Farmers in the Klamath Basin found vindication in a National Research Council report, released Oct. 21, which says the solution to Klamath’s protracted water struggles lies not in irrigation shutoffs but in sweeping repairs to an out-of-balance landscape. In 2001, federal biologists reserved so much water for fish farmers nearly rioted. But there is no […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inNovember 10, 2003: San Diego's Habitat Triage
Agriculture’s wild side
It’s no coincidence that farming and ranching are at least partly responsible for a huge number of federal endangered species listings. When the goal of agriculture is to create monocultures of corn, soy, wheat, hogs or cattle, biodiversity loses. But that doesn’t mean modern agriculture has to be incompatible with healthy ecosystems. In his new […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Gas drilling blamed for smog
Why would Oklahoma City, a town of 500,000 people, have higher levels of some smog-forming hydrocarbons than famously hazy metropolises like Houston, Chicago and New York? A group of atmospheric scientists from the University of California, Irvine collected hundreds of air samples across a 1,000-mile-wide area to find out. Their conclusions, released in the Oct. […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
A bright spot for illegal workers
About a half-million undocumented immigrant farmworkers may earn legal residency under a bill introduced in Congress in September. Unlike a host of similar efforts in the past, this bill appears likely to pass. “This is very historic,” says Will Hart, a spokesman for Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, R, who co-sponsored the Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Mining companies slapped with half the bill for Superfund mess
Environmentalists, Coeur d’Alene Tribe members and government attorneys are doing victory jigs over a federal court ruling regarding a north Idaho Superfund site. Even the mining companies seem fairly pleased with the outcome this time. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the federal government have wrangled in court with two mining companies for over a decade, […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Snowmaking and drought: a bad combination
Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder say that extended drought, coupled with mining pollution, could make for rocky winters at Colorado ski resorts. A recently released study published in the American Geophysical Union’s EOS Journal examines the Snake River Watershed in Summit County, Colo., where hotter weather threatens snow conditions at popular ski resorts […]
Posted inOctober 27, 2003: The Gear Biz
Gas industry gets cracking
There’s no mistaking the moment when the coal deposits crack. The earth shakes, windows rattle and cupboard doors swing open, says Carl Weston, a landowner who lives outside Durango, Colo. “A few years back, I started getting calls from people in the San Juan Basin, saying, ‘My house shook and my (well) water turned black,’” […]
Posted inWotr
Teddy Roosevelt would have put his foot down
When the young Theodore Roosevelt went West to become a cattle rancher in the late 1800s, he was impressed by the flint of the Western character. In his travels through South Dakota and the Rocky Mountains, he met mountain men and cowboys and Indians so independent and strong-willed that even the robuster-than-robust Roosevelt confessed he […]
Posted inWotr
A corporation’s deadly legacy lives on
“It was a Superfund site,” my friend Nina told me, joking about a house she and her husband nearly bought in the crunched real estate market of the greater Yellowstone area. At first they loved the house and its affordable price. Then an inspector informed them that the building was full of asbestos-laden vermiculite from […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Contamination uncovered at Energy office
The toxic heavy metal beryllium has mysteriously cropped up in a U.S. Department of Energy complex in North Las Vegas, and investigators believe it may have come from a 1965 nuclear reactor explosion some 85 miles away. In March of 2002, a contract worker at the complex was diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease, which can […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
New Mexico: A nuclear homeland?
With open arms, New Mexico’s politicians welcome a new uranium-enrichment plant
Posted inOctober 13, 2003: The Big Story Written Small
Clearing the air
For more than 30 years, farmers in California have been exempt from the Clean Air Act. That’s about to change.
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
What child labor laws?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Harvesting Poison.” WENATCHEE, Wash. — José and Luis are only 10 and 11 years old, but they are already expert cherry-pickers. With three summers of experience working in the orchards with their father, they know how to pluck the cherries without harming the tree […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Harvesting Poison
In the little-seen world of immigrant farmworkers, pesticides are a constant threat — and for the workers, the only options are shutting up or getting out.
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Reweaving the river
Farmers and ranchers — not ‘yuppie environmentalists’ — work on a Colorado restoration
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Healthy workers, healthy label
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Harvesting Poison.” The Bailey family grows more than cherries on their 1,500-acre orchard in The Dalles, Ore. The fourth-generation farmers are also trying to nurture worker-friendly conditions. They offer employees decent housing, such as modular trailers and small brick houses, equipped with showers, toilets […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
Connections to your kitchen
The next time you reach for these three popular foods, consider this sampler of the chemicals commonly applied to them in the fields, and the potential impacts to farmworkers’ health if the pesticides are used improperly. Apples Azinphosmethyl (AZM), a pesticide, can cause nausea, convulsions, weakness, respiratory distress, headaches, eye injuries and neurological damage that […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Toxic waste looms over village
While a toxic waste heap inches toward a northern New Mexico village, a mining company and the state crawl toward a reclamation plan. In the 1960s, the mining company Molycorp dumped wasterock from an open-pit molybdenum mine, leaving a 1.6 million-cubic-yard toxic pile above the small town of Questa (HCN, 8/28/00: The mine that turned […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 2003: The West's Biggest Bully
Being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
“It’s not easy being rich” — especially when you’re rich in natural resources. So says a new report from the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explaining why the West is smack-dab in the middle of the nation’s energy fight. The report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy, […]
Posted inWotr
Small farmers seek refuge in the city
Squeezed out of their traditional outlets by larger growers and global competition, Oregon’s small farmers are seeking refuge in the cities. They’re selling directly to customers at farmer’s markets–and, in the process, helping urbanites reconnect with the source of their food. “This is the farmer’s only hope, the only way we can make a living […]