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 […]
Essays
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
Should city slickers dictate to trappers?
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this essay appears as a sidebar to a feature article, “Western hunters debate ethics tooth and claw.” Editor’s note: Under the banner of People Allied With Wildlife, more than 1,000 volunteers fanned out across Colorado earlier this year to drum up support for a constitutional amendment that […]
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
A mystery the size of your fist
I am wondering about beargrass. This summer brought such an explosion of blooms to the Northern Rockies it was front-page news – more beargrass than anyone can remember, more beargrass than anyone can explain. So much beargrass that you don’t have to be a naturalist to stop the car and marvel at the hillsides blazing […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Custom and culture’s worst enemy speaks
The West is certainly changing, but cultural beliefs rather than economic facts tend to dominate our dialogue. Because those beliefs are tied to a vision of a good society rooted in stereotypes of a simpler, less-corrupted-by-evil America, I see them as a type of economic fundamentalism. Consider these characteristics: Worshipping at the rearview mirror. Economic […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Montana Native: Who Cares?
In bold, black letters the bumperstickers declare: Montana Native. I spot them as I drive and, like the chiggers of my native Virginia, they make me itch. For the naive observer, the message must seem benign, a mere statement of birthplace pride. But for an increasingly wary transplant like me, it conveys something more sinister […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
How the New West will vote is anyone’s guess
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. They moved to Boise to kayak the Payette River’s world-class rapids. They came to Salt Lake City for Wasatch powder snow, the lightest on earth. They came to Seattle for Starbucks Coffee, Mount Rainier and the cutting-edge music scene. Since the early 1990s, thousands of […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Forget widgets, we sell wilderness
Italian ski racer Alberto Tomba signed a megabucks deal last winter with Vail Associates, the company that operates the Vail ski area. Tomba has a reputation best understood in the United States when compared to Michael Jordan and Madonna. Both admired and scorned, he’s never ignored – exactly the person that Vail Associates wanted to […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
The bigger the mine, the better the deal
BOZEMAN, Mont. – The way things are going around here lately, we should change Montana’s nickname from the Big Sky Country to the Big Swap Country: Let’s make a deal! No doubt it’s a form of progress. So were the 1872 Mining Law and the railroad land grants in their day. But qualifiers need to […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Clinton learns the art of audacity
Editor’s note: On Sept. 18, just before President Clinton announced the creation of the nation’s newest monument, writer and University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson talked about the historical precedents for protecting land through presidential action. GRAND CANYON, Ariz. – The grandest, most electrifying moments in American conservation history have always been reserved for […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
A harsh and priceless gift to the world
“There was a hardness of stone,” Theodore Roethke starts a poem, “an uncertain glory … Between cliffs of light / We strayed like children.” The Harsh Country, the poem is called. I’m miles away from what I think of as the harsh country, the cliffs of light, the country of bright stone. It has a […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Whatever happened to letting fires burn?
The summer wildfire season is drawing to an end, but the West is still burning. And despite a plethora of ecological research that demonstrates the value of fire as an ecological and evolutionary force, land-management agencies continue to suppress fires, except in a few wilderness areas or other reserves. Not only is such a policy […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Speak up for a quiet Grand Canyon
On my first visit to the Grand Canyon 45 years ago, I was overwhelmed by its magnificent silence, tranquility and timelessness. That serenity is hard to find today. It’s destroyed by the relentless drone of planes and helicopters. A thousand flights a day, 100 flights an hour rain noise down on the canyon. At best, […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Choose not to go boldly outdoors
I don’t hike often in Elk Meadow anymore, the county park near my home in Evergreen, Colo. I don’t hike often in Boulder’s open space parks, either. And I don’t hike any more in Rocky Mountain National Park. Everywhere I look our local and national wild places are crowded with ecology-minded recreationists, and I am […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 1996: Last line of defense: Civil disobedience and protest slow down 'lawless logging'
Grassroots grit beat ‘the mine from Hell’
The campaign to stop the New World Gold Mine on Yellowstone National Park’s northern boundary could rank with the great environmental victories of the 20th century. It’s not so much what happened as how it happened. Mine opponents started with a textbook grassroots plan to stop the $600 million gold mine. They ended with a […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Group sues to stamp out tolerance and diversity
When the National Park Service shows some sensitivity to the religious needs of Native Americans, stomp it. And be sure to also grind a heel into American Indian religious liberty. That’s the way Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver apparently views it. Last month, the foundation filed a lawsuit against the Park Service for respecting […]
Posted inAugust 5, 1996: Disappearing railroad blues
A radical water czar is cashiered by his board
It is not on quite the scale as the 1989 defeat of Denver’s $1 billion Two Forks Dam, but it is worth a mention. On July 16, the Colorado River Water Conservation District board fired its secretary-engineer, Rolly Fischer, after 28 years on the job. Fischer was fired – officially he resigned – in large […]
Posted inJune 24, 1996: Catron County's politics heat up as its land goes bankrupt
Canyonlands is a park in name only; in truth only highly organized chaos reigns
They put a park on it in 1964. Canyonlands National Park. People struggled to define its borders, to leave in Indian Creek, or to exclude Lavender Canyon, should the Orange Cliffs be inside or outside? A congressional hearing was held. Meanwhile rocks off the Orange Cliffs broke loose and moved from BLM land into proposed […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was […]