New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada especially hazardous for pedestrians.
Western state highways among the most dangerous in the nation
Fish and Wildlife declines to list wolverines as endangered
Not enough evidence of climate harm to list wolverines, says Fish and Wildlife Climate change is a real force disrupting wildlife populations. But for the 300 or so wolverines living in the lower 48, there’s still not enough evidence of present or future danger to protect them under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish […]
Who are the true Idaho conservatives?
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has worked hard for six years to turn the state’s Highway 12 into a corridor for sending massive, 200-foot-long mega-loads of heavy equipment to Alberta, Canada, for tar sands extraction. But it’s not working out. First, state court verdicts in Idaho and Montana, plus botched operations by mega-loads haulers, held things […]
The roads scholar
An ecologist helps wildlife safely cross highways.
Jared Polis abandons anti-fracking initiatives
A Democratic family feud takes a surprising turn in Colorado.
Recreational deaths soar this summer
Grand Canyon and Colorado rivers have record year for deaths.
Nebraska loves its cattle a little too much
On the surface, it sounded like good news: In 2013, Nebraska supplanted Texas as the No. 1 cattle-feeding state in the country. The numbers were impressive: Nebraska had 2.46 million cattle on feed, surpassing the 2.44 million in Texas, the longtime king of cattle. They had folks in the governor’s mansion and at Farm Bureau […]
Idaho’s sewer system is the Snake River
As Big Ag flourishes, this massive waterway suffers.
Is Canada’s massive mine waste spill a sign of things to come?
From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a […]
Critics see GOP wildfire bill as attack on environmental protections
Forests and grasslands are smoldering across vast areas of Oregon and Washington, scorching homes and habitat in what may turn out to be a particularly gnarly fire season. Although nationally the season has been quieter than usual, intense fires have been burning in the Pacific Northwest and parts of California, and the West Coast is […]
Women in Western legislatures
Which states are lagging and which lead the way?
I moved from New Mexico to Missoula and can’t believe the water waste
I am fairly new to Montana, and I now walk the streets of Missoula with an uncanny feeling that I’m a messenger from the future. No, I’m not a nut job claiming to hail from Mars or another galaxy. But I do come from a place that has become a mutated version of itself in […]
What diabetic grizzlies can tell us about human obesity
Sept. 2, 2015 update: It has been announced that one of the authors of this study manipulated data, and the study has now been retracted. Here is the retraction note: This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. Amgen requested the retraction as an outcome of an internal review where it was determined that […]
Fracking without fresh water
A Texas oil company looks for other ways to supply its water needs.
Glacier tourists to get a dose of climate education in Alaska
What a melting glacier can teach cruise ship passengers.
Imminent tar sands mine incites civil disobedience in Utah
Two years ago, HCN contributing editor Jeremy Miller asked if Utah’s tar sands deposits could transform the Beehive State into the Alberta of the high desert. Jeremy’s story focused on a mine proposed by U.S. Oil Sands, a Canadian company, in the Book Cliffs south of Vernal. It’s long been known that eastern Utah’s geological […]
To protect hydropower, utilities will pay Colorado River water users to conserve
Here’s a sure sign that your region’s in drought: you stop paying your utility for the privilege of using water, and the utility starts paying you not to use water instead. Outlandish as it sounds, that’s what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million […]
The Tea Party loses one in Colorado
John Pennington lost his primary election bid for sheriff of Mesa County, here in western Colorado, last month. I don’t know why he lost to Steve King, a former Republican state legislator who then canceled his own campaign due to a scandal, leaving the general election race wide-open for several new candidates. But I do […]
The bomb builders’ wives
The Wives of Los AlamosTaraShea Nesbit233 pages, hardcover: $25.Bloomsbury, 2014. In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the […]
