The West’s approach to managing invasive species has, for the most part, been a straightforward one: eradicate them swiftly and at all costs. Spray ‘em, poison ‘em, net ‘em, douse ‘em with fungus, and, when all else fails, eat ‘em – whatever the method, the important thing is that the invader is sent packing. But […]
Blogs
Posted inGoat
How to cut carbon: Change the way utilities make money
State renewable energy standards, imposed on “investor-owned” utilities that supply 75 percent of the power in the United States, have long stood stalwart in the space left empty by the absence of a federal energy or climate policy. They have devalued climate-changing coal and encouraged wind and solar, particularly in the West, where the kind […]
Posted inGoat
EPA’s first CO2 emissions regs for existing power plants
While President Barack Obama’s landmark CO2 emissions regulations for existing power plants will certainly have its losers, in the long-run, the winners are in the majority. Dubbed the Clean Power Plan, drawn up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, the regulations mark the first time the government has imposed national-scale […]
Posted inGoat
The suburbs didn’t die — just short-circuited
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were all celebrating the death of the suburbs? Both Millennials and Boomers, and perhaps many of those in between, were headed for the walkable, vibrant urban core. We would bulldoze no more desert for McMansions; sunflowers would invade exurban golf courses; and the expressways built to […]
Posted inGoat
New California shrimp: A reminder of the West’s undiscovered biodiversity
In 2010, Ed Hendrycks, a research assistant at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, was poring through his museum’s collection of caprellids with José Guerra-Garcia, a researcher visiting from Sevilla, when the Spanish scientist noticed an unusual specimen. One of the caprellids – tiny crustaceans whose slender, translucent bodies have earned them the nickname […]
Posted inGoat
As black lung spreads, a fight over miner protection
The federal government and the nation’s largest coal industry association are in a legal battle over how to best protect miners from the gradual comeback of black lung. In April, the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration issued its final rule to reduce miners’ exposure to coal dust, calling it a “historic step […]
Posted inGoat
In North Dakota, signs of changing attitudes towards oil and gas development
In February 2013, Scott Skokos was sitting in the North Dakota state capitol at a meeting of the Industrial Commission, the three-member body that approves every oil and gas permit in the state. Normally, says Skokos, a field organizer for the Dakota Resource Council, the commission green lights all the requests before them — public […]
Posted inGoat
Latest agricultural census shows a small-farm revolution
They’re growing houses in the fields between the townsAnd the Starlight drive-in movie’s closing downThe road is gone to the way it was beforeAnd the spaces won’t be spaces anymore Thus sang John Gorka in his heartbreaking 1991 ballad, Houses in the Field, about families selling their farms to developers, who “paid better than the […]
Posted inGoat
Scientists turn to crowdfunding for fracking research
A scientist from the University of Missouri who recently found elevated levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals in parts of Garfield County, Colo. where spills of wastewater from natural gas drilling occurred is now planning the second phase of her research, but with a surprising funding mechanism this time. Rather than seeking backing from government agencies […]
Posted inGoat
Will big snowpack bring floods to Colorado Front Range?
Planners gird for more woes after major snows.
Posted inGoat
Climate change threatens nation’s largest archaeological site
When we think about what’s at stake with climate change, we usually imagine impacts to our current way of life. But as a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, our shared human history is at risk of being wiped away as well. Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park – the largest archaeological […]
Posted inGoat
Obama names newest U.S. monument: New Mexico’s Organ Mountains
President Obama’s record on public lands protection has been spotty – as of January 2013, he’d opened more than twice as many acres to drilling as he’d conserved. Lately, though, the POTUS has been on a bit of a roll. Over the last 16 months, Obama has used the Antiquities Act – the 1906 law […]
Posted inGoat
Tribes now prosecute non-Native offenders, Alaska scrambles to catch up
“I am a Native American statistic. I am a survivor of sexual and physical violence.” So began a 2012 speech by Tulalip Tribes vice chairwoman Deborah Parker supporting the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The man who abused Parker in the 1970s – as well as the men who raped her aunt a decade later […]
Posted inGoat
ESA changes could help protect sage grouse on private land
In an increasingly subdivided and trailblazed West, southeastern Oregon’s Harney County is a place that can still make you feel small. From the empty blacktop two-lane highways 78 and 20, broad grasslands rise to sagebrush-studded mesas and hills that crest and break to the blue horizons like the landlocked waves of a parched sea. Drive-fast-with-your-windows-down […]
Posted inGoat
Feel-good salmon farms
Standing on a grated metal platform above a fiberglass tank, I’m entranced by silvery salmon gliding through a current of recycled freshwater. The salmon are lively and occasionally jump when a large feed bin, meticulously set with a timer, rains down an exact amount of feed pellets. Everything is designed to help the fish grow […]
Posted inGoat
Against all odds, wolf OR7 may have found a mate
On May 3, a wolf slipped through the frame of a remote camera in southwestern Oregon, a blur of black and brown. The next day, under the cover of darkness, it stared directly at a camera, eyes aglow, and did something ordinary that, under the circumstances, was an extraordinary sight: It squatted and peed. This […]
Posted inGoat
What ‘unstoppable’ Antarctic ice melt means for Western cities
Save for a freak May snowstorm, the other day started off normally. I woke up, made a giant mug of coffee and walked to work. But May 12 was no ordinary Monday. “Today,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, “we present observational evidence that a large sector of the West […]
Posted inGoat
Making sense of the latest National Climate Assessment
Earlier this month, I traveled to northern Washington for a friend’s wedding. Weary from wandering the drought-racked farmlands in California’s Central Valley, I was kindly given permission by my wife to stay an extra day and revel in the green lushness of the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas. I set out early from my hotel in […]
Posted inGoat
Utah denied claim to road in Canyonlands National Park
High Country News has been around for 44 years now … and sometimes it feels like we’ve been covering certain stories for darn near that long too. Like the Animas-La Plata water project in southern Colorado, meant to fulfill the Utes’ water rights, or the Central Arizona Project, which supplies Phoenix, Scottsdale and other major […]