A hate movement has grown up in northern New Mexico, fueled by decades of Forest Service mismanagement and sensational media coverage (HCN, 12/25/95). It has fostered an unusual alliance across racial barriers to oppose conservation on federal lands. The political alignment became visible more than a year ago during a Christmas candlelight demonstration organized by […]
Writers on the Range
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’
The dirt two-track rises quickly from the river to a ridge of pines. After a few miles the track veers out onto the sagebrush flats of this high desert plain in Montana, and there, on a patch of ground where grass and sage thin out, I spot what I have come looking for: small mounds […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
A rodent that can outlast a camel in the desert
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to as essay, “‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’.” It was a quote from naturalist J.R. Mead in 1859 that got University of Montana zoology professor Bert Pfeiffer curious about prairie dogs. Mead wrote: “Not a drop (of water) […]
Posted inOctober 14, 1996: Greens prune their message to win the West's voters
Wise-users try to whip up a recipe for their own salvation
Casper, Wyo. – Utah House Speaker Melvin Brown tells the audience that he doesn’t want to end the evening on a negative note. But he does want to make you “mad enough to come back tomorrow recommitted.” To get their blood pumping, Brown conjures up an enemy – Thomas Michael Power – a University of […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Clinton learns the art of audacity
Editor’s note: On Sept. 18, just before President Clinton announced the creation of the nation’s newest monument, writer and University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson talked about the historical precedents for protecting land through presidential action. GRAND CANYON, Ariz. – The grandest, most electrifying moments in American conservation history have always been reserved for […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Whatever happened to letting fires burn?
The summer wildfire season is drawing to an end, but the West is still burning. And despite a plethora of ecological research that demonstrates the value of fire as an ecological and evolutionary force, land-management agencies continue to suppress fires, except in a few wilderness areas or other reserves. Not only is such a policy […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Speak up for a quiet Grand Canyon
On my first visit to the Grand Canyon 45 years ago, I was overwhelmed by its magnificent silence, tranquility and timelessness. That serenity is hard to find today. It’s destroyed by the relentless drone of planes and helicopters. A thousand flights a day, 100 flights an hour rain noise down on the canyon. At best, […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 1996: Last line of defense: Civil disobedience and protest slow down 'lawless logging'
Grassroots grit beat ‘the mine from Hell’
The campaign to stop the New World Gold Mine on Yellowstone National Park’s northern boundary could rank with the great environmental victories of the 20th century. It’s not so much what happened as how it happened. Mine opponents started with a textbook grassroots plan to stop the $600 million gold mine. They ended with a […]
Posted inApril 15, 1996: Raising a ranch from the dead
Group sues to stamp out tolerance and diversity
When the National Park Service shows some sensitivity to the religious needs of Native Americans, stomp it. And be sure to also grind a heel into American Indian religious liberty. That’s the way Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver apparently views it. Last month, the foundation filed a lawsuit against the Park Service for respecting […]
Posted inAugust 5, 1996: Disappearing railroad blues
A radical water czar is cashiered by his board
It is not on quite the scale as the 1989 defeat of Denver’s $1 billion Two Forks Dam, but it is worth a mention. On July 16, the Colorado River Water Conservation District board fired its secretary-engineer, Rolly Fischer, after 28 years on the job. Fischer was fired – officially he resigned – in large […]
Posted inAugust 5, 1996: Disappearing railroad blues
Two tribes, two religions, vie for a place in the desert
TUBA CITY, Ariz. – Few Navajos or Hopis can remember a year like this. Nine months and no rain. No grass. Big winds. Shrunken livestock. Dying wildlife. The toughest, most drought-resistant corn on the continent almost strangled by thirst. A year like this means something to these people, and it’s not good. But it’s something […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Learning from an inner-city garden
Ever since I was six years old, I’d thought outdoor education required yellow buses. Yellow buses say “the world is wide and curious – let me take you there.” They invite kids to climb onto their vinyl seats, throwing one last glance at parents, math homework and the mall. Then they roll through suburbia, past […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
What outdoor education didn’t teach me
“It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.” – Henry David Thoreau When I was 18, […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
My coyote education
More than being in church, I loved the junipers. There, I learned how ants move cookie crumbs and how the first drops of rain sound. I also learned to lie about the dirt on the knees of my pants. In fourth grade we had an ant farm, one of those glass-paned horrors. Science class was […]
Posted inJune 10, 1996: Outdoor Education
Hearing stories, finding family, returning home
It was May 23, 1974, when I knocked on David Raskin’s door at the Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah. The only thing I knew about him was that he was one of the world’s leading experts on polygraph machines and that he had given Patty Hearst the lie detector test after she […]
Posted inMay 27, 1996: Utah ushers its frogs toward oblivion
Imagine a West without heroes
Heroes have always come with the West. When Indians blocked homesteaders, the cavalry came. When cattle barons closed the open range, President Cleveland reopened it with the Unlawful Enclosures Act of 1885. When aridity slowed settlement, the Bureau of Reclamation built dams. When Western forests succumbed to flames and cutting, Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service pledged […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
The skeptic: Collaboration has its limits
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Howdy, neighbor!, about collaboration efforts in the West. Editor’s Note: Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club, distributed this memo to the club’s board of directors last November. McCloskey wrote it to spur discussion; it does not represent an official position of […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
Consensus even came to Washington, D.C.
Jim Jontz, feisty director of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, showed up at the seventh American Forest Congress in Washington, D.C., planning to stomp out in protest. Scores of other environmental activists, all passionately opposed to the “logging without laws’ timber salvage rider, planned to join Jontz’s demonstration at a conference its organizers called the […]
Posted inMay 13, 1996: Howdy, neighbor!
View 5 of the grizzly bear controversy
Note: This article is a sidebar to one of this issue’s feature stories, Bringing back grizzlies splits environmentalists, in a special issue about collaboration in the West. Michael Scott recently became program director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. Before that, he was with The Wilderness Society. He lives in Bozeman. There is a lot of overlap […]
Posted inApril 29, 1996: A park boss goes to bat for the land
Erasing the Southwest’s grandest vista
It was Barry Lopez who said that one of the dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. Until the 1970s, when air pollution from California, Mexico and coal-fired power plants in the region began to limit visibility, the […]