“Green Party, huh? Well, I’ll vote for you, as long as you’re not a damn Democrat,” said my 70-year-old neighbor when I told him I was running for the Montana state Legislature. Few weeks later, I introduced myself to Tom, a local businessman and one of the Montana Freeman who’d gotten into trouble with the […]
Writers on the Range
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Like Butte, Montana, an old dog hangs on
(Note: a longer version of this essay is here.) On the dust-blown fringe of Butte, Mont., at the core of one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, lives an amazing paradox. Its genus is Canus, but its species would have to be called extraordinarius. I doubt there’s another mutt like this on the planet. The […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
What Dick Cheney might have learned in Rock Springs, Wyoming
It’s too bad that Dick Cheney didn’t stick around longer in Rock Springs back when he was growing up in the deep West. He worked in the Wyoming city decades ago, in the early 1960s, after he flunked out of Yale. For Cheney, it was a bottom-of-the-heap job, stringing electrical lines as a “groundman.” It […]
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Some lessons about coyotes stick in your mind
A friend from Nevada, an environmentalist, wrote me recently to say she’s been reading the minutes of the Nevada Wildlife Commission, which is using M-4s to kill coyotes in cases of “livestock predation.” The commission is now talking about whether to allow the cyanide guns in “cases of game predation,” otherwise known as doing what […]
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Ranchers in the West should call it quits
In the summer of 2000, in the midst of one of the most intense droughts in the Southwest in decades, I was radicalized by fire. During an 11-day backpack across the Gila Wilderness, my companion and I came across one of the rarest events in the cow-burnt landscapes of the West — a gentle fire, […]
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The view from ground zero at Oregon’s biggest fire in 100 years
This Halloween I camped in the frozen ash near ground zero of the 499,968-acre Biscuit Fire, the nation’s largest wildfire of 2002, and the biggest in Oregon for a century. My wife was not wild about the idea. The Pacific Northwest’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian, had just promoted a three-part feature on Biscuit, billing it […]
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Why one Nevada town is the last, smartest boomtown
It takes an hour for a commuter propjet to cover the 230 miles of desolate salt flats and sagebrush between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Elko, Nev. By the time passengers glimpse the alpine meadows and snowfields of the Ruby Mountains just east of Elko, the aircraft is already making a bumpy descent toward an […]
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It’s good to be impassioned!
A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with a cheery woman I love to be around. She’s an artist, still a diehard Ralph Naderite and a dedicated organic gardener. But one day, when I was ranting about some ongoing environmental disaster or another, she stood up in her broccoli patch, gave me a withering […]
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Eco-farmers seek to grow habitat as well as crops
Northern California farmer John Anderson is on the cutting edge of a new movement that seeks ways for farmers to incorporate stewardship practices into the daily pursuit of their livelihoods. Anderson and others believe it’s a key survival strategy for small farmers, plus a way to get beyond bitter struggles with environmentalists. Ultimately, it would […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Wherever you go, sprawl isn’t far behind
Some of my wilderness-loving friends are abandoning California. Sick of the traffic, the smog, the subdivisions creeping up and destroying beloved landscapes, they’re bailing out in search of smaller communities in the true West. But urban sprawl is everywhere east of here. Like most other man-made problems, sprawl is not something you can run away […]
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Ranchers band together to break a monopoly on marketing
Step onto almost any ranch in the West nowadays and you’re likely to hear someone cussin’ the meatpackers. The next thing you might hear is a phone call from that same rancher to his or her congressman asking support for a ban on packer ownership of cattle. Packers are the people at the end of […]
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Mexican workers in our towns want to legitimize their presence
The hour was early, the high desert air was fall-frosty, and the coffee was, well, truly horrible. I’d arrived for my volunteer shift at a Catholic church in the western Colorado town of Delta, and I had a very bad feeling. Five hundred people were already waiting on the sidewalk outside, sipping the acrid coffee, […]
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My trysts with Miss November
November out West: The spectacle of changing leaves has passed, the hills collecting snow are not yet blanketed in white, and daylight savings brings night time all too soon. It may sound innocent, but the season feels like a cruel and careless mistress to me. I first ventured West in November, four years ago; I […]
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A message to environmentalists from a wildlife biologist
I should confess up-front that. although I’m an environmentalist and a wildlife biologist at a Western university, I admire ranchers. I should further confess that I live on a small piece of property near real ranches– ones big enough to be home to cattle and the shy kind of wildlife you don’t see on smaller […]
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Surprise: Conservation counted in the last election
To many people who care about the West’s publicly owned lands, the Nov. 5 election results fell somewhere between disastrous and catastrophic. Voters handed control of the Senate back to the Republican Party and enlarged its majority in the House of Representatives, thereby sweeping away the fragile congressional roadblock that had hampered Bush administration efforts […]
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Why I’m thankful this Thanksgiving
The things I am thankful for this week are still there: family, health, work, life in the rural West. But I have to scratch beneath world events to find them. I can no longer live as if my well-being depended only on me. In fairness, I never fully lived as if what was immediately around […]
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Gardening old-style with my great-uncle Alfred in Seattle
The other day my great-uncle Alfred gave me a handful of the year’s green beans, dried and ready for planting next summer. “Give them something high up to grow on,” he told me. “They’ll grow seven feet tall.” Alfred knows. He’s planted this variety in his garden for seven years now, every year saving a […]
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Wild times in the human weed patch
I never knew how wild my corner of the West was until my daughter started playing volleyball. It had nothing to do with volleyball or the way it transforms giggling adolescent girls into snarling competitive animals. It had to do with early morning practices. “Builds character,” my daughter’s coach said. The kids’ or the parents’, […]
Posted inNovember 11, 2002: Behind the gate
Freedom of the press is eroding before our eyes
On Sept. 1, the Idaho Statesman ran a fascinating expose of local CEO salaries. The amounts of money, stock options and the all-encompassing “bonuses” lavished on these public company executives were staggering and obscene. Not to mention, according to Statesman reporter Julie Howard, “generous severance, salary, pension and retirement packages.” Many of the companies the […]
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Walking in Portland can be dangerous to your health
Last week another vehicle almost nailed me flat as a coffin. I was alone in a crosswalk in the center of Oregon’s most worldly city, Portland. I had been walking uphill and had made it six blocks west of the Willamette River. I get my exercise some days by hiking around downtown and combining errands. […]