I’m a radical, yes. An environmentalist, yes. A small-is-better zealot, yes. A feminist, a fierce supporter of independent bookstores, a rabble rouser. I’ve been called a Chicken Little who shrieks, “The sky is falling!” I admit to all those labels. What I am not, and this is the second time in a decade I’ve been […]
Essays
Posted inWotr
Energy Bill rewards the fattest cats
As you may have noticed, gasoline costs more than of yore. Some basic economics: Gasoline is a manufactured good. Its price depends in part on the price of its basic commodity, in this case crude oil. It costs more than of yore, as does natural gas. More basic economics: The price of crude oil and […]
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
More than numbers: The dead of Idaho’s Sunshine Mine
The statistics of Idaho’s worst mining disaster are still startling, even more than three decades after that fateful day in 1972, when an underground fire broke out in the Silver Valley’s Sunshine Mine: Ninety-one men dead, 77 women widowed and 200 children left fatherless. The oldest victim was 61, the youngest 19. More than half […]
Posted inWotr
In our rush to protect America, we secretly put Americans at risk
Growing up in Richland, Wash., in the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the Department of Energy produced plutonium for bombs, Trisha Pritikin never imagined that the milk she drank or the air she breathed was poisonous. Her father, a safety engineer at the plant, was supremely patriotic, and the entire family felt proud […]
Posted inWotr
Love the gas, not the drill
I have a confession to make: I like natural gas. Every morning at five minutes before 6:00, I wake up to the gentle whumph of the gas stove kicking on in the family room. I then get out of bed, tap on my son’s door and call, “Time to get up,” and plant myself in […]
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I say good riddance to bad billboards
For four years in the 1980s, I lived in Vermont, and then left for the West after tiring of its busybody politics. But I certainly admired one aspect of life in the bucolic yet politically correct Green Mountain State: No billboards. Back in 1968, the Vermont Legislature passed a law banning billboards, and since then […]
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
Why should the Arctic Refuge matter to the ski industry?
Why should the 19 million acres of wilderness that make up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the potential oil beneath it, and its resident herd of caribou, matter at all to the ski industry? Sure, the refuge in Alaska is wild and beautiful, it’s pristine, it’s a crown jewel of wilderness. We in the ski […]
Posted inMay 16, 2005: Unsalvageable
The allure of the gnarled
The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned […]
Posted inWotr
The brief but wonderful return of Cathedral in the Desert
It looked almost exactly like Phil Hyde’s photograph taken in 1964, a year after Glen Canyon Dam began backing up the Colorado River — a seven-year event. Hyde’s photo revealed a stunning waterfall in a giant amphitheater with a narrow, almost slot opening at top, perfectly named “Cathedral in the Desert.” Eventually it disappeared, drowned […]
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My kind of river flows fast and gritty brown
My kind of river, the White. Near twilight, we camp at the put-in, a two-track rut into a brush-ringed clearing on the outskirts of Rangely, Colo. No ramp, no parking, no fire grates, no tables, no signs — a wide spot on the river bank just out of town, where we lean our canoes against […]
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Trees can be just another sacred cow
Only God can make a tree, but anyone can ruin a prairie. Consider the celebrated 19th century journalist Julius Sterling Morton. On moving to Nebraska from Michigan in 1854, he found he didn’t like the way nature had designed the Great Plains. Accordingly, he summoned forth “a great army of husbandmen… to battle against the […]
Posted inWotr
Ego gates get my goat — and that’s just the beginning
So, my neighbor finally got a ranchette. Whether it’s five acres or 40, the next step is apparently the perfect entrance gate. Rancheteers have made these huge gates the latest symbol of affluence in the West. They boast uprights bigger than my house, flanked by imported decorative boulders. The crossbar seems sometimes to be a […]
Posted inWotr
Why should the Arctic Refuge matter to the ski industry?
Why would the 19 million acres of wilderness that make up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the potential oil beneath it, plus its resident herd of caribou, matter at all to the ski industry? Sure, the refuge in Alaska is wild and beautiful, it’s pristine, it’s a crown jewel of wilderness. We in the ski […]
Posted inWotr
The devil made us do it
A recent proposal to change the name of Devils Tower National Monument has fallen through, but even if it had succeeded, Old Nick would have kept a prominent place in the landscape of the West. In Wyoming, monument supervisor Lisa Eckert had suggested adding the name “Bear Lodge” to the site. That came at the […]
Posted inMay 2, 2005: The Great Energy Divide
So-called ‘peace treaty’ won’t save the Rio Grande
HCN’s story, “Peace breaks out on the Rio Grande,” suggests that the agreement between environmentalists and Albuquerque marked an end to wrangling over water in the Middle Rio Grande (HCN, 3/21/05: Peace breaks out on the Rio Grande). Don’t we wish. For reasons best understood by the city of Albuquerque, two separate legal proceedings are […]
Posted inMay 2, 2005: The Great Energy Divide
The devil made us do it
A recent proposal to change the name of Devils Tower National Monument has fallen through. But even if it had succeeded, Old Nick would have kept a prominent place in the landscape of the West. Monument Supervisor Lisa Eckert had suggested adding the name “Bear Lodge” to the site. That came at the request of […]
Posted inWotr
Grazing buyouts help land and ranchers
It’s springtime in the Rockies, which means roiling rivers, blooming fruit orchards and lots of baby bovines in the valley-bottom pastures. A month ago, the calves were small, dark lumps deposited on dun-colored fields; today, they are energetic youngsters, chasing each other across green grass in free-for-all games of tag. In a matter of weeks, […]
Posted inWotr
Home on a very small range
In the years that I zealously rode a horse as a teen, the pasture below our house was a pen for my plump little buckskin mare. Conveniently flat, it doubled as an arena, hard-packed and strewn with makeshift jumps. Other than being a nuisance and forcing me to feed hay more often, the thistle and […]
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Montana’s Marlboro men get ready to bite the dust
I’m a sucker for the cowboy. My bookshelves sag under the weight of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry novels. I have spent summer wages on Ian Tyson CDs and Willie Nelson concert tickets. My favorite Clint Eastwood film is Unforgiven, not Million Dollar Baby. But even I was surprised when the 2005 Montana Legislature drew […]
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Hullabaloo in the hook-and-bullet press
As a hunter, fisher and full-time outdoor writer, it pains me to admit that most hunting-and-fishing magazines are right down there with supermarket tabloids. You can tell the really important articles by the number of exclamation points after the title, as in: “Sportsmen’s group in all-out battle for shooting and hunting rights!!!” Fact-checking departments are […]