Letter to the editor

Dear HCN: The February 20 High Country News article about the Idaho salmon lawsuit painted a misleading picture. The issues are not about minor legal technicalities, nor gaps between urban and rural folks. The court’s slam-dunk decision was the result of the continued failure of the Forest Service to follow the law and protect dwindling […]

Dear HCN, We read the “Waaaaaahh” essay you published on the back page of HCN Feb. 20, and found it beyond insulting and beneath contempt. It made us sad to see you endorse such sweeping cruel generalizations and obvious vulgar innuendo. Sadder that it appeared just when polarizations and lack of trust over wolf, water […]

Dear HCN, If the concept of “takings’ is to be a part of our way of life, then the concept should extend to population growth. Increased traffic congestion resulting from population growth could, for example, cause a person to spend an extra half-hour a day commuting to and from work; added up over a working […]

Dear HCN, County officials throughout the West are talking about “taking back the land” by abolishing the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. Last year we began hearing a legal argument that New Mexico was denied statehood on an “equal footing” with the original 13 states, contrary to the U.S. Constitution. This old theory […]

Dear HCN, Last summer I spent several days in Salmon, Idaho, as part of my research on the human dimensions of ecosystem management. I expected to hear the same sort of petulant threat-mongering that Jon Margolis mocked – something I’ve heard increasingly often in my years of listening to the voices of the rural West […]

Dear HCN, The Feb. 20 HCN had three very provocative opinions expressed on its back pages. I was startled, however, by Ray Rasker’s comments which followed “Education … is an important determinate to individual success …” He meant that old-timers need to become educated, which is true. I had assumed that he was going to […]

Dear HCN, During the last 15 years of my 27 years as a fish and wildlife biologist, I came to realize that good range conservationists in the Bureau of Land Management can do more for our public lands than all other disciplines combined. For reader-clarity sake: A “good” range con is one who constantly and […]

Dear HCN, Your recent issue on the new Denver airport (HCN, 1/23/95) has caused me to conclude that your standards of journalistic and intellectual honesty are about on the same level as the slickness of your production. Never before have I encountered anything in your paper where you are so wrong (my opinion) and where […]

Dear HCN, Here’s how to save time and effort preparing your next special issue: Take the Denver Airport article and, wherever it says “Denver,” write in “Salt Lake City,” replace “International Airport” with “Winter Olympics.” Seriously, while there obviously are some differences, I was struck by the similarities. Utah politicians are falling over themselves singing […]

Dear HCN, Every time I read a “protect our constitutional rights’ or “jobs save our rural lifestyle” rap (HCN, 1/23/95), I think of two things: The first is that a “rural” lifestyle is a romantic vision that these people have not lived for several generations, if then. They do not grow much of their own […]

Dear HCN, If the administration and Congress want to reform the welfare program, they should not overlook ranchers that graze livestock on federal lands. Some of the richest people in the United States are welfare ranchers: William Hewlett and David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard Co., the computer manufacturing giant, graze cattle on more than 94,000 acres […]

Dear HCN, There is a healthy dose of irony in the Dec. 26 article regarding the battle between Arizona’s Prescott College and Tonto National Forest over a 60-year-old cabin. This otherwise unnoteworthy controversy serves to expose the major shortcoming, and in my mind, insincerity, of the organized environmental movement. Reporter Peter McBride neglects to consider […]

Dear HCN, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, 1933-1946, made a powerful public statement in 1935 supporting wilderness at a conference of state park authorities. Given the public mood, I believe it is time to hear from the old curmudgeon once again: “I am not in favor of building any more roads in the national parks […]

I am intrigued by Ed Marston’s statement (HCN, 12/26/94) that “There have been a bunch of studies of this new economy by environmental groups and their economists; almost all welcome it.” The economy of the New West is not necessarily better – just different. It brings with it new opportunities but also new problems. Our […]

Ed Marston’s call to save the West (HCN, 12/26/94) was a well-intentioned plea for protecting the population and communities here from the larger forces at work upon them. Sadly, it lacks a historical context and appears to invoke the same type of preservationist mentality that is often damned when it is wielded by environmentalists. Implicit […]

Dear HCN, I’ve had a bellyful of Ed Marston’s sappy romanticizing about the Western rancher (HCN, 12/26/94). I’m from a ranching family – my great-grandmother came out West in a covered wagon in 1846, and my grandfather homesteaded a ranch in Arizona in 1913 – and the way you Easterners buy into this “rugged individual” […]

Dear HCN: Why is the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee supporting delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear? (HCN, 1/23/95). After 35 years of research on this population and the expenditure of several million dollars, there still is no reasonable population estimate for the Yellowstone grizzly or a scientifically defensible measure of what constitutes a recovered population. […]

Dear HCN, I noticed that you now have at least three ranchers on your board of directors – Farwell Smith, Diane Peavey and Doc Hatfield. At least two out of the three are well known and outspoken advocates of public-lands grazing. Isn’t this just like the National Cancer Association having a couple of tobacco farmers […]

Dear HCN, I enjoyed Ed Marston’s editorial in the Dec. 26 High Country News. I’m a (gasp) federal-land rancher in (gasp) Catron County, N.M., and write a weekly editorial in the Courier, which often bashes (gasp) enviro-preservationists. I’ve been active in working on the Catron County Land Plan in relation to water. I’ve watched each […]

Dear HCN, As a Seattle-suburbs hobby farmer (horses), widow of a lawyer, mother of four college graduates, and (unpaid) legislative liaison for the King County Property Rights Alliance, I am also one of those “people with an ideological predisposition who are most vulnerable to independence, anti-government and property rights slogans.” (Hoo-ha!) The condescension of the […]