Time magazine recently gave Westerners a good laugh. Time’s “Your Technology” columnist, Anita Hamilton, wrote about her road test of a new satellite radio network. You’ve probably heard of satellite radio – it’s the latest breakthrough, promising to beam signals from orbit to your car radio whether you’re in Stinking Desert, Ariz., or Sodden Pass, […]
Essays
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
In the grip of Ungulate Fever
Deep crimson splotches, like large drips from a painter’s brush, pock the snow and lichen-encrusted rocks. A few steps farther, they mingle with patches of gray-brown fur, some of which cling to the stiff gray branches of sagebrush. Then more blood, more fur, more blood, on down the hill. And finally, the body. Or what’s […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
How does snow melt? A test for all Westerners
“You can’t be a sissy and live in this country,” the old rancher told me, his German accent evident despite his being native to this mountain valley. “Or at least you didn’t use to,” he added, looking me in the eye. It was the 1970s, and I was new to the Interior West. The rancher […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
Attention, wolves: I’m what’s for dinner
Like many Western states before it, Colorado is considering a plan to bring the wolf back to its former turf in the Centennial State. Among the general public, support for the plan is significant: A study by a Washington, D.C., polling firm found that 68 percent of Coloradans asked were in favor of putting wolves […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
Greens join ‘Let’s derail a judge’ game
Federal judges around the West have often been the backstop protecting everything environmental, from stream quality to spotted owls. So it’s surprising when green groups say some judges are systematically undercutting their work. But some “highly ideological and activist judges are threatening the very core of environmental law,” warns a campaign by a dozen groups, […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2002: Here lies the Rio Grande
The Eucalyptus: Sacred or profane?
Only God can make a tree, but any ecological illiterate can plant it in the wrong place. Ansel Adams understood this. On running tree-planting Boy Scouts out of California’s Marin Headlands, the photographer declared: “I cannot think of a more tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless area, and to impose an […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Indian trust is anything but
When I was a girl, the grownups on our reservation, the Blackfeet Indian Nation in Montana, complained about their troubles with the individual Indian trust. It was a mess. Royalties for allowing oil and gas, grazing and logging on Indian-owned lands were collected by the Interior Department. The funds were held by the Treasury Department, […]
Posted inFebruary 4, 2002: Last dance for the sage grouse?
Why the bad rap for Mormons?
If you live in the Intermountain West, you know at least a few of them. If you live in Utah, they’re everywhere. If you are also a nonmember, or “gentile,” as Mormons call the rest of us, you bear a special burden when you leave home. Once people hear I’m from Utah, they invariably ask, […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
The American West is an island besieged
I saw the future of the American West. It stared at me with an unblinking black eye through a narrow metal window in the wall of an aviary on the island of Maui. “That’s the female,” said our guide, Mary Schwartz. “She’s the social one.” The facility manager for the Maui Bird Conservation Center opened […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
A sense of wonder needs no name
Once, I canoed around an Idaho river bend and surprised two enormous, white birds in the shallows. As they lifted off, showing black-tipped wings, I shaped my mouth around the unfamiliar words, “whooping cranes.” Another long-legged bird, farther downstream, joined the whoopers in flight. Yet when I told a knowledgeable birder that I’d seen three […]
Posted inDecember 17, 2001: Bad moon rising
Cybermapping the West – a new view
Cybermapping is a template of the inside of things, a grand tapestry of our cumulative desires. It’s our shadowmap.
Posted inDecember 3, 2001: Closing the wounds
Las Vegas: Images in light, images in stone
My brother, Karl, tells me the Las Vegas Strip is the only road in the United States that’s a National Scenic Byway after dark. It is scenic, though people tend to snicker when informed of this designation. We’re outside my brother’s apartment on the west side of the city. Karl points downtown, toward the Strip […]
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
We are the Oil Tribe
I’ve been visiting drilling rigs lately. For an environmentalist, it’s an education. Rugged tattooed men, macho diesel pickups and in-your-face bumper stickers: EARTH FIRST! WE’LL DRILL THE OTHER PLANETS LATER. In a country with 210 million automobiles, only 250 rigs search for oil in America. That seems a small number until you realize that the […]
Posted inNovember 19, 2001: Bringing back the bosque
The importance of being nowhere
The day felt like rain and smelled like rain. The sky held the soft gray of a winter storm, the kind of weather Mexicans describe as equipatas, equal steps, to capture that idle way the rain on a December day can slowly drizzle across the land. It was 1957, and I was your basic 12-year-old, […]
Posted inNovember 5, 2001: Wyoming's powder keg
Welcome to (your name here), Wyoming
If you have hankered all your life to have a town named after you, the opportunity arose last June at the Casper, Wyo., Holiday Inn. A High Plains municipality named Jeffrey City went on the auction block for cheap, complete with water and sewer, pavement, tract houses, apartments, a post office, and beer on tap. […]
Posted inOctober 22, 2001: Healing the Gila
High Country News: Friend or foe?
Over the past months, High Country News has received a number of letters and e-mails from readers upset about the tone of an article or an opinion expressed in one of the Writers on the Range columns. You’ll find one such letter below from a Bozeman, Mont., reader blasting Writers on the Range for running […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
Lessons of an intolerant past
As horrified Americans recover from Sept. 11, 2001, many continue to compare the attack on New York and the Pentagon to the 1941 strike against our military base at Pearl Harbor. But let’s also remember another historically relevant place from the World War II era: A lonely scrap of high desert called Minidoka, Idaho. There, […]
Posted inOctober 8, 2001: Whoa! Canada!
The once and future West
It turns out that this new economy of ours may be as subject to boom and bust as the economy based on cattle, oil and lumber. September 11 emptied Las Vegas, caused hunters to cancel trips to Idaho and Montana, and silenced ski areas’ reservation phone lines in Colorado. The West’s environmental movement was also […]
Posted inSeptember 24, 2001: River of dreams
The enduring Endangered Species Act
Four years ago, Bruce Babbitt stood at a podium in Austin, Tex., and, in his most sonorous, Garrison Keillor-like voice, delivered the new gospel on endangered species. The conservationists’ most effective tool in the restoration of species and their habitats – the Endangered Species Act – was in peril, the then-Interior secretary told the Society […]