Last Friday morning, as a cold sun struggled to rise above the eastern wall of the San Luis Valley – the 125-mile-long, 7,000-foot-high, Oklahoma-flat basin that lies between the San Juans and the Sange de Cristos in southern Colorado – a throng of birdwatchers climbed aboard a yellow school bus to observe one of the […]
Crane migration depends on agriculture and sustainable groundwater management
Posted inMarch 17, 2014: When California Kicks Coal
Geoduck fishermen switch to urchins off Washington’s coast
China banned West Coast shellfish after finding traces of toxins.
Posted inGoat
Wildfire mitigation program helps homeowners create safer communities
With years of experience bracing for wildfire along Colorado’s Front Range, it’s no surprise that Boulder County is launching a new program – Wildfire Partners – that may mean the start of a paradigm shift in wildfire mitigation. “The old approach was firefighters were responsible for saving homes from wildfire,” said Jim Webster, Wildfire Partners’ […]
Posted inWotr
When poisoning is the solution
A victory for an endangered fish, though some environmentalists fought hard to prevent it.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Birthday of the burning boot
Making peace with growing older, on a hike near Patagonia, Arizona.
Posted inGoat
Los Angeles City Council votes for a fracking moratorium — and hopes the state follows suit
During the suddenly rainy last week in February, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban fracking within city limits. It might have seemed like an academic exercise, just as it did a few years ago, when the five-person city council of Beverly Hills, Calif., voted four to one to quash the city’s oil industry […]
Posted inGoat
Water rights bill pits ski industry against conservationists
The German philosopher with the impressively bushy mustache, Friedrich Nietzsche (below), said that all things are subject to interpretation. Had he lived in the Western U.S., he might have tacked on a clause: “Especially when it comes to water policy.” A House bill to be voted on this week hammers his point home, with policy […]
Posted inGoat
Avalanches weren’t – and aren’t – only a backcountry threat
In the handful of times I’ve visited Missoula, Montana, the grassy slopes of neighboring L- and M-emblazoned Mounts Jumbo and Sentinel have never looked any more threatening to me than the hogbacked foothills that yaw out of the ground west of Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. Velvety, yes. Curved like a set of relaxed shoulders, yes. […]
Posted inWotr
Let’s not bring Las Vegas to Grand Canyon
Critique of a developer’s plan to haul tourists on a tramway to the Colorado River.
Posted inArticles
KDNK Radio speaks with writer Sierra Crane-Murdoch
In the current issue of High Country News, contributing editor Sierra Crane-Murdoch tells a sprawling tale of contamination, cancer and cover up as she tries to unravel the unsolved mystery of the Fallon, Nevada cancer cluster. For the latest edition of KDNK Radio’s Sounds of the High Country, Nelson Harvey spoke with Murdoch about what […]
Posted inGoat
Putin’s Crimean invasion reaches into the West’s gas patch
When Russian troops invaded Crimea at the end of February, I couldn’t help but think back to a similar invasion 30 years ago, when Soviet paratroopers descended on the high school grounds in Calumet, Colo., their Kalashnikov’s blazing. They were joined by Nicaraguan and Cuban troops and aided by surgical nuke strikes on important cities. […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Fallon, Nevada’s deadly legacy
In a small town once plagued by childhood cancer, some families still search for answers.
Posted inGoat
Are coal companies paying fair market value for leases on public lands?
Coal boosters are fond of decrying the Obama Administration’s supposed “War on Coal” – and to be sure, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations limiting carbon emissions from power plants aren’t doing industry any favors. But if there truly exists a federal campaign to depose King Coal, somebody in the administration forgot to tell the Bureau […]
Posted inGoat
Illegal marijuana cultivation is devastating California’s public lands
Scattered throughout California’s public forests, authorities found 315,000 feet of plastic hose, 19,000 pounds of fertilizer and 180,000 pounds of trash on more than 300 illegal marijuana plantations in 2012 alone. The tally comes from a new video by the U.S. Forest Service, describing the extensive and alarming damage caused by “trespass grows” hidden within […]
Posted inGoat
Even unpopular national parks are economic engines
Last summer, I visited Rocky Mountain National Park for the first time and, to be frank, was a little disgusted. Not by the park itself – the mountains were beautiful, even if the beetle-kill and $20 backcountry permits were disheartening – but by the salt-water-taffy-munching, airbrushed-tee-shirt-wearing crowd glutting the park’s gateway community of Estes Park, […]
Posted inGoat
What I learned from Western royalty
During a symposium on natural resources and sustainability last Friday at University of Colorado, Boulder, law professor Charles Wilkinson took a look at a group of panelists that included two former secretaries of Interior, and in a moment of appreciation for their service, declared them “Western royalty.” No one said anything particularly groundbreaking at the […]
Posted inWotr
Utah can boast of a living work of art
Visiting a remote work of art at the Great Salt Lake –– Robert Smithson’s brilliant Spiral Jetty.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
The geoglyph guardian
Alfredo Figueroa fights to protect ancient land art in southern California.