By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House

It used to be that oil and gas development happened somewhere ‘out there’ in rural areas that most of us living in the highly-populated areas of the Rockies didn’t think much about. But now that tapping domestic fuel sources is being supported on all political levels, that development is encroaching on cities and suburbs, making it harder to ignore the potential health hazards.

When it comes to extractive industries, we often focus on protecting our water supply, which is obviously important but, as a result, there’s less of a focus on air quality. Given the push to step-up exploitation of these resources, and the health impacts that westerners are already suffering from air pollutants, the issue needs to be a more prominent part of the national conversation on energy development.

When it comes to air quality and oil and gas drilling operations, there are some major issues to consider—is our air healthy to breathe and what harm are we doing to our atmosphere by extracting oil and gas? Are federal and state emissions standards stringent enough?

Editor's note: This is the third blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana's Musselshell River.

Montana's 2010-2011 winter was a skier's delight. Snow began piling up early, and continued to fall in record amounts through March. In April, when the expectation at this latitude is that snow will begin melting, it just kept coming down, even in the foothills. Disaster coordinators around the state began nervously checking on water content data from Snotel sites, and kept their fingers crossed that spring would be colder and drier than normal. No such luck.

In the Musselshell basin, water stored in mountain snow manteled thousands of acres with the equivalent of 26-36 inches of liquid, and the soil beneath the snow was still soggy from a similar bumper crop of snow and rain the previous year. The snowpack peaked in mid-May, and then warm spring rain began to fall. In Harlowton, near the upper reaches of the Musselshell River, May's total precipitation was more than 300 percent of normal. A storm during the third week of May poured nearly 9 inches of rain on top of the water poised for release from the snowpack. Gravity pulled the torrents downhill, out of the mountains and into the breaks where ranchers had spent their lives caring for their fields and livestock.

Now that February has arrived, I’d like to wish everyone a happy and festive Arizona Centennial! But wait – you say you didn’t realize that Arizona became a state one hundred years ago, on February 14^th, 1912? Well, I’m not surprised. What with the recession, most of the publicity and celebrations had to be scaled back. President Obama’s recent visit might have provided our governor, Jan Brewer, a convenient opportunity to plug the Centennial, but you saw how that turned out instead.

Still, there are some things to celebrate and it’s not too late for you join in. I’m not talking about the official events at the state capitol (live music, speeches, that sort of thing) and elsewhere throughout the state, although if you’d like to visit for those please be our guest.

No, amidst the still boiling-hot feuds over immigration, union-busting (Wisconsin’s Scott Walker may not know it, but he has many kindred spirits among Arizona politicos, unfortunately), and yet more tax-cutting, the Grand Canyon State can be proud of a few recent victories on the environmental front.

Anyone who cares about wildlife should pay attention to a scandal unfolding in Alaska.

Earlier this month, Alaska Fish & Game Division of Wildlife Conservation director Corey Rossi resigned under allegations that he systematically falsified bear hunting records and violated guiding regulations shortly before being appointed to the agency in 2008. If convicted, Rossi is guilty of defrauding the people he was appointed to represent and undermining the wildlife resource he was sworn to defend.

That may be Alaska’s mess for Alaskans to clean up. But Rossi’s fall exposes a cancer that is spreading through America’s wildlife management: cronyism and big money undermining the foundation of North American wildlife management.

North America’s wildlife is the envy of the world. Our wildlife management is based on the principle that wildlife belongs to everyone equally. By comparison, in Europe wildlife belongs to the rich and royal, who have hoarded the resource since the day of Robin Hood.

In North America, heroes like Theodore Roosevelt forged a different story with a far better outcome: wildlife is managed as a public trust using scientific principles for the common good.

By Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News

A high-stakes legal battle is underway in California over whether the state's clean air agency can enforce a first-ever rule to slash carbon emissions in transportation fuels. The fight is being closely watched because the rule could choke global market demand for Alberta's carbon-intensive oil sands at a very precarious time for the industry.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration rejected a permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which could have increased imports of the fuel into the U.S. by up to 830,000 barrels a day. It was a major setback for the oil industry and its allies and an unexpected victory for environmentalists and their allies. The two sides are now facing each other down in this court case.

California's low-carbon fuel standard is the world's first attempt to require oil suppliers to slash the carbon footprint of their motor fuels, measured not just by emissions from tailpipes but across their full lifecycle, from extraction to combustion. Eleven Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, and the European Union, are closely tracking California's case because they are working to adopt similar rules.

The state's influential Air Resources Board, or CARB, adopted the Low Carbon Fuel Standard in 2009 as part of its landmark global warming law, A.B. 32. The agency was supposed to begin enforcing the rule on Jan. 1, 2012. But oil companies, which say it unfairly penalizes high-carbon fuels like oil sands crude, have fought furiously to kill the standard. And on Dec. 29, a federal judge in Fresno, Calif., handed them a victory by ruling that CARB can't enforce the measure until an outstanding lawsuit by the oil industry and ethanol advocates is resolved in 2013.

The judge, Lawrence J. O'Neill, a George W. Bush appointee, said the rule unconstitutionally discriminates against out-of-state fuel sources and regulates commercial activity outside California's borders.

In the past few days, Twitter has been hopping with responses to the White House’s #VisitUS campaign. Initiated by President Obama’s speech on January 19th announcing new proposals to boost tourism (and the jobs that it creates), tweeters (tweeps) were invited to solicit visitation to their hometowns, and they have, in droves. “Rapid City SD – Most Patriotic City!” boasts one of the dozens of posts I scrolled past in one of my daily visits to the site.

