June 6, 1989: In a dramatic, unprecedented raid on a federal nuclear facility, more than 70 U.S. agents burst into the sprawling Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver seeking evidence of environmental crimes involving radioactive plutonium. Led by FBI special agent Jon Lipsky, the raid was kept secret from Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and […]
Wotr
Posted inWotr
A day on the river that ended in a death
I keep thinking about Mary, a woman I never met. I Googled her name looking for her obituary, but I kept getting the same headlines of the articles I’ve already read too many times: “Woman dies in Pine Creek rafting accident.” “Texas woman drowns while rafting the Arkansas River.” When her obituary is posted, I’m […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t pick up the leaverite!
Ranger Maureen McLean relies on her overwhelmingly gregarious nature to help visitors enjoy wildflower season at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. And the wildflowers depend on that good nature to survive being enjoyed by the visitors. Ranger McLean heads the Meadow Rovers, a volunteer group that patrols the most crowded parts of the Paradise […]
Posted inWotr
Who are the true Idaho conservatives?
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has worked hard for six years to turn the state’s Highway 12 into a corridor for sending massive, 200-foot-long mega-loads of heavy equipment to Alberta, Canada, for tar sands extraction. But it’s not working out. First, state court verdicts in Idaho and Montana, plus botched operations by mega-loads haulers, held things […]
Posted inWotr
Nebraska loves its cattle a little too much
On the surface, it sounded like good news: In 2013, Nebraska supplanted Texas as the No. 1 cattle-feeding state in the country. The numbers were impressive: Nebraska had 2.46 million cattle on feed, surpassing the 2.44 million in Texas, the longtime king of cattle. They had folks in the governor’s mansion and at Farm Bureau […]
Posted inWotr
I moved from New Mexico to Missoula and can’t believe the water waste
I am fairly new to Montana, and I now walk the streets of Missoula with an uncanny feeling that I’m a messenger from the future. No, I’m not a nut job claiming to hail from Mars or another galaxy. But I do come from a place that has become a mutated version of itself in […]
Posted inWotr
Why I am a Tea Party member
Every once in a while, someone asks me why I helped start the Tea Party in Bozeman, Montana. To make the story short, I say something like this: It was spring 2009, and I’d become increasingly disenchanted with both political parties’ support of rampant government overspending; I worried about its impact on our nation and […]
Posted inWotr
The battle for women’s suffrage continues
In Montana, no woman has held federal office since 1916, when Montanans elected their first and only female Congressional representative.
Posted inWotr
Our reliance on drones to patrol the borders
When I think of Canada, I picture caribou herds, universal healthcare and the occasional hockey brawl. Officials at our Department of Homeland Security, however, seem to think the neighbors up North pose a serious security threat. After all, the department has spent the last five years quietly building a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — […]
Posted inWotr
How Amazon taught Grand Junction a valuable lesson
Small businesses and nonprofits have a lot in common: They operate on thin margins, develop strong local ties and support their communities’ economic and social wellbeing. But what happens to those strong bonds when an online retailing giant comes in with a deal that benefits one side and threatens the other? That was the question […]
Posted inWotr
Boise may be low profile, but we’re high-tech
Over the years, whenever I’ve tried to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of living in a small town rather than a metropolis, the small town has always looked like the better choice. It used to be that cultural amenities and cosmopolitanism gave big cities significant boosts in this either/or match-up, but developments in technology have changed […]
Posted inWotr
A neologism for the summer’s inevitable wildfires: smoke season
Planning summer outings here in Montana used to be simple: Enlist participants, round up gear, drive to the river or trailhead, and go. But as I plan this year’s adventures, I’m warning the possible participants: Smoke may force cancellation. Last August was dicey. With wildfires roaring in 11 Western states, all our outings were at the mercy of wind […]
Posted inWotr
My town wasted scarce water for a celebration
I’m still thinking about last February’s “Dew Downtown,” Flagstaff’s third annual ski and snowboard festival, which transformed a steep downtown road into a winter playground of snow-covered runs and what looked like death-defying jumps. In the crowd, scattered among the thousands of families and younger beer drinkers who used words like “shred” and “stoked,” were […]
Posted inWotr
What makes America unique is its public lands
As Independence Day approaches, let’s take a moment to celebrate our nation’s natural wonders. In this country we have the freedom to explore approximately 618 million acres of publicly owned federal lands, from the tundra of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the cliffs of the newly-created Sleeping Bear Dunes Wilderness on Lake Michigan and […]
Posted inWotr
This July 4th, take a gander at the phone book
Like most Americans, I’m a mutt, and proud of it.
Posted inWotr
About those gay loggers for Jesus and July 4th
A town’s July 4th celebration says a lot about a community, and this holiday in Bozeman, Montana, promises to be relatively laid-back, with locals typically heading for nearby Livingston or Ennis to catch their parades, then back home for stirring music and fireworks at the fairgrounds. Just five years ago, however, Bozeman woke up to controversy when […]
Posted inWotr
Let’s protect all our nation’s water
The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed a new rule to define the term “the waters of the United States” as used in the federal Clean Water Act. If you care about protecting our nation’s waters and wetlands, and if you care about government efficiency, then you should support this rule. Here’s why. For largely historical […]
Posted inWotr
Reflections on the fire that killed 19 firefighters a year ago
The terms fire control and fire management are really just euphemisms for firefighting. Think tornado control or the impossibility of tornado management. We can prepare for fires, we can study them and even learn how to dance with them, but controlling fires is always a gamble. And sometimes we lose. Last year, on June 30, we […]
Posted inWotr
Fighting GMO’s: a passionate bunch of people move mountains
Did this really happen? Did a young organic farmer discover that the multinational agricultural firm Syngenta had secretly planted genetically modified sugar beets (banned in the company’s native Switzerland) near his small fields, and in other leased plots around southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley? Did he then plough under his own crop because of the risk […]
Posted inWotr
Cannabis could go Champagne in western Colorado
In the garden of my cousin, Sepp, in Germany’s Black Forest, there is a big tree that produces lots of yellow plums every year. Sepp, a retired forest worker, keeps the grass cut very short around his Mirabellenbaum, so he doesn’t miss a single fallen fruit. Every evening in the fall, he gathers the plums […]