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Blogs
Posted inGoat
How much money is a healthy ecosystem worth?
For the 95,000 or so people in and around Bellingham, Washington, the water bill they pay every other month includes a charge called the “watershed acquisition fee.” It’s currently $24.81 per bill, and the city uses this money to strategically purchase land to protect Lake Whatcom and its watershed—the source of the city’s water supply. […]
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Alaska’s Senate race and the fate of the West’s public lands
Republicans look to Alaska in their bid to overtake the U.S. Senate.
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Closure of federal sheep facility would be a victory for grizzlies
On the last day of August, 2012, a collared grizzly bear dubbed 726 by federal wildlife biologists vanished into the rugged Centennial Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. A few weeks later, they recovered his collar near an established campsite. It appeared to have been cut, stoking suspicions that hunters may have shot the bear, a […]
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Summer rains in a drought-plagued state
How much does a monsoon season relieve drought?
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Poll shows strong Latino support for conservation
Max Trujillo caught the conservation bug during childhood summers spent with his father hunting, hiking and camping in the wilderness of northern New Mexico. In the years that followed, Trujillo noticed that many Hispanic families were out enjoying the woods, but they weren’t involved in the mainstream environmental movement. “As a community, we’re grossly underrepresented, […]
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Western state highways among the most dangerous in the nation
New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada especially hazardous for pedestrians.
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Fish and Wildlife declines to list wolverines as endangered
Not enough evidence of climate harm to list wolverines, says Fish and Wildlife Climate change is a real force disrupting wildlife populations. But for the 300 or so wolverines living in the lower 48, there’s still not enough evidence of present or future danger to protect them under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish […]
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Recreational deaths soar this summer
Grand Canyon and Colorado rivers have record year for deaths.
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Is Canada’s massive mine waste spill a sign of things to come?
From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a […]
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Critics see GOP wildfire bill as attack on environmental protections
Forests and grasslands are smoldering across vast areas of Oregon and Washington, scorching homes and habitat in what may turn out to be a particularly gnarly fire season. Although nationally the season has been quieter than usual, intense fires have been burning in the Pacific Northwest and parts of California, and the West Coast is […]
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What diabetic grizzlies can tell us about human obesity
Sept. 2, 2015 update: It has been announced that one of the authors of this study manipulated data, and the study has now been retracted. Here is the retraction note: This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. Amgen requested the retraction as an outcome of an internal review where it was determined that […]
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Glacier tourists to get a dose of climate education in Alaska
What a melting glacier can teach cruise ship passengers.
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Imminent tar sands mine incites civil disobedience in Utah
Two years ago, HCN contributing editor Jeremy Miller asked if Utah’s tar sands deposits could transform the Beehive State into the Alberta of the high desert. Jeremy’s story focused on a mine proposed by U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, in the Book Cliffs south of Vernal. It’s long been known that eastern Utah’s geological […]
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To protect hydropower, utilities will pay Colorado River water users to conserve
Here’s a sure sign that your region’s in drought: you stop paying your utility for the privilege of using water, and the utility starts paying you not to use water instead. Outlandish as it sounds, that’s what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Hunting for Scorpions
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. Our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, is a tireless athlete, while her older sister, Hannah, is the family intellectual. This is why my wife, Eryn, and I were surprised when Caroline chose for her weeklong summer […]
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Was the fatal thunderstorm in California a climate phenomenon?
The weather of Venice Beach, California, where I live, is for the most part stable, and almost always predictable. No sudden squalls appear out of the southwest to chase skateboarders off their concrete ramps; never do we hear the civil-defense sirens warning of an approaching tornado. Living here, swimming and surfing at the beach a […]
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Colorado water users gird for first statewide plan
Last year, 14 years into a regional drought, forecasts predicted that as many as 2.5 million Coloradans could be without sufficient water supplies by 2050. And yet the state still had no official plan to deal with its looming water crisis. In response to the troubling situation, Governor Hickenlooper issued an executive order: Colorado needed […]
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Colorado River Basin groundwater levels drop even faster than reservoirs
When Lake Mead is full it’s the largest reservoir in the U.S., capable of holding two years’ worth of water from the Colorado River. But the Southwest has been trapped in a 14-year drought, and the states Mead feeds – Nevada, Arizona and California – are thirsty. The reservoir is now only about half full […]