 86 pages, illus. $9.95 paperback. When was the last time you heard an environmentalist complain that we’re recycling too much? No street-corner shouter or mealymouthed apologist, John Ryan is the sober, credentialed research director of Seattle-based Northwest […]