A recent post on the High Country News website advocates the position that the Navajo Nation should eventually drop its 2005 uranium ban so that it can get a better deal on uranium development, which the author, Jonathan Thompson, sees as inevitable. The post holds up the example of the Ute Tribe as an example […]
Blogs
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High-tech canary in the copper mine
On the night of April 10, 165 million tons of rock — equivalent in volume to 735,000 school buses — ripped down the northeast face of Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon mine near Salt Lake City, damaging giant shoveling machines, haul trucks and other mining equipment. The cascade of earth swept away roads and left […]
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In the ozone
In 2005, smog levels in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin surprised even the scientists who study one of smog’s primary components, ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is typically a summertime air pollution problem in traffic-ridden urban areas, like L.A., Salt Lake City and Denver. But in sparsely populated Sublette County, ozone that winter was […]
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The companies behind the curtain
Ever since the Bureau of Land Management announced more than a year ago that some 30,000 acres surrounding the towns of Colorado’s North Fork Valley like a necklace had been nominated for oil and gas development, wild rumors have flown about who did the nominating. (Nominating leases prompts the BLM to review whether the parcels are […]
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The river and the drought
“We’re geniuses!” bellowed my good friend, G, as we embarked on a rafting tour of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The temperature was nearing 80 under a cloudless sky, only a slight breeze blew upriver and the water was unusually clear. The ranger had just told us we’d have the place pretty much […]
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Real bears get a helping hand from Hollywood
It’s a long way from the cold, rainy valleys of northwestern Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to the bright lights of Hollywood. But they are both bear country, in very different ways. Hollywood is about myths — taking old myths and digging them deeper. Grafting on new, odd branches to existing myths. Hollywood plays to the mythology […]
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Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
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Changing of the guard at the Department of Interior
Monday was Sally Jewell‘s first day on the job as the nation’s new Secretary of Interior. She replaces Ken Salazar, Obama’s first-term choice. The second woman ever to serve as the head of Interior (Gale Norton, considered a nemesis of conservationists, was the first), Jewell is now in charge of 70,000 employees and 500 million […]
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Pipeline paradox
Despite many high-profile protests and acts of civil disobedience focused on the adverse effects of extracting and burning the fossil fuels the Keystone XL pipeline would transport, Americans have curious, if not contradictory, views of climate and the pipeline. The KXL, if constructed by TransCanada, would move up to 830,000 barrels per day of tar sands (which […]
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The who, what, where and why of letting it burn
A dusting of new snow here in Paonia, Colo., HCN’s home base, is making it difficult to imagine the fast-approaching fire season. But it won’t be long before the walkie-talkies crackle to life and giant tanker aircraft are dusting the mountains with red fire-suppressant. 1) Was the fire human-caused? If so, the Forest Service will […]
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Return to the bat cave
Since 2006, a powdery white fungus has killed at least five and half million bats that would otherwise be eating insects, pollinating flowers and hanging out in caves. But as far as scientists know, the disease called white-nose syndrome, which grows on bat snouts and wings, hasn’t infected a single bat in the Western United […]
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Feral vs. wild horses
The question of whether mustangs in the West are feral versus wild is a controversial one; it’s got a knack for appearing in the comment section of many a mustang story. Mustang advocates are adamant the wild horse is a bona fide North American wildlife species – on par with deer, elk, bison and pronghorn. […]
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The legacy of Documerica
Here at High Country News, we’ve been reading and writinga lot about how the federal funding cuts from sequestration will hit home in the West. But as usual, it takes a personal experience to make things real. For me, it came while sitting on a pit toilet at a Bureau of Land Management trailhead outside […]
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How can we sustainably fund our national parks?
Given the iconic status of our national parks—the spirited geysers of Yellowstone, striking gravitas of the Statue of Liberty and Kodachrome hollows of the Grand Canyon—it’s hard to imagine a time when their establishment and protection were a hard sell. But a century ago, that’s where park champions found themselves; hawking to Congress and the […]
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‘Port Gamble Predicament’ inches toward resolution
Last winter, I reported on the tangle of cultural and conservation challenges surrounding western Washington’s Port Gamble Bay, documenting how the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe is in the final stages of a 160-year-long faceoff with Pope Resources. Pope is the corporate stepchild of a logging company that built a mill town called Port Gamble in […]
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Is coal making a comeback?
Last September, Citigroup quietly released a report declaring that cheap natural gas was engaged in a “symbiotic relationship” with intermittent renewable forms of energy — i.e. solar and wind — and that together the two would displace enough coal to take a big bite out of carbon emissions. Over the past month, the report has […]
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Science for the long now
High in eastern Nevada’s Snake Mountain Range, just below treeline, live gnarled bristlecone pines as old as 4,900 years. Core samples taken from the trees have helped researchers understand how the region has changed over millennia. That’s part of the reason why the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based group whose mission is to “creatively […]
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Does oil and gas drilling cause earthquakes?
Just before 11 p.m. on November 5, 2011, the biggest earthquake in Oklahoma’s history hit the small town of Prague. It buckled a highway, exploded windows, collapsed homes and left terrified residents clutching their beds as they waited for the shaking to stop. Ripples from the 5.7 magnitude quake were felt as far as 800 […]
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On setting aside new national monuments
As of last week, our country has five new national monuments; two of them are in the West. The Eastern sites, controlled by the National Park Service, are cultural – new monuments in Ohio and Maryland commemorate Charles Young, the first African-American colonel in the Army, and Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the […]
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Montana’s Rep. Steve Daines warms up to conservation
When the newly minted Congressman Steve Daines stepped into the press conference he wore cowboy boots, standard issue for Republican Congressmen from Big Sky Country. What set him apart were the words that came out of his mouth. Daines, a Bozeman businessman elected in November, held the conference to announce his support for the North […]