Four years ago, when I was 25, I went to Alaska to work as a wilderness guide. I bought my first pair of XtraTuf boots and my first set of head-to-toe rubber rain gear, and between seven-week trips in the backcountry, lived above a Laundromat that smelled perpetually of halibut. The first spring, my boyfriend […]
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NPS Director Jon Jarvis on shutdown rage and funding needs for the service
National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis had not come to Rubén Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on October 24 to talk about government shutdowns, Tea Partiers in Congress or the privatization of public lands. He had come instead to promote the park service’s American Latino Heritage initiative, a prototype of a new kind of […]
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Why the farm bill’s crop insurance is a missed opportunity for reducing climate risk
This week, Congress is getting back to the big issues haunting the public, including the farm bill, which expired amid the government shutdown. Since the House and Senate have already passed two separate versions, select lawmakers are meeting today to try to reconcile their differences. The division between the two chambers centers on, you guessed […]
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A new history of redwoods, eucalypts, citrus and palms in California: Conversation with an author
Jared Farmer, Utah native and associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, released his third book this week: Trees in Paradise: A California History. The book traces the history of redwoods, eucalyptus, citrus and palms in the Golden State from 1848 to today. Farmer takes a unique approach […]
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What’s at stake in this November’s off-year elections
Next week’s elections will come and go relatively peacefully. And for that we can be thankful. To simultaneously endure the hyperbolic screeching of political mailers and television ads, along with the federal government’s self-implosion, would have broken even the most committed of citizens. Then again, a high-stakes election season probably would’ve saved the federal government […]
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Wonderful, gritty ‘Indian Relay’ documentary airs on PBS
If you have access to a TV on November 18, I recommend that you tune in for the nationwide debut of a new documentary about Indians in the West devoting themselves to a zany kind of horse racing. If you’re in Montana, catch the local debut on Montana PBS on October 31. They call their […]
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New satellite technology to detect wildfires an acre in size
What started as a small blaze in the backcountry of central California this summer became the 250,000-acre Yosemite Rim Fire that forced thousands of nearby residents out of their homes. The tab at the end of the fire fighting efforts tallied over $100 million, and that’s not including lost revenue, damaged structures or the tens […]
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“Idiot-proof” citizen science results in 16 new diatom species
Loren Bahls is not your typical retiree. After stepping down as head of water quality management for the state of Montana in 1996 – then retiring again from private consulting in 2009 – Bahls finally found time to pursue his real passion: Tiny, glass-walled microbes called diatoms that practically cover the surface of the Earth. […]
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Immigration reform bills still give feds rein to trample border ecology
The environmental onslaught caused by the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence may have started with a mouse. When the federal government first built a section of border fence south of San Diego in 1990, it left nearby grasses – habitat to an imperiled mouse – to grow long to comply with the Endangered Species […]
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California’s energy storage requirement may revolutionize the grid
The spring of 2011 was wetter than usual in the Pacific Northwest. A huge snow year was followed by rain, and during the peak runoff water was ripping through the hydroelectric turbines on Bonneville Power Administration’s dams. Spring is also the windy season, and hundreds of new turbines in the region were also pumping juice […]
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Forest Service rules catch up with the growth of year-round activities at ski resorts
After spending a day of mountain biking on the Colorado Trail this summer, I stopped near my car to watch the tourist season circus at Copper Mountain’s base area. The crowd milled around a bungee-and-trampoline contraption, a mini golf course and a concert stage that blared mediocre funk music. Signs along the trail pointed “mountain […]
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After South Dakota’s deadly whiteout, a look at blizzards past
It began as unseasonably warm weather – 80-degree temperatures edging into the last couple of weeks before western South Dakota ranchers were to round up their summer-fat cattle, bring some to market and move the rest to closer-to-home pastures with gullies and trees for shelter against the brutal winter months ahead. The cows perhaps didn’t […]
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Nitrogen pollution at critical levels in dozens of national parks
We’ve had national parks on the brain a lot lately as we slogged through 16 days of federal shutdown. It’s been an economic burden to gateway communities and a frustration to tourists. But a depressingly dysfunctional government isn’t the only thing plaguing our parks. A new study shows that airborne nitrogen pollution is fundamentally changing the […]
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The shutdown is over but its impacts linger
The shutdown is over. Federal employees are going back to work, with back pay. Journalists and data geeks can access information on census.gov and usgs.gov. Tourists are once again able to see national parks. And the National Zoo’s Panda Cam – praise be! – has returned to the air. Maybe we can just chalk all […]
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Oil spill, eagles and fracking: the news you missed during the shutdown
The staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was welcomed to work yesterday by a “coffee cake bite”-bearing Joe Biden, and a grinning administrator so thrilled to have her employees back on the job she jumped up and down as they entered the building. There wasn’t, I expect, a lot of jumping and grinning happening […]
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Pipelines aren’t the only way to ship oil – rail’s on the rise
What do melting sea ice, fiery train wrecks and the Bakken oil boom have in common? No, they’re not part of the latest Hollywood blockbuster – although if I came across a trailer showing George Clooney as a roughneck leaping from a flaming train onto an ice floe with an angry polar bear, you better […]
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Painkiller prescriptions skyrocket, endangering veterans
Ricky Green was 43 when he accidentally overdosed on pain medication for a lingering back injury from the first Gulf War. He died in his sleep in September 2011. Just a month earlier, he had asked his Veterans Affairs doctors to decrease the dose of three painkillers he was taking, but the physicians told him […]
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Don’t blame rangers for closed public lands
We’re now on Day 15 of the shutdown. The consequences of suspending so many of the government’s daily operations continue to ripple outward (a few of the odder side effects: new beers can’t be approved; Alaskan fishermen can’t catch crabs; furloughed federal workers are growing #shutdownbeards). The closures have, of course, affected access to the […]
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States pay to re-open national parks and fuel anti-feds fire
Last Thursday, the complaints of business owners and restaurant workers in national park gateway towns around the West hit home when my boyfriend’s parents, who were about to embark on the Southwestern leg of their once-in-a-lifetime cross-country road trip, realized the shutdown had foiled their entire itinerary for the region. Instead of snapping pictures from […]
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Does the Rim Fire leave room for compromise on salvage logging?
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., might have known that his proposal to salvage burned timber from Yosemite’s Rim Fire would not go over smoothly. Not only is he trying to auction off logging contracts in a national park while his own party’s antics have kept that park closed to citizens, he wants to sidestep the whole […]