Several years ago, two off-road enthusiasts threw their backs into building and improving a trail through Utah’s Recapture Canyon near Blanding. They used picks and shovels, added culverts and retaining walls. They likely had the support of many local off-roaders, eager for new places to four-wheel. What they did not have was permission to build […]
Blogs
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Fire suppression flip-flop
Last May, the Forest Service made news by announcing it was going to suppress all fires burning on its lands. The memo, issued by James Hubbard, Deputy Chief of State and Private Forestry, instructed fire-line officers to get approval from their supervisors before doing anything but full suppression—effectively discouraging the practice of letting some fires […]
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Grand Canyon State Park?
We have been immersed in another round of what some like to call “public lands theater,” the seemingly endless war over who best to manage or, perhaps even own, the federal land estate of the United States. Last year the Arizona legislature tried to demand almost all the federal lands within its boundaries, even the […]
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Energy imbalance WTF?!
A few weeks ago, certain sectors of the environmental/renewable energy community got all fired up. We had reached a “major turning point” said one blogger. Another called the mid-February news a “milestone.” So what was all the fuss about? Did we manage to pull some charismatic megafauna away from the brink of extinction? Or perhaps […]
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Locally-grown climate conversations
After reporting on climate change and natural disasters in Australia, South America, the U.S., and Mongolia, science journalist Julia Kumari Drapkin grew frustrated with the failure of traditional media to convey how climate impacts our daily lives. Part of the problem is scientific. Climate models, and the climate itself, work over large expanses of space […]
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Here comes the sun?
On March 11, 2011, the 500-foot smokestack of the Mohave Generating Station, a notoriously dirty coal-fired power plant in far southern Nevada, was spectacularly demolished. From 1971 until 2005, the plant had gobbled coal and sucked groundwater from neighboring lands belonging to the Hopi and Navajo, who had a complicated relationship to the plant and […]
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Moose in need of a boost
A few years ago, I was driving through Northern Maine on my way to hike Mt. Katahdin, the state’s highest peak and terminus of the Appalachian Trail. A small crowd of hunters had gathered outside a game inspection station, and I stopped to see what they’d shot. A jolly man in an orange vest was […]
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Living the small government dream
updated 3/7/13 Let me begin with a confession: I have a professional crush on Ryan Lizza – the master of longform political profiles. Nearly every time I read one of his New Yorker stories – fascinating windows into our political culture and the sausage making side of lawmaking (or, as it may be, political posturing […]
Posted inRange
Yea or nay?
There’s renewed movement in Congress on some legislation that would affect our public lands in a big way. Bills to create wilderness areas, combat bark beetles and streamline mining and grazing will be debated, and despite having “improvement” and “protection” in their names, not all would not encourage sustainable or resilient ecosystems in the West. […]
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Pollinator problems
What works twice as hard as a domesticated honeybee? Its wild, free-living relatives. Much of the food we eat is pollinated by bees, and it turns out that wild bees are significantly more effective than domestic honeybees at causing flowers to produce fruit. That finding is just one in a set of new studies reinforcing […]
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Rants from the Hill: Upon the burning of our house
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. When I say that American writers have ignited fires, I don’t mean only that they have fired our imaginations or that they have sparked changes in the […]
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The timber-payment blues
Inmates accused of homicide allowed to walk free. Paved roads reverting to gravel. Local libraries closed. These are some of the results of hard choices Oregon’s rural, timber-dependent counties have had to make in recent years, as their federal timber payments have dried up. Now a slew of state bills in Salem seek to give […]
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Counting–and counting on–visitors
If you’re weary of modern ills like private companies collecting your information in the name of the almighty dollar, maybe you’ll want to escape to a wilderness area for the weekend. There’s no barcode scanner, and no one to meddle in your business. You are free to move about undetected and get messed-up 127 Hours-style […]
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Side effects
In a video released last fall by the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research, Google Earth zooms in on Humboldt County, Calif.’s forested hills. Cruising the ridges from one watershed of this virtual landscape to the next, one gets a bird’s-eye view of the hundreds of new roads, out-buildings, and even the tall, leafy pot […]
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Coal’s gasping on the Colorado Plateau
“Here in the U.S., I’m happy to say, the king is dead,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week. “Coal is a dead man walking.” While the statistics seem to back up Bloomberg’s statements — coal production is in decline, and natural gas is taking up an ever growing slice of the electricity […]
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How much would you pay for clean water?
Would you be willing to pay up to $10 per month to have your drinking water free of a suspected carcinogen? That’s the question that city councilors in Woods Cross, Utah, are asking residents to answer. In the late 1980s, residents of this Salt Lake City suburb learned that a chemical called tetrachloroethylene (or PCE) […]
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Man’s (and livestock’s) best friend
It’s always fascinated me that domestic dogs are widely embraced as “man’s best friends,” while wild dogs like coyotes and wolves often elicit deep-seated animosity. So I was particularly taken by this video of livestock guard dogs by the Montana-based conservation group, People & Carnivores. The good folks at People & Carnivores work to resolve […]
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Signs of a strong environmental agenda?
Greens weren’t exactly thrilled with Obama’s environmental performance in his first term, especially with regard to climate change. One of the brightest spots in his administration was Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson. Under her watch, the EPA moved toward regulating greenhouse gases, developed key emissions rules for power plants, made a valiant attempt at […]
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The future of wolverines
By Kylie Paul, Defenders of Wildlife After more than a decade of legal hand-wringing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) finally proposed on Feb. 1 to protect wolverines in the lower 48 states as a threatened species. But invoking the Endangered Species Act alone is not going to save wolverines from looming threats on […]
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A new vision for public lands
In 2012, the seemingly endless argument over what level of government ought to be the manager over part of the federal land estate flared up again, led by individuals in Utah and Arizona. In Arizona, in March, the state legislature passed a bill that called for federal land agencies to give up title to roughly […]