One of the first lessons responsible parents teach their children is both simple and valid: if you make a mess, clean it up. Many mining companies used their political influence to escape this admonition. This is true through out the West, even on the borders of Yellowstone National Park. Their economic calculus is simple. Benefits […]
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Environmental think tanks exist to foster constructive reforms. That’s why FREE and Gallatin Writers launched a $35,000 contest. The goal is to generate innovative ways to help preserve the Upper Missouri River, its culture, and its economy. The bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (2003-2005) will focus world attention upon the Upper Missouri, […]
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Recently, my wife and I were dinner guests in a beautiful home. Like hundreds of others, it’s built in on a forested hill on the edge of the Gallatin National Forest. It is enclosed by trees which nearly brush the house. When a forest fire makes a run up their slope, their house is likely […]
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Recently, my wife and I were dinner guests in a beautiful home. Like hundreds of others, it’s built in on a forested hill on the edge of the Gallatin National Forest. It is enclosed by trees which nearly brush the house. When a forest fire makes a run up their slope, their house is likely […]
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What do Cyanide leach mining, dredges, and hydraulic mining have in common? Ecological, social, political, and economic destruction. First consider the most dramatic, hydraulic mining. Here’s how it works. Water is captured at an elevation above the site to be blasted. It is piped downward, picking up four tenths of a pound of pressure for […]
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University Press of Colorado, 1998, John A. Baden, contributing author and editor (with Karl Hess, Jr.).Available through Amazon Books.
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The cowboy symbolizes the American West and universal manly virtues. For a few decades these rugged individualists ran roughshod over the wild expanse of the West, herding cattle, taming broncs, and working dawn to dusk. In myth, the cowboy still is the West at its best. But times they are a changing. The West isn’t […]
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“By establishing a nonprofit trust to manage the Presidio’s property, it gives us a blueprint for national parks that one day will be able to sustain themselves without government funds,” President Bill Clinton announced last month. He was in part referring to legislation he signed which turned over management of the Presidio National Park in […]
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In Idaho, state wildlife biologists are doing something they never learned in college—teaching trout how to eat native foods. It seems that the hatchery-raised fish, fed a diet of protein pellets instead of stoneflies, have developed rather discriminating palates. They react to worms and other traditional fare the way most five-year-olds do to broccoli. This […]
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In Idaho, state wildlife biologists are doing something they never learned in college—teaching trout how to eat native foods. It seems that the hatchery-raised fish, fed a diet of protein pellets instead of stoneflies, have developed rather discriminating palates. They react to worms and other traditional fare the way most five-year-olds do to broccoli. This […]
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