It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she […]
Essays
Posted inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
Imagine a West without heroes
Heroes have always come with the West. When Indians blocked homesteaders, the cavalry came. When cattle barons closed the open range, President Cleveland reopened it with the Unlawful Enclosures Act of 1885. When aridity slowed settlement, the Bureau of Reclamation built dams. When Western forests succumbed to flames and cutting, Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service pledged […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
The skeptic: Collaboration has its limits
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Howdy, neighbor!, about collaboration efforts in the West. Editor’s Note: Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club, distributed this memo to the club’s board of directors last November. McCloskey wrote it to spur discussion; it does not represent an official position of […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Consensus even came to Washington, D.C.
Jim Jontz, feisty director of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, showed up at the seventh American Forest Congress in Washington, D.C., planning to stomp out in protest. Scores of other environmental activists, all passionately opposed to the “logging without laws’ timber salvage rider, planned to join Jontz’s demonstration at a conference its organizers called the […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
View 5 of the grizzly bear controversy
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Bringing back grizzlies splits environmentalists, in a special issue about collaboration in the West. Michael Scott recently became program director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. Before that, he was with The Wilderness Society. He lives in Bozeman. There is a lot of overlap […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Erasing the Southwest’s grandest vista
It was Barry Lopez who said that one of the dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. Until the 1970s, when air pollution from California, Mexico and coal-fired power plants in the region began to limit visibility, the […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Experts line up on all sides of the tree-grass debate
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story: Raising a ranch from the dead If only Sid Goodloe had confined himself to his six or so square miles of private property. Then his would be a straightforward story about the rejuvenation of a piece of exhausted land. But Goodloe doesn’t stop at […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Dance with a cow, and the cow will lead
In 1985, in mid-career, I went back to college. I wanted to be a range conservationist. At the time, I thought I was the only student who wanted to study range management so I could later have an excuse to chase cows on government time. Silly me. Even at granola-crunching, holistically groovy Humboldt State in […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
Goodbye, Deadwood
When I arrived in 1976, Deadwood, S.D., was 100 years old and still a living gold camp. I was 22, married and fresh out of suburban Minneapolis. Deadwood felt like home from the moment I set foot here. It wasn’t an easy place to live. You weren’t considered a local until you made it through […]
Posted inApril 1, 1996: Gambling: A tribe hits the jackpot
High Country Snooze
HCS publisher heaves fowl Joey Winterbottom, an intern who arrived last week, successfully administered the Heimlich maneuver to HCS publisher Ed Motown during a brown-bag staff meeting yesterday. Motown had noticed the meeting had gone two minutes over the designated hour and was trying to sigh conclusively to indicate it was over – a technique […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
How I learned to love logging
For a long time I was a critic of the Thunderbolt timber sale on the Payette and Boise national forests in Idaho. Its real name was the “Thunderbolt Watershed Restoration Project” because its intent, the public was told, was to help salmon. But it seemed like a timber sale since it called for 3,300 acres […]
Posted inMarch 18, 1996: What does the West need to know?
Tactics first, ideas last
Back when I was a college sophomore, a disillusioned freshman wrote to the campus newspaper: “It seems to me that this college is all about what’s going to be on the test and whether the professor is a hard grader. Where are the ideas and the passion?” He didn’t get ideas, but he did get […]
Posted inMarch 4, 1996: Who owns these bones?
True portentousness on a Wyoming highway
A few months back I was heading along U.S. 30 east of Kemmerer. It was one of those amazing Wyoming spring evenings, a panorama of sky, sage and sun which encompassed me totally, so totally that it took me a few moments to realize I had pulled off the highway and was standing in a […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 1996: Can a Colorado ski county say 'Enough is enough'?
Federal negligence turns ordinary Montanans hostile
NOXON, Mont. – Until last spring, few people had heard of Noxon, Mont., a sleepy town in the morning shadows of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness. That changed after the Oklahoma City bombing and the media frenzy around citizen militias, including the Militia of Montana (MOM) based in Noxon. Now, most folks who have heard of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
One man’s good move
My father is impeccably urban. Except for a stint at boarding school in New England and a few summer jobs in the country – he was fired from one for accidentally hoeing the heads off a half-mile-long row of cabbage – he remained in New York almost his entire life. His tastes, his habits of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Separating sense from nonsense in New Mexico’s forests
Environmentalists in northern New Mexico have a chance to show their better side. Having brought things to a halt in the recent, unnecessary crisis over firewood on Carson National Forest (HCN, 12/25/95), they might now show they can start things that need to get started. The crisis resulted from a lawsuit over the Mexican spotted […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
…and the words from the meaning on the Nevada range
“We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” – W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Times of Civil War “This is a war we’re in. We’re choosing up sides,” thundered Gene Gustin, chairman of the public lands advisory committee for Elko County, Nev. Shouts of approval rose from a crowd of […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 1996: Lack of enchantment: Santa Fe's boom goes flat
Don’t just stand there: Get arrested
Everybody’s doing it – the Audubon Society’s Brock Evans, former Indiana congressman Jim Jontz, the Sierra Club’s Charlie Ogle – all going to jail for trees and to stop salvage sales. Getting handcuffed and treated roughly by gendarmes. Paying a new, for them, sort of dues. Since our travels around the West put us in […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hanford: Boomtown of the atomic frontier
At the beginning of World War II, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr told American scientists that “to get the fissionable materials necessary to make a bomb, you’re going to have to turn the whole country into a factory.” He exaggerated, of course. The factory took up counties, not countries. The Hanford Engineering Works in a […]
Posted inJanuary 22, 1996: At Hanford, the real estate is hot
Hunting: Get used to it
Let me state right off and as unapologetically as possible that I am a member of the “hook-and-bullet” press – a field editor of the venerable Outdoor Life magazine, which along with its sister publication, Field & Stream, are America’s original conservation magazines. Both have been in business since before the turn of the century, […]