A radical change could be coming to the way electric co-ops across the country do business.
Ed Marston
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Learning to bend: Settling Utah’s road wars
Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon CountryJedediah S. Rogers242 pages, hardcover: $39.95.University of Utah Press, 2013. Some fear that we will saddle our children with trillions of dollars in federal debt. That would be too bad, but it would be a minor inconvenience compared to what our forefathers cursed us with: the 1866 federal […]
Posted inWotr
A final hats off to rancher Doc Hatfield
Doc Hatfield died March 20 at his home in Sisters, Ore., just after his 74th birthday, soon after his and his wife Connie’s 49th anniversary, and an extraordinarily long three years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which usually kills within a year of diagnosis. Many Westerners may not have heard of them, but the […]
Posted inJanuary 11, 2010: Breakdown
The genesis of the West
Douglas Brinkley’s new biography tells the story of TR
Posted inArticles
Primer 4: Water
If you want a glimpse of the unpredictable nature of water in the arid West, pick up a Utah newspaper from late fall or winter of 1983. Almost every story was about flooding. Floods that menaced Interstate 80 and the Southern Pacific Railroad with the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Floods that threatened to […]
Posted inDecember 25, 2006: Confessions of a Methane Floozy
A corps of visitors, not discoverers
In Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, the late historian and journalist Alvin Josephy assembles nine weakly linked essays by 10 Indian writers. A few essays are solid; some are tough to get through. But together they should enable the Anglo reader to pass through the looking glass, as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s classic, […]
Posted inMay 15, 2006: The Immigrant's Trail
HCN says farewell to an old friend
High Country News has always been fortunate in the people it attracts, whether they are readers, writers, staff or board members. Never has it been more fortunate than the day in 1984 when Herman Warsh agreed to join our board. Herman knew he was signing on for a tough voyage. Circulation was about 3,500, the […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
It’s the West’s turn to call the shots
I was recently invited to a seminar at a university whose thesis might be considered insulting. The American West, said the invitation, “lacks an intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country or the continent. Eastern publishers, Eastern intellectual centers and agencies, public and private, based in Washington, D.C., still provide the authoritative voices […]
Posted inWotr
It’s the West’s turn to call the shots
I was recently invited to a seminar at a university whose thesis might be considered insulting. The American West, said the invitation, “lacks an intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country or the continent. Eastern publishers, Eastern intellectual centers and agencies, public and private, based in Washington, D.C., still provide the authoritative voices […]
Posted inWotr
Now that we’ve clear-cut the Forest Service…
I first met the U.S. Forest Service in 1967, when I helped build a log cabin at 9,600 feet on the Gunnison National Forest in western Colorado. The idea that I was part owner of 300,000 square miles of beautiful land intoxicated me. We became so drunk on the land that in 1974, we moved […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2004: Conservationist in a Conservative Land
Colorado voters snub coal for all things renewable
Not long after Enron, one of our larger humpty-dumpties, had its great fall, I heard a supporter say he missed its CEO, because “Ken Lay was a visionary. He wanted to cover parts of Texas with wind turbines and export that clean energy to the rest of the country.” Yeah, a visionary. Wind or natural […]
Posted inWotr
Colorado snubs coal for all things renewable
Not long after Enron, one of our larger humpty-dumpties, had its great fall, I heard a supporter say he missed its CEO, because “Ken Lay was a visionary. He wanted to cover parts of Texas with wind turbines and export that clean energy to the rest of the country.” Yeah, a visionary. Wind or natural […]
Posted inWotr
Thank you, Sierra Club
The last time the Sierra Club was shaken into life, it was at the vigorous hands of the late David Brower. He took an insular, elite conservation group and made it grassroots, activist and environmentalist. The Sierra Club was transformed because Brower led it to act. The club first saved Dinosaur National Monument in Utah […]
Posted inWotr
Some trees inspire true love
This is a love story about a small number of scientists and some pine trees in North America. I do not know if any hugging has taken place between the trees and the scientists, but tears of loss have been shed. Biologist Diana Tomback got to know the trees as a young graduate student, and […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 2003: Courting the Bomb
The EPA needs an urban pit bull
You walk past a wrecking yard and see, on the other side of a high chain-link fence, not a pit bull with a mouth full of teeth, but a goldfish in a tank. That’s the image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It’s a nomination that […]
Posted inWotr
The EPA needs an urban pit bull
You walk past a wrecking yard and see on the other side of a high, chain link fence, not a pit bull with a mouth full of teeth but a goldfish in a tank. That”s the image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It”s a nomination […]
Posted inJuly 7, 2003: Invasion of the rock jocks
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
There is no better guide to fire in the West than Stephen Pyne, who spent 15 years fighting fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and has written 16 books on fire. The 32 essays in his most recent book, Smokechasing, are a mixed, uncoordinated group, but so brilliant and thoughtful that they […]
Posted inWotr
Westerners must be fire-starters as well as firefighters
In one of his 16 books on fire, historian Stephen Pyne wrote: “If fire were captured today, it would never make it past the federal regulatory agencies.” Letting fire run free is a huge deal; early man must have wondered if it was worth the trouble. Fire empowered our ancestors not just to cook food, […]
Posted inApril 14, 2003: Change comes slowly to Escalante county
Republicans wave guns, but where’s the butter?
Western Colorado Congressman Scott McInnis occupies a congressional seat that until 1972 was the most powerful one in the West. It was owned by the late Wayne Aspinall, a Democrat who chaired the House Interior Committee in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the federal government was continuing the development of the Interior West. Federal […]
Posted inWotr
The West’s negligent landlord
Western Colorado Congressman Scott McInnis occupies a congressional seat that until 1972 was the most powerful in the West. It was owned by the late Wayne Aspinall, a Democrat, who chaired the House Interior Committee in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the federal government was pouring billions into the the Interior West. Federal agencies […]