Many of us here in the West are lucky enough to live in areas that are attractive to tourists, so we’re familiar with both the benefits and drawbacks of that industry. It does provide jobs, without a doubt, and boost economies. Unfortunately, it also can contribute to crowding, pollution, and other ills at popular sites (such as the Grand Canyon in my home state), and is subject to boom-and-bust cycles. Likewise, as right-leaning websites such as The Daily Caller were quick to point out, most tourism-related jobs are currently low-skill, low-wage hospitality industry positions, such as servers, maids, and groundskeepers. 

Despite the latest attempts at social media fueled boosterism, tourism is one of those complicated phenomena that cannot easily be diluted, by politicians or others, into neat sound bytes. It’s good and bad in varying degrees, and it’s probably disingenuous to contrast it with other industries, such as energy extraction, as The Daily Caller attempted to do by noting that the Keystone XL pipeline scheme would have generated some high-wage positions.

There's an old Doors song which tells us that "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." That pretty well sums up the message I got from the new book by William deBuys, A Great Aridity: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.

He takes us around the region -- its heart, he writes, is a stretch from the Four Corners south to where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora almost come together -- to meet climatologists, archaeologists, river runners, forest rangers and border crossers, among many others.

Editor's note: This is the second blog in a series by contributor Wendy Beye, chronicling a restoration effort on Montana's Musselshell River.

Careless Creek is one of the main tributaries feeding the Musselshell River. Its flow begins in the Big Snowy Mountains and is augmented by Swimming Woman Creek as well as by a canal that channels water from Deadman's Basin Reservoir into the river to meet downstream irrigation contract demands. By the 1980s it was a poster child for a problem facing many Western streams at the time: severe bank erosion and the resulting high sediment levels that destroyed its warm water fishery in the last gasping 15 miles of its life.

There was no easy solution to Careless Creek's problems. In 1992 a steering committee made up of representatives from water user associations, state and federal resource protection agencies, the state wildlife division, and agricultural producers hashed out a plan to tackle the creek's ecological degradation. The first task was to determine the causes that led to the creek's condition.

 The main culprit was unrestricted livestock access to the creek. Cattle had stripped away protective vegetation and their hooves had accelerated sloughing of the creek's clay banks. Runoff from corrals and a cattle feedlot dumped algae-producing nutrients into the water.

By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House

There’s potentially change in the works for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the public can weigh in on it through February 7.

The proposed draft rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA)—the two federal agencies responsible for administering the ESA—is intended to clarify which species, or segments of species, are eligible for protection.

They will do this, purportedly, by defining the controversial phrase “significant portion of its range.” What it means for a species to be threatened or endangered in a “significant portion of its range” is not defined in the ESA, and that lack of clarity has led to decades of debate and litigation, and to some decisions that clearly had bent to political pressure.

There’s no question we need a tighter interpretation of the ESA. A Bush-era legal opinion, “The Meaning of ‘In Danger of Extinction Throughout All or a Significant Portion of Its Range,” which had been in place since 2007, allowed some endangered species to be classified under the ESA differently in neighboring states. For example, the policy led to the delisting of the gray wolf in some Western states while not in other adacent ones; a move considered short-sighted by some. But the legal opinion is no longer operative, having been rejected by two federal courts.

“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert.

Our corner of the western Great Basin is tucked into the rain shadow of the Sierra crest, which knocks the bottom out of those big, wet storms that rise in the Pacific and cross California’s central valley before pounding the Range of Light. Here in Silver Hills we average only seven inches of precipitation each year, while just up the mountain at Donner Pass the average is fifty-four inches, which falls in the form of thirty-five feet of snow—a detail that may be of special value if you happen to be travelling by wagon train and don’t have an appetite for the “other other” white meat. We don’t see many clouds above the Ranting Hill, where 300 days of sunshine each year ensure that our passive solar house remains self-heating until well into the cold nights we experience here at 6,000 feet. This winter has so far been especially clear and dry, making clouds in Silver Hills as scarce as city council members uncorrupted by real estate developers. And in an era in which everything I thought was stored on my computer is apparently kept in THE cloud, I find myself doubly troubled by these unbroken skies.

All this stunning high desert cloudlessness has me thinking about clouds. Stratus. Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus. These are names so lovely it occurs to me that we should have named our daughters after them. It would at least have made hollering at the kids more entertaining: “Cirrus and Nimbus, take out the trash!” Mostly, I’m envisioning the signature cloud of the western Great Basin, the lenticular. A lenticular is a high-elevation cloud that is flat on the bottom and gracefully arched across its domed top. It resembles a flying saucer, for which it is sometimes mistaken—especially here in rural Nevada, where so few of us are wholly sane, and where we lead the nation in both foreclosures and UFO sightings (are the feds covering up a relationship between the two?). A lenticular forms when the moist air pouring over the Sierra hits the dry air rising from the desert floor, creating a cloud that is essentially a standing wave made visible. As that moist air sweeps over the top of the cloud it vanishes into vapor, which is precisely what makes the lenticular so special: it never leaves home, as do other clouds, which drift across the sky. Lenticular clouds are instead the children of mountain and desert, and it is their essential nature to perish precisely where they are born and shaped, an aerial analog of the stunningly beautiful ecotone below them.