After four frustrating years of cajoling Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law that allows hard-rock mining on public lands, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has decided to see what he can do on his own. Recently he announced a task force that would investigate the ways the administration can prevent some of the environmental damages […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
It’s cows as usual in Oregon
Last fall, Oregon activists envisioned cattle fenced away from riverbanks, and streams tested for purity after a district court ruled that grazing was polluting water on the state’s Forest Service lands (HCN, 10/28/96). It hasn’t happened yet. Instead, state officials are scrambling to draw up “emergency” grazing rules so ranchers can turn out their cows […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Still no deal for New World Mine
With great ceremony last August, President Bill Clinton announced he had saved Yellowstone by blocking a proposed gold mine that bordered the park (HCN, 9/2/96). Once the applause died down, critics who worried that the the deal was a ploy for re-election warned that the deal was not done: Clinton still had to secure $65 […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Is Hanford back in the bomb business?
With the Cold War over and plutonium production halted at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, the federal facility seemed destined only for intensive and expensive cleanup (HCN, 1/22/96). No longer. Outgoing Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary has announced that Hanford’s research nuclear reactor, named the Fast Flux Test Facility, will remain on standby for […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Nuclear dump could waste the Colorado, foes say
WARD VALLEY, Calif. – Through the chill of winter and 120-degree heat in the summer, activists have camped for the past 16 months among the lizards, cacti and creosote of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: To stop California from building a low-level nuclear dump in this long, desolate valley. At times, this protest on a […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Oregon’s ranchers vote for survival
From the start, it was easy to see that the meeting on a bleary January 1994 day in Albuquerque, N.M., would go nowhere. The purpose was to look for a compromise, but four New Mexico environmentalists and ranchers spent most of the time hurling barbs at each other. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Gov. Bruce […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
This trip’s to the pits
It’s not exactly the Grand Canyon, but your next Arizona vacation could include the enormous crater of an open-pit copper mine. ASARCO Inc. ow offers bus tours of its Mission Mine near Tucson, hauling visitors to an overlook of the two-mile-long, 13’4-mile-wide hole deep enough to hide a 100-story building. Tourists can also see “the […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Alien invasions
The aliens have landed and they’re killing the natives. It may sound like the plot of a bad movie, but it’s real life: Alien species threaten the survival of native plants and animals across the country. In the report, America’s Least Wanted, The Nature Conservancy has named the 12 most threatening invaders of our nation’s […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
We’d rather have weeds, Missoulians say
MISSOULA, Mont. – This city’s Mount Sentinel seems an unlikely place for an environmental battle. Not a grand mountain by Western standards, it’s a stoop-shouldered hill that bears the University of Montana’s “M”. It is covered mostly by open meadows, and, like much grazing land in western Montana, it is infested with weeds alien to […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
Leonard Felix
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Leonard Felix has been spraying chemicals on crops for 27 years. When he isn’t spraying Olathe’s famous sweet corn in western Colorado, he may be flying over a national forest dropping native seeds on a recent burn. Leonard Felix: “We work with beekeepers when […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Judge kicks out cows
After nearly five years of haggling over how many cows should be allowed on the Diamond Bar grazing allotment in New Mexico, U.S. District Judge Howard Bratton ordered Dec. 4 that all 863 cows belonging to ranchers Kit and Sherry Laney must leave national forest land. The Laneys had sued last spring when Forest Service […]
Posted inDecember 23, 1996: El Nuevo West
Cow coup: Wyoming governor usurps federal grazing group
CASPER, Wyo. – It was not yet high noon, but the showdown over grazing between Wyoming’s governor and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had begun to unfold. Around a table sat the 15 members of Wyoming’s Resource Advisory Council. They were the very same ranchers, industry representatives and conservationists who had been meeting for over a […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Reservoir unleashes more than water
Biologists braved a morass of mud and fish carcasses in early October while investigating a section of the Poudre River near Fort Collins, Colo. More than 4,000 fish were killed when an irrigation company drained its reservoir to check water gates at the bottom of the dam. Mike Cola, a dam-safety engineer for the Colorado […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Pollution in paradise
A robust service economy can’t bury mining’s toxic waste
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
River cleanup is slow, expensive and maybe hopeless
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CANYON CREEK, Idaho – Thick mud gushes beneath Marti Calabretta’s high rubber boots as she walks from her office, a much-used house trailer, to the dirty pickup truck. The raw landscape looks like a construction site before the pouring of a foundation, but Calabretta […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Logging, floods push metals downstream
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Heavy metals don’t recognize state boundaries. That’s why some people in Spokane, Wash., 30 miles downstream from Lake Coeur d’Alene, are worried. “The metals are coming this way, and we hope to slow them down so they don’t also poison the Columbia River Basin,” […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Cows, ballot measure gunned down in Oregon
JOHN DAY, Ore. – Patrick Shipsey is a tall, thin doctor who loves rural living. A native of the small southern Oregon city of Klamath Falls, he moved to John Day six years ago because he says he was drawn to the surrounding countryside. Although his environmentalism at times made him a pariah in this […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
What’s not on the label
The “secret” ingredients in a few widely used pesticides won’t be secret anymore, thanks to a small nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore. The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides won a lawsuit in U.S. District Court Oct. 16 against both the Environmental Protection Agency and the pesticide industry, which had claimed that “inert” ingredients are […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Urgent news from the front
The battle over whether to industrialize Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front has heated up, thanks to a proposal from the Forest Service to allow new oil and gas leases in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement would make 52 percent of the 1.8 million-acre forest available for […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
The Last Ranch: The truth is stranger than the book
In 1992, I followed a year in the life of a third-generation ranch family named Whitten in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. I was exploring an idea. I supposed that a fresh understanding of nature might save the world from becoming desert. The impetus came from a long association with the ideas of […]