Right now, following the farm bill’s progress seems a lot like watching corn grow. The bill is due for reauthorization and the senators and representatives charged with finding a compromise are under pressure to make progress before Thanksgiving. The major hurdle to clear right now, and that’s received a fair bit of media attention already, […]
Blogs
Posted inRange
Putting politics before science won’t save the lobo
With winter upon us and the days getting noticeably shorter, so too is the time left to speak out on behalf of Mexican gray wolves. Among the country’s most imperiled species, there are only about 75 lobos left in the wild. The ultimate fate of these iconic animals could be decided in the next year […]
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Why it doesn’t matter whether Colorado’s fracking bans hold up in court
If anything illustrates just how contentious fracking has become on Colorado’s urban Front Range, it’s the closeness of the vote on a Broomfield ballot measure to ban the practice for five years. When results came in after the Nov. 5 election, it had lost by a mere 13 votes, triggering a mandatory recount. Last Thursday, […]
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Regulations for Native American ‘artifacts’ auctions may still be too lax
Two weeks ago, a Lakota sacred object advertised as a “Sioux Beaded and Quilled hide Shirt” was set to be auctioned off in Boston, Mass. and was expected to fetch $150,000-250,000. Minutes before the bidding began on Nov. 9, Skinner auction house pulled the item in response to pressure from attorneys and tribal officials representing […]
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Immigration reform is pivotal for the future of agriculture in the West
When farmer Kerry Mattics sunk several thousand dollars into building a bunkhouse for 12 workers to stay on his property during planting and harvest seasons, he figured the house would be useful for at least a decade. But by 2012, he had no workers to fill it up and his Olathe, Colo. fruit and vegetable […]
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Pisaster disaster: When starfish wasting disease strikes, there’s only one man to call
Dr. Chris Mah may be the only man in the world who can correctly identify any species of starfish on sight. Growing up in San Francisco on a steady diet of sushi and Japanese monster movies, it was no wonder he was attracted to the weird, slimy invertebrates he plucked from the shores of the […]
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Drought and population growth punch Colorado in face, state fights back with water planning
Last week, while speaking at lunch during the Upper Colorado Basin Water Conference in Grand Junction, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board could have put his audience to sleep in their cannoli. He was talking about the narcolepsy-inducing topic of water planning, after all. Instead, James Eklund captured the room’s attention by quoting […]
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Could oil companies incentivize coal plants to use carbon capture tech?
When Gina McCarthy, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stood before the National Press Club on September 20 and announced draft rules for regulating carbon dioxide from new power plants, she said the proposal, “rather than killing future coal, actually sets out a certain pathway forward for coal.” That way forward is through carbon […]
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Arizona solar war hearings to start soon amid costly PR battle
What started out as a simple request to alter the way Arizona residents are compensated for power generated by rooftop solar has exploded into a full-blown, national headline-making, wacky political war complete with shady dealings and nasty ads. But it should be all over soon. Perhaps. Arizona Public Service is trying to get that state’s […]
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Obama picks Nevadan Neil Kornze as next BLM head
A native Nevadan is expected to become the next overseer of much of the West’s public lands. Neil Kornze is President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres, mostly in Western states. Kornze joined the agency in 2011, and has been its principal deputy director since March. He […]
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Will Obama’s climate preparation order force flood planners into the future?
It’s been over a month since rain-swollen creeks tore through roads and flooded homes in Colorado’s Front Range. While the camera crews have long since gone home, the disaster isn’t over for families who suffered property damage. Of the 20,000 single-family homes in the Boulder area, only 3,504 had flood insurance – one of the […]
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Teton pronghorn take to highway crossings the third time around
For 15 days last year, Renee Seidler, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, sat in a truck near a highway and watched the fall migration of Wyoming’s pronghorn. It was the first time since the construction of Highway 191 that the 300-head Teton herd had an alternative to dodging cars and trucks to get […]
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Dead Southern California puma would have spread genetic diversity
As I wrote in High Country News last spring, the pumas of Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains are dying — slowly, but quite literally — for lack of genetic diversity. Blocked from migration by freeways, development and the Pacific Ocean, the lions have begun to inbreed; researchers studying the lions have, through DNA tests, found […]
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Salt Lake City water managers troubleshoot climate change with local data
In many Western cities, municipal water management is a job tied to the mountains. In Salt Lake City, for example, 80 percent of the city’s water supply comes from snowpack in seven Uinta and Wasatch Mountain watersheds. Yet it’s becoming all too clear that the mountains’ water yield will decrease, come earlier in the year, […]
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New anti-wolf, anti-fed film features “wolf cages” to protect kids
Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in […]
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The long and winding (and dangerous) road: Car crashes and the rural West
It was almost a normal drive home. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in the Colorado Rockies, I’ve completed variations on the same 4.5-or-so-hour route dozens of times on my way down to the plains and my hometown, Boulder, Colo., without major incident: Highway 24 from Leadville to I-70; Highway 82 from Aspen to […]
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Pro-coal arguments win the day at Denver EPA hearing on CO2 regulations
At 5 a.m. on Oct. 30, coal miners and residents of Moffat County, Colorado, gathered at a McDonald’s in Craig for a pancake breakfast before boarding buses to Denver chartered by Peabody Coal. They were headed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s listening tour, in which the agency travels around the country seeking input on […]
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Rants from the Hill: Towering Cell Phone Trees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. For a couple of years back in the 1970s, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, […]
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Americans are driving less, but Westerners still love their cars
Fellow Westerners: We are pathetic! Sure, we’ve got our redeeming qualities, I guess, but one of them is not our ability to mitigate the environmental impact of our commute. We Westerners are a tribe of steering-wheel-gripped, fossil-fuel-burning, trapped-in-a-tin-can-in-traffic creatures, guided along highways not by eyes and mind, but by the tinny, seductive voice of our […]
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Will stricter emissions limits mean stranded assets for investors?
Forty-five of the world’s top oil and gas producers received a letter, released at the end of October, that must have come as something of a wake-up call. Seventy investors that control a total of $3 trillion of those companies’ assets sent off the missive with one question in mind: What’s going to happen to […]