On garbage and tolerance in the wilderness.
The Big Nasty
Posted inGoat
Congress considers largest dam removal in U.S. history
This week, Congress is looking at a bill that even a few years ago seemed wildly, laughably improbable: an authorization to spend $250 million to implement a reworked version of the historic 2010 Klamath River agreements. The Senate bill is a mere 42 words long, but it seeks nothing less than to seal the fate […]
Posted inWotr
Los Angeles needs to leave a rural valley alone
If we’re going to limit the coming climate change impacts, we surely need to harness a lot of solar electricity. But proposals from Los Angeles to spread four square miles of solar panels across rural Owens Valley have local people saying: “Whoa! Doesn’t the sun shine in L.A.?” Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power […]
Posted inGoat
Are invasive species really that terrible?
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 […]
Posted inWotr
You can still get your kicks on Route 66
I had the ride but not the road. I was a Westerner living in Tennessee and I’d bought my dream car, a 1963 pearl-white Thunderbird complete with a 390 cubic-inch Ford V-8 engine and black leather bucket seats. But what I missed was the Mother Road, Route 66. I had the car but not the […]
Posted inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Archaeology’s poisonous past
Most U.S. ethnographic collections are contaminated with toxins. Will new cleaning methods help tribes reclaim artifacts?
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 inWotr
A protected river is still vulnerable to oil spills
In every stage of life, I’ve lived near railroad tracks. The haunting sounds of night trains with their short-blast-long-howl whistles and steady rumble have always been grounding and comforting to me. I used to love watching gritty, graffiti-clad train cars pushing forward to get an important job done somewhere to my east or west. The […]
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 inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Excerpt from “The Ogallala Road”
An author returns to a family farm in Kansas to explore drought and depletion.
Posted inArticles
Will gun control do more harm than good?
As Americans grapple with the best way to stem the tide of mass shootings that have terrorized the country in recent years, one liberal journalist and author is arguing that adding gun control laws could actually do more harm than good in the effort to make Americans safer. In his recent book “Gun Guys: A […]
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 inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
The great gun-rights divide
A liberal gun owner finds ‘gun nuts’ on both sides of the debate.
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 inMay 26, 2014: The Great Gun Rights Divide
Rain watch
What to expect from the likely El Niño summer across the West.
Posted inWotr
Rocky Flats and the power of forgetting
On nuclear legacy and the power of nature to adapt.
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 inArticles
Massive Colorado mudslide nearly clobbered gas wells
How much should energy developers plan for natural disaster?
Posted inWotr
Suckers for gold: recreational dredgers can wreck stream beds
Suction dredging for gold is basically a recreational activity. Required equipment: gasoline-powered dredge, sluice box, wetsuit and scuba gear. With a 4-inch-diameter hose you vacuum up what’s on the bottom of rivers — stuff like gravel, woody debris, plants, mussels, snails, insect larvae, crayfish, frogs, salamanders, fish eggs, fish fry and, occasionally, gold. I have […]