“From its beginning 200 years ago, throughout its history, America has made great sacrifices of blood and also of treasure to achieve and maintain its independence. In the last third of this century, our independence will depend on maintaining and achieving self-sufficiency in energy.” President Richard Nixon said this back in 1973, after oil producers […]
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 inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inGoat
The Estonian connection: Or how I started worrying about oil shale
The last big oil shale* boom in the West busted on “Black Sunday” 1982. I was 11 years old, then, living in Western Colorado, and I can still remember my dad explaining the boom, the bust and the process necessary to get the “oil” out of the shale. Here’s a primer: Underground room and pillar […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but […]
Posted inGoat
Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
Posted inGoat
Return of the corn
The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up […]
Posted inGoat
Demise of the housing growth machine
In 2008, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University released a report called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor. It predicted that the corridor, stretching from Nogales in the south to Prescott in the north, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart, would more than double its population by 2040, requiring some 3.7 million […]
Posted inGoat
The urban wild
In the beginning was the bat. Roger, Isolde,* and I sipped margaritas on a warm August evening in their Boulder condo. Suddenly, Roger slammed down his drink, pointed to the ceiling and screamed, “Look out!” As a black, papery blur fluttered around the living room, I dived to the floor and slithered under the table. […]
Posted inGoat
Bill Koch, coal, and political cash
The cynic in me hardly batted an eye when I read recently that Republican House Speaker John Boehner is raking in coal-stained cash. Nor did I spill my coffee when I noticed that one of Boehner’s big new donors is a Koch brother. My interest was piqued, however, when I saw that it wasn’t David […]
Posted inGoat
Hummer Syndrome
A few months ago, while scouring Wyoming’s Powder River Basin for evidence that the West had gone global, I drove my little rental car into Gillette, a once humble little burg that has ridden a coal mining and methane boom to become one of the state’s biggest cities. I saw my share of strip malls […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2011: The Global West
The Global West: how foreign investment fuels resource extraction in Western states
Douglas, Wyo., population 5,000 and home of the legendary jackalope, lies in an almost puritanical landscape — beautiful, yet shy about that beauty, concealing it modestly under a beige blanket of grass and shrubs. A collection of low-slung stone and brick buildings sits at the town’s center, with tree-shaded residential neighborhoods radiating out from it. […]
Posted inJuly 25, 2011: The Global West
Global Players in the West’s Extraction Economy
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Posted inJuly 25, 2011: The Global West
When the locals don’t want your coal, sell it overseas
The world’s largest surface coal mine complex is a landscape unto itself. Six 200-foot-high draglines tear open the earth and scoop the black coal into gigantic dump trucks that make school buses look like playthings. Two dozen loaded-down trains, each a mile long, slide out of the mine complex every day, headed for power plants […]
Posted inNovember 22, 2010: Hardrock Showdown
Western elections wrap-up
Red states get redder, while key Senate seats stay blue
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
New Mexico: Wolves, wilderness, drilling and Latinos
“Nothing is more attractive to a wolf than the sound of a crying baby,” said then-Rep. Steve Pearce, R, during a 2007 debate over one of his bills, which sought to kill funding for the federal Mexican wolf reintroduction program in southern New Mexico, Pearce’s district. More recently, Pearce expressed his views of land protection […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Oregon: Tea Party limbo
It’s hard to imagine, in these Tea Party times, a guy with a political history like John Kitzhaber’s having a chance to win a major elected office. As a Democratic state senator in the ’80s, he authored Oregon’s government-funded health plan; later, as governor from 1995 to 2003, he expanded the plan, got more funding […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Washington: Tea Party limbo #2
Washington is a coffee-drinking state; Starbucks is only one of the many java peddlers rooted in Seattle. Tea, however, at least of the political sort, is not catching on. So the fact that some of this year’s races appear to be ramped up on caffeine can probably be blamed on roasted, ground-up beans. HCN’s Guide […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Arizona: Obama’s curse?
Is President Obama to blame for the Democrats’ troubles? In the West as a whole, maybe. In Arizona? Definitely. When Obama picked Arizona Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano to run his Homeland Security Department, he inadvertently surrendered the state to an ultra-conservative agenda. The Republican Legislature forged ahead with bills closing state parks and selling off […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
California: Dope, eBay, pollution and moonbeams
California’s ballot is sizzling hot. Top of the list is Proposition 23, which would emasculate or kill California’s pace-setting 2006 climate change law, Assembly Bill 32. That law takes a multi-pronged approach, including statewide cap-and-trade and more rooftop solar, to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Prop. 23 would put […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Colorado: The West’s true swing state
Congressman John Salazar has a tough job. His constituents are scattered across a huge swath of Colorado’s rural Western Slope, over a political and demographic spectrum that ranges from oil and gas roughnecks in conservative Grand Junction to creative-class telecommuters in liberal Telluride. But most of Salazar’s constituents lie somewhere in between and share a […]