IDAHO The man who could succeed Idaho’s feisty Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage is in hot water with the Environmental Protection Agency. C.L. “Butch” Otter says he recently dug weeds, cattails, rusty car bodies and concrete from the border of a pond next to his home to make the pond more hospitable to wildlife. But the […]
Politics
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
On the trail
If you’re looking for a little financial help with your off-the-grid dream home, don’t look to vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney. At an Oct. 10 campaign stop at a recreational-vehicle plant in Yakima, Wash., Cheney said, “You have a solar panel on your house, you get tax relief. If you drive a solar-powered car, you get […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
In presidential politics, the West has a bad hand
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Life, as someone once pointed out, is unfair. Someone, no doubt, pointed it out millennia ago, but the observation is generally attributed to John F. Kennedy, among whose distinctions was winning the closest presidential election in living memory. A mere 118,570 more Americans voted for Kennedy than for Richard M. Nixon 40 […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Nader shakes up Western enviros
Note: a sidebar article, “‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough,’” accompanies this story. MONTROSE, Colo. – “There’s a lot we have to cover here,” sighs Ralph Nader, stooping over the podium with all the enthusiasm of a harried college professor. The Green Party presidential candidate isn’t campaigning this afternoon. Not officially. […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
‘A choice between bad and worse is not good enough’
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. NIJHUIS: I’ve been wondering who you’d pick for Secretary of the Interior. NADER: Well, I haven’t thought about that yet (laughs), but it would be someone with a determined record of achievement on behalf of the environment and the preservation of the […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Third-party votes count for plenty
Political conversations this fall often include the observation that “We need a third party.” In the Mountain West, the most reliably Republican part of America, the reply is often “Third party? Wouldn’t it make more sense to start by having a second party?” Soon comes a practical admonition that unless you cast a ballot for […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Stalking Slade
Tribes, Greens and Democrats hope to ambush Washington Sen. Slade Gorton in November
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Democrats see the light in Montana
The 2000 elections could be pivotal for theeconomy and environment
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Washington’s Steel Magnolia
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories. Like her opponent, Slade Gorton, Maria Cantwell is not a native of Washington. She grew up in Indianapolis in a political household – her father was a county commissioner and a city councilman. Cantwell leaped into politics herself at a young age. […]
Posted inOctober 9, 2000: The hunters and the hunted
On the Trail
In the close presidential race, even New Mexico’s five electoral votes are worth a fight. George W. Bush has visited three times, Al Gore has stopped by twice, and Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman both showed up in Albuquerque in mid-September. “For the first time in recent memory, New Mexico appears to be playing an […]
Posted inSeptember 25, 2000: Backyard boom
On the trail
Congressional races in Montana are heating up. Brian Schweitzer, the Democrats’ maverick Senate candidate, is still well behind two-term Republican incumbent Conrad Burns, but he’s made some small gains in recent polls. Schweitzer, a mint farmer from Whitefish, defends small-scale agriculture and criticizes rising health-care costs. Over the last year, he has shepherded busloads of […]
Posted inSeptember 25, 2000: Backyard boom
Bush camp backpedals on toppling monuments
Vice presidential candidate Richard Cheney may have spoken too soon in August, when he said George W. Bush might rescind national monuments created by President Clinton (HCN, 9/11/00). U.S. presidents have created 114 monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act, and undoing them is unlikely, according to University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson. In 1996, […]
Posted inSeptember 11, 2000: Holy water
Remembering an establishment revolutionary
John Sawhill wasn’t planning to stick around as president of The Nature Conservancy for much longer. As he told some associates, 10 years is a long time for one of those high-powered jobs, and as a 63-year-old diabetic, Sawhill was starting to think about a life with fewer plane trips and less tension. Maybe he […]
Posted inAugust 28, 2000: The mine that turned the Red River blue
Floyd Dominy: An encounter with the West’s undaunted dam-builder
The name Floyd Dominy still rings loud in the West. As the head of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to1971, he built Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River and many more of the West’s dams, persuading Congress that the region needed to control the flow of rivers to generate electricity, control flooding and […]
Posted inAugust 14, 2000: Meth invasion
Farewell, Marc Reisner
In 1995, when we first asked Marc Reisner to write an article for High Country News, we didn’t know what to expect (HCN, 3/20/95: The fight for reclamation). Would the man who had changed how America thought about dams and reservoirs accept suggestions from an editor of a small paper in a small town in […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Can ‘property rightsniks’ stop a popular bill?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – You know folks are going to lose when they choose Helen Chenoweth-Hage to close their argument. Resplendent in a red suit, perhaps symbolic of going down in flames, the Idaho Republican stood at the well of the House and used her two minutes to … well, that wasn’t quite clear; her rhetoric […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
He’s worried about weeds
UNCOMMON WESTERNERS Steve Monsen is a stocky, modest, self-contained man. Sixty-three years old, the son and grandson of Utah sheep ranchers, he works as a botanist for an organization that could not sound more unassuming if it tried – the USDA Shrub Lab in Provo, Utah. There, he wears short-sleeved shirts and jeans and cuts […]
Posted inApril 24, 2000: At your service: Unions help some Western workers serve themselves
The U.S. isn’t dead yet
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On the first day of the first spring of the millennium, one of the world’s largest and most powerful global corporations did as it was told. Parke-Davis, a division of the multibillion-dollar Warner-Lambert Company, announced that it was withdrawing the diabetes drug Rezulin from the market, as directed by the Food and […]
Posted inApril 10, 2000: Beyond the Revolution
Learning to think like a region
Environmental issues have nothing to do with political boundaries
Posted inApril 10, 2000: Beyond the Revolution
Beyond the Revolution
The struggle for the public lands is ending. Now what happens? Will the Interior West remain a rogue region, or will it choose to rejoin America?