Every year, untreated sewage flows out of storm drains in Portland, Ore., and into the Willamette River. “Most of the time, when you flush the toilet, it goes straight into the river because basically, when it rains in Portland, the sewers overflow,” says Don Francis of the nonprofit group, Riverkeepers. He estimates that 3 billion […]
Climate change
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
Desert development raises dust
‘Tis the season to be coughing: November and December are the worst months for Phoenix’s air quality, says David Feuerherd of the American Lung Association of Arizona. “Picture somebody … shoveling dirt down your bronchial tubes.” Officials in the Valley of the Sun say the area’s familiar brown cloud is caused by “fugitive dust,” brought […]
Posted inDecember 20, 1999: Unleashing the Snake
Clean-air program may suffocate
Washington state voters recently passed a ballot initiative that slashes taxes but leaves the state’s clean-air program gasping for breath. The initiative cuts license plate fees from an annual percentage based on car value to a cheap $30 and dictates that any increase in taxes for state government and schools must be voted on by […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Court reads the environment its rights
MISSOULA, Mont. – Tom France talks like a man who knows he’s made history. For three years, France, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation, has been battling a proposed gold mine on Montana’s Blackfoot River (HCN, 12/22/97). In October, he won a ruling from the Montana Supreme Court that could mean the end of […]
Posted inDecember 6, 1999: Peggy Godfrey's long, strange trip
Decision may help a granddaddy keep its teeth
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”Court reads the environment its rights.” The October supreme court ruling may help clarify the granddaddy of Montana’s environmental laws, the Montana Environmental Policy Act, or MEPA, which dates back to 1971. Modeled after the National Environmental Policy […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
A lasting chemical legacy
When a Missoula Rail Link train derailed April 11, 1996, ruptured tank cars exposed suddenly wakened residents of Alberton, Mont., to 129,000 pounds of chlorine gas and 17,000 gallons of potassium cresylate (HCN, 8/3/98). More than 1,000 people were evacuated from the western Montana town that night, and most didn’t return until health and emergency […]
Posted inOctober 25, 1999: Monumental chaos
Mohave agrees to clean up its act
Mohave agrees to clean up its act The view from the rim of the Grand Canyon will be clearer, thanks to a major cleanup at one of the Southwest’s largest coal-burning power plants. Owners of the Mohave Generating Station in southern Nevada and environmental groups announced the news Oct. 3, following a court settlement. “This […]
Posted inApril 26, 1999: Visionaries or dreamers?
Western weather: feast or famine
In February, Washington’s Mount Baker Ski Area was forced to turn skiers away for two days – a storm had buried even the chairlifts in snow. Boasting 90 feet of snow, the mountain is very close to setting a world record for yearly snowfall. Neighboring Mount Rainier isn’t far behind with 77 feet. Getting much […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Affluent effluent stinks, too
BIG SKY, Mont. – For years, this posh resort community of 2,500 people leaked partially treated sewage into the pristine waters of the Gallatin River, the blue-ribbon trout stream in Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It. In 1991 alone, an estimated 47 million gallons of effluent seeped illegally into the groundwater that feeds […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
Wyoming regulators gamble on Amoco cleanup
CASPER, Wyo. – Clad from head to toe in sterile white clothing, environmental engineers have become a familiar sight in this central Wyoming city of 51,000. They come to clean up the defunct Amoco Corp. oil refinery, one of the state’s oldest, and one of its most notorious, hazardous-waste sites. During its boom years in […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
Plant pays hefty fine for polluting the air
POCATELLO, Idaho – At the foot of the bare-faced Portneuf Mountains, plumes of white smoke issue from a cluster of smokestacks at FMC Corp.” s phosphorous plant, often obscuring the view of motorists passing by on Interstate 84. And charcoal-colored slag flanks the factory’s sides. The 1,400-acre Pocatello plant, first opened in 1949, is North […]
Posted inNovember 9, 1998: Grizzly war
Erosion danger fans flames
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 […]
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 […]