The Thicket of Tribal Law

LAME DEER, Mont.–As energy development accelerates in the West, trouble comes with it. Ranchers object when a state legislature decides to allocate thousands of acre-feet of water to a coal slurry pipeline. Homeowners protest when their wells go dry after a strip mine is dug. And when power companies try to condemn prime farm land for a transmission line, farmers holler.

A Crisis of Oil Information

WASHINGTON, D.C.–During the puzzling oil crisis of 1979, while oil companies and their critics argued over the reasons for gas lines and soaring prices, one little known public official, Dr. Joachim W. Koenig, had more inside information about what was going on than anyone else outside the industry.

Cost-efficient Contamination

MONTAGUE, Mich.–The town of Montague, Michigan, sits up against the rolling bluffs of White Lake, hundreds of miles from the industrial centers of Detroit and Chicago. Every springtime, sap from the sugar maples runs like rainshowers and the lake is fat with perch and bass. In the springtime of 1951, however, there were also no jobs. "We were a community down at the heels," recalls 79-year-old Wendell Lipka, who lives with his wife of 55 years in a house on the ravine over Little Buttermilk Creek.

DENVER–The temperature was in the 20’s this December day and light snow was expected as Jonny Sappington pulled his government-owned 18-wheeler out of Cheyenne after lunch. He headed south toward Denver with his highly classified cargo. Three heavily armed guards followed close behind in a light blue, unmarked Chevrolet Blazer. Two more armed men were in the tractor with him and shared the driving duties since the crew left Richland, Washington, early the previous day.

HUTCHINSON, Kan.–Six hundred and fifty feet beneath the Kansas prairie, in a mined-out section of a working salt mine, a man in a gray plaid suit sits at a telex machine typing out and receiving messages. This is only a test-the man comes to the salt mine two times a year for a communications drill. But if a nuclear attack had been launched against the United States, the messages he is sending and receiving would be devoted to re-establishing the services of the Federal Reserve Bank in the devastated country.