Montana
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Environmentalists pick their sides in key Senate races
It’s a rare political event that can draw applause from both the White House and environmental groups, but Lincoln Chafee’s victory in the Rhode Island Republican primary on Tuesday was just that. Lincoln Chafee. The Bush administration reasons that Chafee — the most liberal Republican in the Senate, and frequently at odds with Bush on […]
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Montana’s landscape is changing — will America’s be next?
Montana's governor is a politician of such breathtaking dexterity, ability, and raw, hungry, political instinct that your first thought upon witnessing him -- no matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat -- is likely to be, "When does he explode, and in what manner?" For rarely in American politics has anyone this good been that way indefinitely.
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I’m on the Hunt, I’m After You
Bush Angers Hunters and Anglers by Promoting Resource Extraction The Bush administration is ticking off many traditionally Republican hunters and anglers with its plans to encourage logging and oil and gas drilling in natural areas throughout the Western U.S. Last week, 450 U.S. gun clubs sent a petition to the U.S. Forest Service objecting to […]
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Michelle Nijhuis reviews Libby, Montana by Andrea Peacock
It's never been easy to make a living in Libby, Mont. Citizens in this town of 12,000, tucked into the dense, damp conifer forests of northwestern Montana, have long scraped by on seasonal logging jobs and other sporadic work. So in the 1920s, when local entrepreneur Edward Alley discovered that a nearby vermiculite deposit yielded an efficient, lightweight insulation and fireproofing material, Libbyites were thrilled.
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Back to the Yellowstone Age
The Bush administration has asked the United Nations to remove Yellowstone National Park from a list of endangered World Heritage sites. “Yellowstone is no longer in danger,” wrote the Interior Department’s Paul Hoffman in a letter to the World Heritage Committee. There’s just one snag: The park staff disagree with Hoffman, saying Yellowstone still faces […]
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How we could save both forests and jobs
The “roadless” road show swept the nation last week as U.S. Forest Service officials collected public comment on President Clinton’s initiative to prohibit road building in national forests where no roads now exist. What’s missing from this picture? Photo: U.S. Forest Service. The policy would affect 43 million acres across the country, including about 5.8 […]
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Fire on the Mountain
Enviros in Washington are apoplectic over what they fear will be a pre-Earth Day cave-in by the Clinton administration over mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. This used to be a mountain. Photo: David Miller, www.mountaintopmining.org. Readers may recall this battle from last year’s appropriations season, when powerful Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) introduced a rider that […]
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Montanans are now proud owners of the right to a clean environment
Should citizens in the United States have a constitutional right to clean air and clean water, just as they have rights to free speech and freedom of religion? That’s the broad question raised by a court decision in Montana last month. Fight for your right to clean water. In a ruling that is sure to […]
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The Intermountain West becomes a California suburb
One does not expect enlightenment from a barber shop conversation, but there it was. I’d always had hunches about the nature of demographic change in Western mountain towns, nasty hunches, hunches counter to the conventional wisdom that immigration was motivated by the newcomers’ love of the land, so the newcomers would become allies in environmental […]
