Capturing carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and factories and storing it in deep geologic formations could prove a critical arrow in the quiver of efforts to combat climate change. Plus there’s a bonus: it makes coal and natural gas — and the reliable energy they produce — a whole lot cleaner, protecting them from […]
Emilene Ostlind
Posted inGoat
Pop quiz: What national conservation land is nearest you?
The National Landscape Conservation System — America’s youngest permanently protected collection of public lands — celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and grassroots organizers and BLM managers are meeting in Nevada to plan for the next 10 years in the “sportsman’s park service.” Before the upcoming meetings in Nevada, you might brush up on the […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
Draining the tub
On Oct. 17, history was quietly made: The surface elevation of Lake Mead, a huge reservoir on the Colorado River near Las Vegas, dropped below its record low and continued to fall about a tenth of an inch per day over the following days. Those fractions of inches might seem insignificant, but when projected across […]
Posted inGoat
Oh deer
For the last 10 years, Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc. — an environmental and statistical consulting group — has been studying the mule deer that winter on the Pinedale Anticline. Over the first four years of the study, But the latest data, just released in a new report [pdf], makes those increases look like a temporary […]
Posted inGoat
Squeezing trees
The new data show forest carbon storage by region, with forests in the 11 Western states accounting for almost a third of the nation’s total. Forests in the West reach two extremes. Oregon, Washington, and southeast Alaska forests store the most carbon per acre of anywhere in the U.S., while those in Arizona, Nevada, New […]
Posted inGoat
Fortification or sacrifice?
The Fortification elk herd, which lives in what some call “the wildest country remaining in the Powder River Basin,” is one of the only plains elk populations in the continental US. After reintroduction to the Fortification Creek watershed of northeast Wyoming in the 1950s the herd now numbers around 250 animals. Hunters covet licenses for […]
Posted inGoat
Who’s terrorizing who?
Attention citizens of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming: get ready for new neighbors in your skies as the U.S. Air Force plans to train pilots over far-reaching swaths of the West. The Air Force’s existing training areas, developed during the Cold War, are too small and flat to prepare pilots […]
Posted inGoat
Grazing takes the heat
Climate change. Severe wildfires. Invasive species. A booming human population. The Bureau of Land Management identifies these as four key threats to Western public lands. Stick conventional and renewable energy development, endangered species protection, and recreation in the mix, and there’s less room each year for a past widespread use of public lands: livestock grazing. […]
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More surprises flow from Ruby Pipeline
Last month the HCN magazine ran a story on the furor over a conservation deal meant to keep two environmental groups from suing to stop construction of the Ruby Pipeline, a 675-mile-long natural gas pipe stretching from Opal, Wyo., to Malin, Ore. Western Watersheds Project and the Oregon Natural Desert Association opposed fragmentation and destruction […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
Beyond beefalo
By the end of the 19th century, North America’s many millions of bison were reduced to just a few hundred. They’ve since recovered to around a half million, most raised as livestock and crossbred with cattle. Now conservationists manage over 60 herds, such as the one at the American Prairie Reserve in Montana, to restore […]
Posted inGoat
Out of breath
A dry cough rattles the throat of 63-year-old John Mionczynski, who is sun-tanned, fit and active and should be one of the healthiest people in Wyoming. He’s spent his life goat packing through the Wind River Mountains and living off wild plants in the Red Desert. An ethnobotanist and wildlife biologist, he calls high, dry […]
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“Lines Across the Sand”
Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang opened with a definition: sabotage … n. [Fr. < sabot, wooden shoe + -age: from damage done to machinery by sabots]…. From this subtle introduction, the book grew beyond its covers, even beyond the reach of its cantankerous author, and led a whole generation of upset desert […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Surprises flow from Ruby Pipeline
A conservation compromise fails to stave off lawsuits
Posted inAugust 16, 2010: Young, All-American, Illegal
Welcome back, otter
Kitchi, a male river otter, escaped from Colorado Springs’ Cheyenne Mountain Zoo this past May when he deftly pulled apart the mesh wire on his outdoor enclosure. Zookeepers pursued him through a culvert with a robotic camera, but failed to catch him. He is still on the loose, perhaps living in nearby Fountain Creek. Kitchi’s […]
Posted inGoat
Quarry quandary
The limestone that comes from quarries near Durkee, Ore., has more mercury in it than average. As Jeremy Miller reported for HCN last January, when that limestone gets cooked in giant kilns to make cement, the mercury lifts into the air along with other dangerous pollutants like soot, hydrogen chloride, and hydrocarbons. From there, it […]
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New law empowers tribal justice systems
In late July, President Obama, an adopted member of the Crow Tribe of southern Montana, signed the Tribal Law and Order Act. The measure, introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) in 2008, aims to smooth out the “jurisdictional maze” of law enforcement on reservations in order to empower tribal communities to better confront crime. Many […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Crime crackdown in Indian Country
A federal effort to improve public safety on reservations gets a rocky start
Posted inGoat
The Heart of the Beast
As a kid in northern Wyoming, I watched my dad dump a five-gallon bucket of Powder River Basin coal into the heater in our living room every winter night before bed. I’d lean against the stove in my jammies, enjoying its warmth while a blizzard rattled the chimney pipe. Though most Americans never hear coal […]
Posted inJuly 19, 2010: The Ute Paradox
HCN rocks with eTown
ETown, the eco-groovy weekly radio music show based in Boulder, Colo., will honor HCN Founder Tom Bell and HCN‘s 40th Anniversary with its E-chievement Award at a special concert July 30 at the Redrocks Amphitheater near Denver. The “Greenrocks at Redrocks” event will feature great music from Lyle Lovett and Taj Mahal, a little stage […]
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Shutting down the batcave
Like some nightmarish scene from a horror film, bats have been dying by the millions from a pervasive, infectious fungus that causes white-nose syndrome. As Madeline Bodin relates in her recent HCN story “Bracing for White-Nose Syndrome” the fungus looks like powder on the faces and wings of bats and kills them by driving them […]