Despite vociferous opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R, and Democrat state legislators cemented a deal on Aug. 30 to pass the much-heralded Global Warming Solutions Act. California is the world’s twelfth-largest producer of global-warming causing greenhouse gases, and the bill commits the state to cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent […]
Essays
Posted inWotr
Gutsy science wins the day
For any scientist, publishing in Science magazine marks a giant success. It’s one of the world’s premier scientific journals, and only about 7 percent of submitted manuscripts are accepted. But Dan Donato, a second-year graduate student at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, overcame the odds. Donato was lead author of a study on the […]
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How to be alone with a lot of other people
Since I live in Chaffee County, Colo., home to an even-dozen 14,000-foot peaks, I’m used to encountering what we call “peak-baggers” — people bent on climbing all 54 “Fourteeners” in Colorado — often in the shortest time possible. In recent years, the baggers have become so numerous that old trails have to be rebuilt or […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
Underworld
It was August 1997, and I stood beside a manhole cover at Ninth Avenue and F Street in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., with a small gathering of police detectives, firefighters, and city workers. Cones diverted traffic around us. Frank Garcia, a hazardous-materials technician, knelt and ran a tube through one of the silver-dollar-sized […]
Posted inWotr
Utah legislation endangers lands we hold dear
There’s a bill before Congress that would have far-reaching impacts for my backyard in Utah and could also set a precedent for where you live, especially if you — like me — love the public lands that make the West unique. The legislation is called the Washington County Growth and Conservation Act, sponsored by Utah […]
Posted inWotr
Will I ever become a local?
I’m still what people call a newcomer, but it seems to me that most people who live in the mountains fall into one of three categories: Second home owner, transplant from somewhere else — usually a city, like me — or native, though I meet very few natives who are older than 10. I’ve lived […]
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Wyoming can buy what Portland can’t
It’s too early to panic, but there’s a rumor that Wyoming, with a population that’s only a quarter of metropolitan Portland, Ore., might buy Portland’s basketball team, the Trail Blazers, using the $2 million that daily aggregates into the Cowboy State’s swelling reserves. Portland should cringe at the outrageous notion of losing the Blazers because […]
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We need to talk about why some minorities lag behind
It is hard for this old civil rights attorney to be called a “racist,” but some recent comments of mine on minority under-performance kicked up a firestorm of criticism. This hurt, but there are important issues involved, and America needs to talk frankly about its problems. It is unfortunate that political correctness, a liberal orthodoxy, […]
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Montana Sen. Conrad Burns spotlights a bad burn policy
Conrad Burns, the third-term Republican senator from Montana, may have done Westerners a backhanded favor when he cornered firefighters in the Billings airport and berated them for the job they did on an eastern Montana wildfire. Burns reportedly confronted members of the Augusta Hotshots last month as they were waiting for their flight back home […]
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Our lungs, ourselves: Smoking in Wyoming bars
In a victory for health activists, non-smokers are increasingly able to enter workplaces, restaurants, bars and outdoor patios without breathing secondhand cigarette smoke. Smoking bans of various levels of restrictiveness are being enacted all around the country, and even my state of Wyoming, historically resistant to knee-jerk social change, has seen a few communities unplug […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
How we lost our ranch to gas drilling
Our cattle, our dreams and our ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling. As one who has lived through the experience, I can say that […]
Posted inAugust 21, 2006: The Lure of the Lawn
Nine reasons why a river is good for the soul
SILT. Healthy particles of silt are suspended in the river, buffed off eons of Wingate sandstone and the debris of flash floods fire-hosing through twisted arroyos. These tiny particles of soil, mud, stone, trees and bones scour our skin as we float in the slow, warm current of the river. We drift in silence, particles […]
Posted inWotr
My Wonderful Heart Attack
My Wonderful Heart Attack happened last March while I was hiking with my wife in the mountains west of Boulder, Colo. The dogs were ranging out ahead as usual and, except for some heartburn, I felt good as we walked through the trees. I said to Pat, “I have some heartburn and I can;t think […]
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Is the great federal land debate over?
Every decade or so, people start pushing the idea of selling off big chunks of public land or transferring that land to state ownership and management. Outside of small parcels, it has never happened, probably because most of us support leaving public lands in federal hands. With the recent pronouncements of Idaho’s own Dirk Kempthorne, […]
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Relishing those idiosyncratic Western triumphs
When I realized a dozen years ago that my state’s license plates were issued chronologically, I felt stirrings of ambition. Here was a tiny yet visible status symbol, and all I had to do was wait. At that time my plate, after the county prefix, was 4786A, meaning that there were over 4,000 vehicles lined […]
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Nature-deficit disorder is ruining our kids
No matter how old I live to be, there will never be a place so full of mystery and adventure as a place of my childhood called The Woods. The stories that grew out of those trees still kindle powerful feelings, even after all these years. My friends and I knew the place was haunted. […]
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Just why did Gale Norton leave the interior department?
It seemed so sudden, the way Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned back in early March. It wasn’t like the other resignations from President George Bush’s cabinet. Everyone in town knew that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was an odd-man-out before Powell announced he would leave at the end of the first term. As to former […]
Posted inWotr
How we lost our ranch to gas drilling
Our cattle, our dreams and our ranching lives are now a thing of the past. My husband and I felt obligated to sell everything we had worked for over nine years in Silt, in western Colorado, to escape the impacts of gas drilling. As one who has lived through the experience, I can say that […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
There was no green in this Rainbow gathering
When we tell folks that we became the unwitting hosts for the Rainbow Family’s annual gathering, the first response is “the who?” The Family’s Web site, welcomehome.org, styles the Rainbows “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” At the beginning of July, more than 17,000 of them gathered in Big Red Park, north of […]
Posted inAugust 7, 2006: Is It or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?
‘There was just some hard hittin’ going on’
LIND, Washington — In New Mexico, people tend to sort themselves by red and green, based on the kind of chile they prefer to eat. On the wheat farms of eastern Washington, folks divide into red and green camps, too. But here, they do it according to the kinds of combines — the giant machines […]