The company that powers the computer I write on is getting the kind of attention corporations loathe. Idaho Power Co. and its three Hells Canyon dams on the Snake River have been thrust into the center of a controversy over a provision of the energy bill that would give power companies more control over the […]
Essays
Posted inWotr
Environmentalists have one big blind spot
I hope no one yanks my green card for this admission, but I’m beginning to hate the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s not that I’m for drilling. There’s no reason to drill in a place set aside for wildlife when more efficient vehicles could eliminate demand for the oil. But as a Westerner newly relocated […]
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Once touched by drought, you never forget
From the mothers in my family I learned what poverty and drought were like during the 1930s. To them, these were experiences so profound they became proper nouns: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. Not quite 30 years later, when I was a boy verging on gangly teenager, a thunderstorm of unusual menace advanced one […]
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Giving back the bison
In the 1870s, a Salish Indian brave named Walking Coyote led a handful of bison calves from the Great Plains westward to the home of his people in Montana’s Mission Valley. Some traditions say he did so because he saw that Europeans were hunting the beast to extinction. Bison proliferated in the lush valley, which […]
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Who needs Superfund when we’ve got reality TV?
By the end of the year, only $28 million will be left in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund account. Superfund pays for the reclamation of abandoned toxic waste sites, and $28 million barely affords a study just to figure out how to clean up one of the 1,200 deserted dumps wasting away in American […]
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There’s a way to end the RS 2477 road mess
The West’s public lands face many 21st century problems, including pressure from population growth and energy development. But they also face an old problem — the legacy of the Mining Law of 1866, which granted rights-of-way “for the construction of highways” on federal lands not set aside for other uses. That grant became section 2477 […]
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Protecting fake wilderness goes against the law
Environmental groups are going “wild” over the Interior Department’s recent decisions to recognize Western road claims and chuck out the Clinton administration’s wilderness study policy. Before getting into the angry rhetoric, however, a bit of history is in order. This entire flapdoodle hinges on interpretation of two laws, Revised Statute 2477 — RS 2477 for […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Essays for thought
For the past 33 years, High Country News has lived up to its name, focusing on the news. Though we’ve concentrated on the environment, we’ve also covered Western culture, politics and economics, because you can’t separate the environmental issues from the arenas in which they play out. Besides, the context is part of what makes […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Tourist tales from the New West
I knew I was in trouble the first morning of our cruise. We were headed up the Columbia and Snake rivers on a Lewis and Clark bicentennial expedition, and this well-dressed widow sat down beside me at breakfast. Her diamond ring was the size of an unshelled peanut, and her hair matched the silver flatware […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
A ‘nature girl’ remembers a dying lumber town
I never got over Hilt. It is as real to me now, when it no longer exists, as it was when I was 3 years old, or 6, or 12. I see it, sometimes, with an aching intensity that will not go away, so that the little valley beside Cottonwood Creek comes back to me […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Running home
It’s been four years since I touched human bone, since I had silt and clay stuck beneath my fingernails and inside the cracked skin of my knuckles — silt and clay that had cradled bones for hundreds of years. I used to work as a contract archaeologist, scanning the landscape for petroglyphs and fire rings, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Love and loathing on the interstate highways
At a conference several years ago, we were given crayons and sheets of white paper and asked to draw our visions of utopia. This was in the West, so of course a great many rustic cabins in meadows far removed from civilization were sketched onto these sheets. Not mine. Yes, of course, I had hills […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Seeing the mysterious in the everyday
Someday, everything is gonna be different / When I paint my masterpiece. — Bob Dylan It’s late at night in the green springtime, and I’m wide awake in the studio, Van Morrison on the CD player and a pastel painting slowly coming to life on the easel before me. Hayfields and a line of cottonwoods, […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Why I fight: The coming gas explosion in the West
Here’s what I once believed: that if the president knew about the damage done to our land by the energy industry, the damage would cease. I once believed that if you could show that industry can extract gas without damaging land right near us — as it does on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and […]
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Let’s not succumb to the temptation of biopharming
It’s hard to take issue with a technology that might have been able to save my parents’ lives. But that’s what I’m going to do. I’m talking about biopharming, the process that makes medicine from crops. Take a corn plant or a tobacco plant; inject it with a protein-making gene from humans or animals; harvest […]
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Why I do what I do, the way that I do it
I hate corpo-jargon, the trying-to-be hip phrases that aren’t. But the first words in my mind as I pull off Quartzite, Arizona’s main drag into the gritty parking lot of Reader’s Oasis are: “I am definitely working outside the box.” The big-box bookstores, that is. Reader’s Oasis is a metal shed, a half-dozen tables, a […]
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Cheers for Arizona’s governor and a Hopi warrior
The successful effort by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to rename a Phoenix mountain after an American Indian woman killed in Iraq needn’t have turned into a nasty fight. Gov. Napolitano wanted to honor an Arizona citizen, Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a member of the Hopi Nation, because she was the first American woman to die in […]
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Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
In one of his 16 books on fire, historian Stephen Pyne wrote: “If fire were captured today, it would never make it past the federal regulatory agencies.” Letting fire run free is a huge deal; early man must have wondered if it was worth the trouble. Fire empowered our ancestors not just to cook food, […]
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The bittersweet comings and goings in a small town
Most schools have a Homecoming weekend. Red Lodge, Mont., celebrates a different kind of coming home, on Memorial Day. On the last weekend in May, snowplows finish clearing the 10,000-foot Beartooth Pass between Red Lodge and Cooke City. And unless blizzards close it right back up again, which happens with some regularity, people like to […]
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To restore the West, go big and go native
It’s always disconcerting to have a myth blown apart. Like when you find out your favorite sports star, who you know to be a morally upstanding person, abuses his wife. The world wobbles; food doesn’t taste as good; you just want to fall asleep and wake up when everything is back to normal. That’s what […]