Last week, as I was working on a story about the so-called “War on Coal” being waged by Obama (spoiler alert: It’s cheap natural gas, not the current administration, that’s the culprit), I ran into an article indicating that Peabody Energy, the biggest coal company in the world, plans to lay off about a thousand […]
Jonathan Thompson
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Follow him @LandDesk
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
How the Mormon GOP runs Utah with a collectivist touch
“Our object is to labor for the benefit of the whole …” –Brigham Young, 1873 A throng of cars floats down Interstate 15 on an end-of-summer morning, the rising sun wreathed in the orange gauze of distant wildfire smoke. In Lehi, a suburb sandwiched between Salt Lake City and Provo, a massive steel-and-glass shape juts […]
Posted inGoat
Is the Western growth machine coming out of its coma?
I like to keep an eye on what the housing market’s doing in the West. That’s not because I’m invested in it — my family and I have been happy renters since we sold our house a year ago. I’m interested in the housing market because this one data set can tell so much about […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Collectivists for Christ!
Orderville, Utah, is a smattering of modest homes in a narrow valley on the banks of southern Utah’s Virgin River. It feels both overgrown and empty: Thousands of people pass through here daily on their way between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet few ever stop. On a perfect September day in the thick […]
Posted inGoat
This rich Republican Mormon spreads the wealth
He’s a rich, conservative Republican businessman, and the scion of a powerful Mormon family. And four years into a devastating economic crisis, he has come to Washington, D.C., amid cries to balance the budget, to offer a solution. Mitt Romney? Nope. It’s Marriner S. Eccles. The year was 1933, and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee […]
Posted inGoat
Drilling into the data
I’ve written here before about how the natural gas glut has led to low prices which has led to a drilling drought in many Western regions. But even I was surprised when I received the latest numbers from the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission and saw that drilling in my state had slowed to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bobcat kittens fall in love with firefighters
OREGON Every town needs something to be proud of. Portland not only has its own television show, Portlandia, but also a toilet. A very special toilet: Portland, if the L.A. Times is to be believed, has revolutionized the public loo, creating a minimalist, solar-powered bathroom that boasts its own Facebook page. It supposedly solves the age-old […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Fraudulent corn robberies
Around Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, the livestock are a little different. Credit: Andrew Gulliford UTAH It seemed at first like just another armed holdup of a roadside corn stand. Corn-seller Dusty Moore told police that he was innocently selling ears in a North Ogden parking lot when a Hispanic-looking man in his 30s approached, demanded some money […]
Posted inGoat
OPEC invades Hollywood!
The Heritage Foundation’s crack team of investigative journalists has done it again. After deep digging (looking at the film’s credits?) they determined that Gus Van Sant’s new film with Matt Damon, “Promised Land,” about oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, was at least partially funded by a firm based in the United Arab Emirates. […]
Posted inGoat
Brigham Young the enlightened one
In 1847, a few years after the violent death, in Missouri, of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led the Mormons on an exodus across the desert into the promised land, a place we now know as Utah. Young, as President of the Church of Latter Day Saints, then led the colonization of Utah and parts of […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
The great New Mexican juniper massacre
385,000 years: That’s the estimated collective age of old, live junipers illegally cut for firewood between July 2010 and November 2011 on Bureau of Land Management land in northern and central New Mexico. Hardest hit have been the surreally beautiful badlands west of the small town of Cuba, now stippled with freshly sawed tree stumps, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bloodsuckers in California
THE SOUTHWEST & CALIFORNIA It’s been hot lately. Damned hot. Phoenix, Ariz., Palm Springs, Calif., and other Western torrid zones posted temperatures of more than 100 degrees every day during the first two weeks of August. Death Valley’s high exceeded 115 degrees on 14 out of those 14 days, and on one occasion reached 126 […]
Posted inGoat
Is Lake Powell really shrinking?
The West is heating and drying up so much that the whole place could burst into flames at any second. At least, that’s the way it seems, reading the news these days. Every day it’s another item about the catastrophic, unprecedented drought and the “new normal” of months of consecutive 90+ degree highs in places […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Dark days for bovines
WASHINGTON: “It’s all downhill from here, sweetie.” Courtesy Alexis Alloway. COLORADO These are dark days for bovines. In northeastern Colorado, 50 cows keeled over this summer, most likely from anthrax, which thrives during drought. That sad news came on the heels of a grisly spate of livestock mutilations in the western part of the state. […]
Posted inGoat
Romney energy plan more of the same
By now you probably have heard that Mitt Romney unveiled his energy plan this week. He calls it: “The Romney Plan For A Stronger Middle Class: ENERGY INDEPENDENCE.” So creative! He’s only the gazillionth politician since Nixon to tout energy independence. And he’s also the gazillionth to get it all wrong. If there were any […]
Posted inGoat
The two-wheeled stimulus plan
On an overcast, unseasonably cool, late August morning, a roar, a cacophonous clatter of cowbells and a riot of horns and sirens rose up from the streets of downtown Durango, Colo., as the second annual USA Pro Cycling Challenge got its start. From there, the peleton — 126 riders, including some of the world’s best […]
Posted inGoat
Help us cover the New New West
Dear Reader, I need your help. No, I’m not asking for money, or even a couch to crash on or your extra ramen noodles to dine on during reporting trips. I’m just looking for your ideas and observations. When I was brought on as High Country News’ senior-editor-at-large number two in July, it was with […]
Posted inGoat
Get on the bus
One of the first things we did when we moved back to my quasi-rural hometown of Durango, Colo., this summer was ride the “trolley.” It’s actually a bus that is made to look like an old street car, complete with wood benches for passengers, but it’s mass transit, and it’s free, and it gets you […]
Posted inGoat
Price matters
Last winter, the Bureau of Land Management gave its approval to a large natural gas drilling project in northern New Mexico. Under the Middle Mesa plan, WPX Energy would drill and frack 53 shale gas wells on a mesa overlooking Navajo Reservoir over a five year period. The company can drill year-round, too, since the […]