by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing and park space. Those are [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel No folk music collection is complete without the all-time classic 1967 LP, Arlo Guthrie’s debut, the entire first side of which was the 18-minute opus called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” It was a sarcastic and irreverent narrative protesting the Vietnam-era draft, beginning with an innocent [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In the 1967 classic, “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman gets pulled aside for the ultimate one-word advice about his future: “Plastics.” It was a prophetic view of the entire nation’s economic future. In President Trump’s speech to Congress on March 4, he did not shy [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In 2017, the Arizona Game and Fish Department estimated that there were only 252 Mount Graham red squirrels left. They only inhabited a few hundred acres in the 10,000-foot Pinaleño Mountains, not equipped to survive the heat of the surrounding deserts. Then, a lightning [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel It is ironic to see preservationists lobbying to save power plants with smokestacks, but that is the strange case of the Zuni power plant in Denver. The coal-fired steam plant was built in 1901 and provided electricity to a growing metropolis until decommissioned by [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a dead body reanimated through Vodou magic. The modern concept of zombies as flesh-eating creatures from the cemetery evolved more recently, from the 1968 comedy/horror film, “Night of the Living Dead,” and sequels like “Dawn of the Dead,” [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel A lot of jokes about Elon Musk are making the rounds, in light of his new role in identifying government waste, fraud and abuse. One says after he puts a car into orbit, outer space will be full of germs and diseases, no longer [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In the 1950 movie version of Grimm’s Fairy Tale, the cruel stepmother scolds Cinderella, “You clumsy little fool — clean that up!” But of course, it was the stepmother, not Cinderella, who made the mess. Sometimes it seems like the world is full of [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel An early lesson I learned as a young staffer for the late Sen. Bill Armstrong was the importance of careful consideration. He disliked being rushed into hasty decisions and developed a standard response to any demand for immediate action. “If you need an answer [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Range Magazine features a story called “Where the Desert Bloomed” about the Bend, Oregon, region along the Deschutes River. It could just as well be about the Grand Valley. It describes a once-arid desert turned into a lush valley of productive agriculture by irrigation [...]
