After three years of negotiations, wilderness in Idaho’s Owyhee Canyonlands is one step closer to reality (HCN, 12/8/03: Riding the Middle Path). On Oct. 22, the Owyhee Initiative voted 8-0 to forward its 500,000-acre wilderness proposal to the Owyhee County Commission, which quickly sent it on to Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. A spokesman for Crapo […]
New Mexico
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
The Greening of the Plains
A conservation movement is stirring on the Great Plains, but farmers are stuck with a stark reality: It pays to plow up virgin ground
Posted inAugust 2, 2004: The Greening of the Plains
New Mexicans move to make roads more wildlife-friendly
Local residents and school kids speak up about preventing roadkill
Posted inJuly 19, 2004: They're Here: Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers
Follow-up
“If you build it, we will burn it!” read a fax claiming responsibility for a fire at a West Jordan, Utah, lumberyard in mid-June. The fire, set by the Earth Liberation Front, which now tops the FBI’s list of domestic terrorists, caused $1.5 million in damage to Stock Building Supply (HCN, 9/15/03: Burning one for […]
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
As fire season ignites, Smokey Bear’s legacy lingers
Land managers talk about letting firesburn, but politics douse the flames
Posted inJune 21, 2004: A Walk Between Worlds
Oil money rules in the West’s mini-Middle East
Wyoming and New Mexico governors walk a jagged line between conservation and fiscal conservatism
Posted inJune 7, 2004: Wal-Mart's Manifest Destiny
Wilderness up for lease
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Buying time against the energy assault.” As industry gobbles up oil and gas leases across the West, citizen-proposed wilderness areas, which encompass millions of acres of public lands, have become battlegrounds. Under a Clinton-era policy, these areas […]
Posted inMarch 29, 2004: Who Will Take Over the Ranch?
New Mexicans take a stand against oil and gas
The fight to keep drillers off Otero Mesacould set the tone for the November election
Posted inMarch 15, 2004: The New Water Czars
Gas well slated for state park
COLORADO/NEW MEXICO That loud sucking noise you hear from the San Juan Basin comes from 20,000 gas wells. Now, industry is targeting a state park for one more well pad. Navajo State Park, home to Navajo Lake — “Colorado’s answer to Lake Powell” — is owned by the Bureau of Reclamation, which built Navajo Dam […]
Posted inMarch 1, 2004: The Last Open Range
Oil and gas drilling could oust elk — and Boy Scouts
NEW MEXICO The Valle Vidal in northern New Mexico, known for its trout streams and trophy elk herd, could soon be known for oil and gas drilling, too. In 1982, Pennzoil Corporation donated the 100,000-acre valley to the Carson National Forest, and for more than 20 years, hunters and hikers have enjoyed the valley and […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 2004: Courting Disaster
Tongue-tied in the Southwest
There’s no denying that some Spanish speakers get frustrated with the dialect that’s spoken in New Mexico and southern Colorado. Take, for instance, the Jemez Mountains. Anyone who’s sat through a high school Spanish class would say “HEM-es.” Don’t try that in New Mexico: Those are the “hay-mez” Mountains. Luckily, Rubén Cobos, a professor for […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 2004: Courting Disaster
No place for pesky nuclear waste
NEW MEXICO If an energy company and a Republican senator get their way, southern New Mexico will get even hotter than its habañeros. The European-owned company LES plans to build a facility near Eunice to produce nuclear reactor fuel, but it still doesn’t have anywhere to store the highly toxic, radioactive byproduct (HCN, 10/13/03: New […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 2004: Mending the Nets
Saving a sacred lake: Zuni activist Pablo Padilla
Pablo Padilla is lying low right now, but don’t expect him to remain quiet for long. The 29-year-old law student at the University of New Mexico and member of the Zuni Tribe was an instrumental player in his tribe’s recent victory against an Arizona energy company (HCN, 8/18/03: Follow-up). He’s now trying to be just […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
In New Mexico, a homegrown wilderness bill makes headway
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Two decades of hard work, plowed under.” In the face of the Interior Department’s top-down decision to stop looking for new wilderness areas on federal land, some communities are working to protect wilderness from the bottom up. Sidestepping White House-appointed bureaucrats, wilderness advocates are […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 2004: Two decades of hard work, plowed under
Proposed wilderness on the auction block
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Two decades of hard work, plowed under.” The following areas, which are proposed by citizens for wilderness protection, will be up for grabs during the BLM’s January/February 2004 lease sale. WIA = wilderness inventory area CWP = citizens’ wilderness proposal New Mexico (Jan. 21) […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2003: Being Green in the Land of the Saints
More than just a city on a river
In New Mexico, history is never an abstraction. Whether you are seeking shelter in a thick-walled adobe home, listening to the lilt of a native New Mexican’s words, tracing the path of acequias or tasting posole, you can sense history there. And there are few writers better able to tell that history than Marc Simmons. […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2003: Riding the middle path
Follow-up
New nukes — as well as old nuclear waste — may soon be headed West: Tucked inside the 2004 Water and Energy Appropriations Bill was $11 million for the Modern Pit Facility, a factory to build plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs (HCN, 9/1/03: Courting the Bomb). Now, it’s up to the Energy Department to decide […]
Posted inNovember 24, 2003: New Mexico goes head-to-head with a nuclear juggernaut
Moving the cheese to New Mexico
Neighbors and local governments are increasingly fed up with the stinky, unhealthy conditions of the huge dairy operations on the Snake River Plain. One of the world’s largest cheesemakers, Ireland’s Glanbia Inc., recently wanted to expand its operations near Twin Falls, but local opposition — in the form of heated public meetings and two counties’ […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 2003: Harvesting Poison
City at the end of its rope
Anyone who has lived in Albuquerque, and sworn a curse upon the city and all its planners, visitors and inhabitants while broiling in traffic, and then eaten chile rellenos at sunset while watching the Sandia Mountains turn pink, knows that love and hate, beauty and grit, stand shoulder to shoulder in this desert city. Longtime […]
Posted inAugust 4, 2003: Pipe Dreams
Red Earth: desert poems resurrected
I’ve seen her pass with eyes upon the road — An old bent woman in a bronze black shawl, With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy’s, As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar. And I have fancied from the girls about What she was […]