The morning of Friday, February 21 dawned bright and clear in the rolling boreal forest of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, east of Fairbanks, Alaska. The temperature topped out at eight below zero. Earlier in the week, a family of 11 wolves known as the Lost Creek pack loped beyond the preserve’s boundaries as they […]
Feds and state officials square off on Alaska hunting regulations
Posted inWotr
Illegal pot farms that damage land should make room for legal entrepreneurs
If you care about protecting clean water, endangered species and public health, then you might want to consider legalizing marijuana for recreational use. That’s because so much of the stuff is now being grown illegally on our public lands in places dubbed “trespass grows.” These secretive and often well-guarded farms do enormous environmental damage and […]
Posted inArticles
Hippos spark management debate
Nation’s most fearsome invasive species wreaks havoc on Western waterways.
Posted inArticles
Locals resist a Bakkenization of the Beartooths
South-central Montanans oppose new drilling, forewarned by fracking’s impacts in other states.
Posted inGoat
Fracking fuels the post-Recession economy and growth
Oh how a housing bust, a nasty economic downturn and a shale oil and gas boom can change things. Seven years ago this spring, the Census Bureau released a flurry of numbers about the economy and growth, which then spawned a bunch of articles about which parts of the country were growing fastest and why. […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Happy housewarming, Charlie Brown
A couple restores a Seattle home and honors the Austrian Jewish couple who once lived there.
Posted inGoat
Four women joyride the flood that will revive the Colorado River Delta
The guides warned us, of course. Or they sort of did. It was sometime after the river outfitter’s shuttle van had passed through the latticework of gates and fences that guards the steep, hairpinned road to the boat-launch at the base of the Hoover Dam, and possibly right before we realized that we had left […]
Posted inWotr
Paddling bill is bad news for Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks
How boaters are looking for special treatment.
Posted inWotr
A little paddling won’t hurt the Yellowstone experience
RELATED: Paddling bill is bad news for Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks If we’ve gained any strength as environmentalists, it’s because we’ve stuck to science and public processes. The other stuff is for the bad guys who want to exploit public land for profit. As a longtime activist on forest issues, I could give you […]
Posted inGoat
Conservationists join animal rights groups to challenge Idaho ag gag law
Idaho’s sweeping new ag gag law, enacted in February, raises so many red flags that the Animal Legal Defense Fund has filed a lawsuit against it, only the second suit of its kind in the nation. But this time, in a new twist on ag gag litigation, the animal rights non-profit is joined by conservation […]
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Go West, clean megawatts
Nevada stakes its renewable energy future on California.
Posted inGoat
New national monuments threatened by House attack on Antiquities Act
When President Obama bestowed national monument status upon the Point Arena-Stornetta Public Lands — a 1,600-acre stretch of rocky California coast that teems with abalone and sea lions — earlier this month, the reaction was predictable as a high tide at full moon. While conservation groups rejoiced at the presidential protection, House Republicans snarled at […]
Posted inGoat
Drought gives one of the West’s thirstiest crops an ironic boost
“We farmers here in the United States might as well recognize that we are a minority group, and that the prevailing interest of the nation as a whole is no longer agricultural,” wrote Dust Bowl farmer Caroline Henderson in a letter to a friend later published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. She lived in […]
Posted inWotr
Does Juneau in Southeast Alaska really need this highway?
A proposed road is destructive, dangerous and bound to be ridiculously costly.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
The toxic legacy of Exxon Valdez
We are just beginning to understand the true cost of one of America’s worst ecological disasters.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Navajo Nation bets on coal
A tribe digs into a dying industry.
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
A plague of tumbleweeds
A handy pamphlet on how to dig out from a tumbleweed takeover of sci-fi proportions.
Posted inGoat
Hatcheries make for happy anglers, but at what cost to wild fish?
This spring, millions of Americans will snap together rods, tie flies and spinners to monofilament, and, from a boat or streambank, cast to a rising fish. In many places, their quarry will be the born-and-raised products of hatcheries, facilities in which fish are artificially bred for the benefit of anglers. Nevada will stock a million […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t call the desert empty
In the spareness of a desert hike, you become a Beckett character, faced with big space and big time” — Laurie Stone. I write for a living, or what amounts to it, and because I’m a dreamer and a fool and one of the luckiest people I know, I also edit a literary magazine dedicated […]
Posted inGoat
Drone improves emergency response in Wyoming floods
Brandon Yule, a volunteer firefighter in Worland, Wyo., was called to the scene of the Big Horn River flood at 7 a.m. An ice jam under a bridge had apparently caused the river to rise overnight, and water was starting to flood nearby homes. But by 9 a.m., Yule and the team still couldn’t get […]