Here at High Country News, some of us recently had a lively discussion about our slogan: “for people who care about the American West.” After 43 years, is it still the best phrase to convey who we are and what we do? We added the “American” to that slogan some years ago, realizing that in […]
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What would lifting the crude oil export ban mean for pump prices and energy independence?
Sometimes it seems as if the energy industry wants to turn the New World back into a resource colony for the rest of the globe. First, coal companies, seeing a reduction in demand domestically, tried to sell more coal overseas. Then, thanks to the shale gas glut, the fossil fuel industry has been trying to […]
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As analog film grows obsolete, Western towns struggle to keep theaters afloat
One snowy evening over the holidays, I sat down for a beer with screenwriter Susan Shilliday (“Legends of the Fall”), who moved from Los Angeles to rural western Massachusetts eight years ago to run a used bookstore. We were discussing how difficult it is for independent booksellers to stay in business when Susan brought up […]
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49-million-year-old cockroach fossils discovered in Colorado
Three years ago, Slovakian paleontologist Peter Vrsansky found a surprise in a shipment of fossils from Rifle, Colo. Hidden in the collection was an unexpected new peek into the insect world during the Eocene epoch, 50 million years ago. Vrsansky discovered four new species of Ectobius cockroach that are five million years older – and […]
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West’s building and population growth is not yet back to pre-Recession levels
When I started working for High Country News eight years ago this month, there was no shortage of issues to write about. Natural gas drilling was going nuts, nearly every sector of the economy was on fire and immigrants were streaming through the desert to live the dream. Perhaps most bewildering to me, however, were […]
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New Year brings protections for California bobcats and atonement for a Joshua Tree conservationist
Wolves in several Western states entered 2014 in the crosshairs of hunters, but California’s bobcats got a reprieve – thanks in large part to one Joshua Tree landowner and conservationist. The Bobcat Protection Act of 2013 (AB 1213), introduced in March by Santa Monica assemblyman Richard Bloom (D), went into effect January 1. It prohibits […]
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Forecast for drought continues Westwide
El Nido is a small settlement of some 300 souls located almost right in the middle of California, in the grand agricultural enterprise known as the San Joaquin Valley. Translated into English, El Nido means “the nest.” It’s a fitting name for the place, though its founders couldn’t have foreseen how. Today, El Nido is […]
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Navajo Nation’s purchase of a New Mexico coalmine is a mixed bag
The Navajo Nation got coal for Christmas this year – literally. On December 30, a Navajo tribal corporation finally completed its drawn-out purchase of the Navajo Mine, the sole supplier of coal to New Mexico’s Four Corners Power Plant. Depending on whom you ask, this is either a historic milestone for tribal energy independence, […]
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As the economy recovers, many Westerners are left behind
Las Vegas is filled with symbols of how drastically the economic landscape of the West has changed over the past decade. Drive out into the city’s fringes, and you’ll see vast swaths of land for which developers — visions of master-planned tract home communities dancing in their heads — paid the Bureau of Land Management […]
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Rants from the Hill: Out on Misfits Flat
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. The quintessential Nevada film is John Huston’s 1961 picture The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. The movie had its origins in playwright Arthur Miller’s trip to Nevada in 1956. While […]
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The price of a loud world: How road noise harms birds
Last fall, a team of researchers from Idaho’s Boise State University hiked into the mountains outside of town with backpacks full of batteries and speakers. The unusual cargo was not for a backcountry dance party, but rather for a unique experiment to determine the impact of road noise on migratory birds. The scientists hung speakers […]
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Top 10 reasons not to move to Bozeman
In my role as a journalistic curmudgeon, today I’d like to tell you some of the drawbacks of living in a trendy Western town that often makes the Top 10 lists drawn up by the likes of Outside magazine, Entrepreneur magazine, and Livability.com. I’m talking about Bozeman, Montana – and how the conventional wisdom is […]
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A data junkie’s look back at the West in 2013
’Tis the season of cheer and light and of gorging ourselves and then getting in life-threatening sledding accidents. And, of course, it’s also the season of looking back on the year that has been and futilely trying to learn from all the stupid mistakes we made. Yes, it’s Year-in-Review time. My colleague, Sarah Gilman, wrapped […]
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California Energy Commission says no to desert solar plant that could kill birds
It came as a shock last spring, at least to me, when BrightSource Energy decided to suspend its Hidden Hills Solar project near Pahrump, Nev. For starters, I had a story going to press whose conclusions were somewhat tied to the looming specter of Hidden Hills, a large concentrating solar “power tower” project which would […]
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The Wilderness Act at 50: In 2014, what makes a place wild?
In December 1960, the iconic Western author Wallace Stegner wrote a letter to a University of California, Berkeley researcher in support of what would become the Wilderness Act. Wilderness is important, he wrote, because it “was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is […]
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2013 in environmental news, from the darkest to the most hopeful
A few weeks ago, High Country News contributing editor Craig Childs dropped me a note asking for some help with his annual winter solstice production, Dark Night. Would I write and read a series of poems about descending into darkness – specifically “death, ice, fear, what is inside the deep, blue, scarier crevasses of your […]
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Peabody mine expansion coincides with Navajo and Hopi artifacts battle
Ten years ago, Jennafer Yellowhorse picked up an out-of-print archeology book titled A View from Black Mesa and read about a vast trove of artifacts unearthed on a lonesome plateau of Navajo land near the Four Corners. “Right in my backyard,” as she says, “but I’d never heard of it; no one had. So I […]
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A report aims to change the way we think about Native justice
In 1881, a Brulé Lakota man in South Dakota who shot and killed another member of his tribe was sentenced to death by federal officials who thought the tribal punishment of eight horses, $600 and a blanket was too lenient. The case set a precedent that certain crimes committed on tribal lands are to be […]
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Research shows oil booms can yield long term socioeconomic decline
If an old-timer Denver wildcatter named James K. Munn has his way, there’s going to be an oil drilling boom in Escalante, Utah. Escalante’s a small town in the southern part of the state, placed right smack dab in the center of some of the most spectacular landscape in the West. Naturally, many residents, especially […]
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States test a new prairie dog plague vaccine
Dressed in long pants, long-sleeve shirts and closed-toed shoes, a team of researchers from Colorado Parks and Wildlife gathered in a sagebrush-grass meadow near Gunnison, Colo. this summer, each with a GPS in hand. Lining up 10 meters apart along the border of a virtual grid, they walked straight lines over a Gunnison’s prairie dog […]