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Dispatches from the High Country: Essays on the West from High Country News
Dispatches from the High Country: Essays on the West from High Country News
Dispatches from the High Country: Essays on the West from High Country News
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Dispatches from the High Country: Essays on the West from High Country News

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Ed Quillen is best known for entertaining Denver Post readers with his weekly columns for twenty-six years, but he wrote some of his sharpest commentary for High Country News. Managing Editor Jodi Peterson called him one of the region’s “wisest and most unique voices.” Dispatches from the High Country features a selection of his best essays published between 2008-2012.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 27, 2013
ISBN9780989982221
Dispatches from the High Country: Essays on the West from High Country News
Author

Ed Quillen

Ed Quillen was the author or co-author of 15 books, including the upcoming Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies. He entertained Denver Post readers for 26 years as a regular contributor to the Perspective section, where he wrote about history, politics, water issues, computers, and small town living. He founded Colorado Central Magazine in 1994 with his wife Martha Quillen, and they published it for 15 years. He also regularly wrote for High Country News and his work appeared in various other publications, including Colorado Homes and Lifestyles, the Los Angeles Times, and Utne. "He was a keen chronicler -- a mountain-town crier, an unofficial state historian, and a self-described sloth. The first word that comes to mind to describe Ed is "colorful," and I mean that as an absolute compliment," writes Curtis Hubbard, former State Editor of the Denver Post You can find a long bio, a bibliography, and Ed Quillen's full archives at http://edquillen.com.

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    Book preview

    Dispatches from the High Country - Ed Quillen

    Dispatches from the High Country

    Essays on the West from High Country News

    By Ed Quillen

    Edited by Abby Quillen

    Also available by Ed Quillen:

    Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies

    Selected Columns from the Denver Post 1999-2012

    Copyright © 2013 by Ed Quillen

    Cover @ 2013 by Aaron Thomas

    Smashwords Edition

    All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations and a representation of the book cover in a book review.

    Editor: Abby Quillen

    Cover photo courtesy of Zach Dischner Photography

    Cover design by Aaron Thomas

    Printed in the United States of America

    First Printing, 2013

    ISBN: 978-0-9899822-2-1

    sidewalk logo 2

    Eugene, Oregon

    Sidewalkpress@gmail.com

    Table of Contents

    Dedication

    Introduction

    Earth

    The latest trend in name-calling

    We’ve heard the drill now drumbeat before

    You gotta dream big when you dream about oil shale

    Not good news for the locals

    Fraud is fraud

    In defense of wood heat

    It’s time for Maximum Trashing Utilization

    Leadville, an old Colorado mining town, may resume mining

    Place

    Change we could believe in

    The easy way to purify our geography

    The Arizona solution

    Who’s in charge of immigration?

    The harm of hallowed ground

    The Gettysburg of the West?

    Matters of State

    The West remains a mysterious region

    Cold dead fingers

    Wyoming’s day in the spin

    The debate that won’t happen

    Ronald Reagan: The accidental environmentalist

    Fixing what ain’t broken in Foggy Bottom

    Impact

    Water and the National Parks

    Why not fees on Fourteeners?

    The nature of nature

    How Christo's opponents can change your mind

    Protection versus promotion at Brown's Canyon

    Life in the Rural West

    Mayberry and Peyton Place

    Welcome to hard times

    A local business, and old friend, dies

    The latest War on the West

    Legacy

    We’re in a land of Lincoln

    Of populists and political fusion

    Abraham Lincoln and the West

    Socialism and the West

    Utah vs. the United States of America

    How the Civil War shaped the West

    Make my state gun a popgun

    The postal service is slipping away

    About the Author

    About the Editor

    Also available by Ed Quillen

    Acknowledgments

    To the memory of Ed Quillen,

    and to all the readers who made it possible

    for him to do the work he loved.

    Introduction

    It’s the place where South Dakota ranchers, New Mexico shepherds, Colorado mountain riff-raff, Montana Earth First!ers, Boulder Sierra Clubbers and other varied elements of the Interior West come together to argue about what they care about, Ed Quillen wrote of High Country News in 1995.

    "I suspect that HCN has thrived precisely because it isn't slick or colorful, and it lets writers write about what they care about, rather than stuff that nobody will care about after next year's models come out, he continued. HCN doesn't try to sell the West or any part thereof. It can be as quirky, weird and eccentric as the people, weather and landscape of the West."

    Ed Quillen is best known for entertaining Denver Post readers with his weekly columns for twenty-six years, but he wrote some of his sharpest commentary for High Country News. Managing Editor Jodi Peterson called him one of the region’s wisest and most unique voices.

    The issues he probed in the magazine — human impact on the wilderness, the region’s role in the national political landscape, the legacies of conquest and conflict — are ever-present in the West. This collection features a selection of Ed Quillen's best essays published between 2008 and 2012.

    Earth

    The latest trend in name-calling

    June 09, 2008

    The Cold War was actually rather heated when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. America was more or less at war with the Communists as a matter of foreign policy. It affected our domestic discourse because politicians so often sought to discredit their opponents as Communist sympathizers or comsympssoft on Communism, just a little bit pink or outright pinkos.

    Something as basic as the integration of public facilities could be, and often was, denounced as part of a global Communist conspiracy to weaken America. As Strom Thurmond of South Carolina put it in 1961, It has been revealed time and time again that advocacy by Communists of social equality among diverse races ... is the surest method for the destruction of free governments.

