Forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” King’s opposition to the war in Asia was immediately denounced as “demagogic slander” by Time magazine. But others also spoke out. George W. Ball, undersecretary of State, told […]
Essays
Posted inWotr
Peak bagging and how to avoid it
“I could not rest until the topmost stone was beneath my feet,” said John Muir. That’s right, nature-loving boys and girls: John Muir was a peak bagger. Long celebrated for his founding of the modern environmental movement and his exuberant love for the small wonders of nature — “not a sparrow falls to the ground […]
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Why bad people do good things for our public lands
There I was out on the high prairie that angles up to the mountains of the Front Range of Colorado, digging out Mediterranean sage with a tool of torture called the pick-mattock. I couldn’t have been paid to do this. Not only was I there, but over 100 other people were there, too. The weather […]
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Tomorrow’s ghost towns are sprouting today
It’s hard to believe that in the late 1880s, Bannock, Mont., not far from present-day Dillon, was one of the fastest-growing, most wildly energetic communities in the West. The mining town was even proposed as the territorial capital. Today, it is a ramshackle collection of abandoned buildings surrounded by mine tailings, and open only as […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2007: Bonfire of the Superweeds
Old West meets Old World in Big Horn
Shane Winkler pops open a can of Bud Light and stuffs a wad of Copenhagen into his mouth before turning on the sound system at the Big Horn Equestrian Center just outside Sheridan in northern Wyoming. It’s a hot July afternoon. The only shade is in the top rows of the small set of bleachers […]
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A happy 63rd birthday to Smokey Bear
It’s time we give an overdue nod of gratitude to that venerable bruin of fire prevention: Smokey Bear, who just turned 63 this August. At a time when bears are being tranquilized and relocated all over the West for Dumpster-diving and campsite pantry raids, Smokey remains the only honorable bear role model. You won’t find […]
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Hot time in the city
Summer features its best impression of Hades as we enter August. You feel like you’re awakening from a bad, slow-moving dream, one in which the cat has settled on your face, and you can’t wake up enough to move it, but neither can you breathe. That’s the way midsummer makes me feel. Denver’s weather is […]
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Wind power will blow your mind
Wind power has all the ingredients of a good brain-buster. The energy that windmills produce helps to preserve the environment, but the giant wind generators themselves have to be added to the environment. Wind power is making us redefine what we consider pollution. Windmills may not billow black smoke that require scrubbing or leak hazardous […]
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A Wyoming forest yearns to burn
Gorgeous red sunsets and haze in the air scare the heck out of people in my part of Wyoming. We live next to the Shoshone National Forest. It is a jewel, and so remarkable that it was the first national forest created by Congress. The mountains in this 2.4 million-acre reserve in west-central Wyoming are […]
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Living precariously with wolves and cattle
Through the end of June last year, we got along fine with the wolves. I was working on a ranch in Montana’s Madison Valley, where the wolves ran elk to exhaustion in the high country while yearling cattle fattened on the lower pastures of the ranch. Peaceful coexistence with predators seemed within our grasp, and […]
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They don’t have to shoot horses
The idea that you can keep a blind horse safely, that it can be pastured, ridden, that it can lead a happy, even productive life, flies in the face of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking, however, is not Alayne Marker’s strong point. She and her husband, Steve Smith, operate Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Montana, […]
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The caveguy within holds us back
I’ve been puzzled by people I know to be intelligent who nonetheless find it inconceivable that the earth’s climate could be affected by human activity. Then I saw one of those “cavedude” commercials on television, and a glimmer of insight began to flicker. In the commercial, a Neandertal in modern dress is talking to a […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2007: Guns R Us
The owl and I
“I rejoice that there are owls,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote. For 30 years, I had no idea what he meant. I grew up in Los Angeles, and if owls soared the smoggy skies, I never saw them. Only after moving to Oregon did I learn the word “raptor.” Intrigued by these magnificent, carnivorous birds, […]
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Reckless at 50
I celebrated my 50th birthday a few years back by just about killing myself on a desert hike. I lived atop a 3,000-foot plateau called Grapevine Mesa, an extraordinary place that towered over the far eastern end of Lake Mead, a huge man-made body of water that sprawled through desert canyons 80 miles distant. My […]
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Asthma and allergies take root in the new West
‘Mom, would you really have shipped me off to Denver?’ I asked my mother recently. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘But imagine,’ I said, ‘what it would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution, surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?’ ‘You were very, very sick,’ she explained.’Nothing helped.’ She told how […]
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Oh, those summer nights at the drive-in!
It’s the kind of summer night when a warm breeze rubs up against you like your date in that strapless dress on prom night so long ago. Not only that, but our kids are restless and we need something to do. It’s the perfect night, in other words, to see a movie at the drive-in. […]
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Wyoming manners? Forget about it!
Wyoming may be the rudest state in America. I grew up in upstate New York, where it was rude not to introduce strangers to each other. If you neglected to do this, you found yourself apologizing to the accidentally slighted person. Nothing in the preceding paragraph applies to daily life in Wyoming. Even New York […]
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America needs clean water – and mining law reform
Back in the early 1870s, Gen. George Armstrong Custer was among those excited by the rumor of gold and glory in the Black Hills of South Dakota, my home state. A lot has changed since then, but the same law that presided over gold mining in Custer’s day — the Mining Law of 1872 — […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2007: Hydrogen Highway Revisited
Natural diversity
As a black park ranger, I’m often asked why more minorities don’t visit national parks or participate more in outdoor activities. That’s a short question with a long answer, and one part of it involves the perpetuation of historical inaccuracy, since the victors get to write what passes for history as portrayed in movies and […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2007: Hydrogen Highway Revisited
The aroma of Tacoma
My husband grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Whenever we’d go back to visit the cloudy skies of Seattle or Portland, he’d ask, “Can you picture us living here?” and I would try. But I always felt anxious. He seemed so happy, just posing the question, that I put my trepidation down to that arthritis […]