    But despite everything, the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. And although China remains Communist in theory, in practice it is proving quite talented at capitalism.

    Today, pinkos are passe. So what do you do when the need arises to discredit political opponents, especially on environmental issues?

    Simple. We’re fighting what President George W. Bush calls a global war on terror. So instead of accusing your adversaries of being commies, which is so twentieth century, move into the twenty-first century. Call them terrorists.

    Witness the recent press release from an outfit called Americans for American Energy, based in Golden, Colorado. At issue was the leasing of the Roan Plateau in western Colorado for oil and gas drilling.

    Part of the plateau was originally set aside as a Naval Oil Shale Reserve by President Woodrow Wilson. Back then, as navies switched from coal to oil, the federal government reserved certain public lands for future fuel supplies for the U.S. Navy — the most notorious being the scandal-ridden Teapot Dome Reserve north of Casper, Wyoming.

    At that time, and even today, there was no economical way to extract petroleum from oil shale. No battleships were ever powered by oil shale, so control of the land passed from the Navy to the U.S. Department of Energy to the federal Bureau of Land Management.

    Lots of people — including local ranchers and hunters worried about the mule deer population — oppose drilling on the Roan Plateau. They worked through the system to protest, writing letters, speaking out at public meetings and lobbying their elected officials.

    They did nothing violent or destructive. But the press release denounced them as economic terror groups — eco-terrorists who had launched an attack against the U.S. Naval Oil Shale Reserve, thereby weakening American security, right when we are in the middle of a war.

    Greg Schnacke, president of Americans for American Energy, explained that America can better support our troops if our economy is strong. And producing more American energy here at home — instead of buying foreign energy — makes us stronger. But these eco-terrorists and their supporters in Congress want to hamstring America’s ability to harvest American energy. ...

    Thus does a peaceful, legal effort to protect public lands become an act of terrorism.

    The energy lobby isn’t the only one to play the name-calling card, however.

    A couple of months ago, an immense (5.25 pounds, 12 by 14 inches) book landed on my desk. Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation is a lushly illustrated anthology of passionate attacks on motorized recreation: motorcycles, ATVs, ORVs, snowmobiles, jet skis, dune buggies and swamp buggies, to name the most prominent offenders.

    As someone who tries to tread quietly and lightly, I certainly sympathize with the authors. But are motorheads really practicing eco-terrorism?

    In the book’s foreword, Douglas Thompson, president of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, says so. Thrillcraft was designed to document the pervasive destruction of America’s public lands by a home-grown crop of eco-terrorists, people who wantonly disfigure landscapes in the pursuit of thoughtless, gas-guzzling ‘fun.’

    Motorized recreationists are outdoors having fun. They might be boorish, loud and destructive. But does that make them terrorists?

    Granted, there are some who knock down signs and tear out gates. I saw their handiwork a few months ago at one of my favorite hiking areas near town. Some four-wheelers had contrived a detour around the big rocks that the BLM had installed to block a deeply rutted, washed-out path up a gulch. Those drivers were certainly vandals and lawbreakers. I would call them jerks, as well as various unprintable epithets. But I wouldn’t call them terrorists.

    What, after all, is terrorism?

    My American Heritage Dictionary says it’s the systematic use of terror (defined nearby as intense, overpowering fear), violence, and intimidation to achieve an end.

    Perhaps more pertinently, the U.S. State Department calls it premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. In our land-management disputes, there certainly have been acts of terrorism, such as the pipe bombs aimed at U.S. Forest Service personnel in 1995 in Nevada, or the 1998 arson that damaged or destroyed seven buildings at the Vail ski resort in Colorado.

    But citizens who go to public hearings or offer their opinions on motorized recreation, oil and gas drilling or a host of other public-lands issues are hardly committing acts of terrorism. These citizens may be our opponents. They may be stupid or naive or misguided. But let’s quit calling them terrorists.

    If you don’t agree, then you must be a terrorist, or at least a pinko comsymp.

    We’ve heard the drill now drumbeat before

    October 06, 2008

    Perhaps it is telling that when it comes to energy policy, President George W. Bush has inspired nostalgia for Jimmy Carter. If we had only followed Carter’s energy plan, people say, we wouldn’t be in this fix now.

    For Westerners, though, following Carter would have been a big mistake. Granted, there were some sensible aspects to Carter’s energy policies, such as higher gas-mileage standards, conservation and more solar energy. But in general, Carter saw the West as a colony to be exploited for the benefit of the mother country.

    Part of Carter’s attitude toward the West may have been driven by raw politics. In 1976, the Democratic former governor of Times defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford with 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. Not one of Carter’s electoral votes came from the Mountain West. Indeed, from Alaska and Washington to Oklahoma, was carried by Ford, with only two exceptions — Hawaii and Texas.

    Carter took office three years after the oil shock of 1973, when an Arab embargo that fall caused pump prices to jump from 30 cents a gallon to 60 cents. He was in office in 1979 when there was another oil shock resulting from the Iranian Revolution. He addressed America’s energy challenge on several occasions, once calling it the moral equivalent of war.

    How did he plan to fight this moral war? He did not propose to lift a ban on offshore drilling, because there was no ban then. The congressional ban came about in 1982, when it was passed by a Republican Senate and signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan. The executive order against offshore drilling was issued in 1989 by another Republican, President George

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