Las Vegas is filled with symbols of how drastically the economic landscape of the West has changed over the past decade. Drive out into the city’s fringes, and you’ll see vast swaths of land for which developers — visions of master-planned tract home communities dancing in their heads — paid the Bureau of Land Management […]
As the economy recovers, many Westerners are left behind
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Out on Misfits Flat
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. The quintessential Nevada film is John Huston’s 1961 picture The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. The movie had its origins in playwright Arthur Miller’s trip to Nevada in 1956. While […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The fignificent fig man
Lloyd Kreitzer’s journey as New Mexico’s premier fig grower.
Posted inDecember 16, 1977: Yellowcake spilled; clean up slow, disorganized
Family gaining independence with sun, wind, wood
The Ricks family in Rexburg, Idaho experiments with new technology and makes much of it themselves, including an all-electric car. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/9.24/download-entire-issue
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Coalbed methane bust leaves thousands of orphaned gas wells in Wyoming
And the state is starting to come to terms with an orphaned gas well problem.
Posted inGoat
The price of a loud world: How road noise harms birds
Last fall, a team of researchers from Idaho’s Boise State University hiked into the mountains outside of town with backpacks full of batteries and speakers. The unusual cargo was not for a backcountry dance party, but rather for a unique experiment to determine the impact of road noise on migratory birds. The scientists hung speakers […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Eucalyptus: Beauty or Beast?
Restoration pits these exotics against California natives. But for some, they’re a natural.
Posted inWotr
Words to live by as the year winds down
Adages, quotes and sayings to inspire in 2014.
Posted inGoat
Top 10 reasons not to move to Bozeman
In my role as a journalistic curmudgeon, today I’d like to tell you some of the drawbacks of living in a trendy Western town that often makes the Top 10 lists drawn up by the likes of Outside magazine, Entrepreneur magazine, and Livability.com. I’m talking about Bozeman, Montana – and how the conventional wisdom is […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Art and the atomic age
Radioactive disposal sites and other residuals of the bomb era.
Posted inWotr
Will the nation accept horse slaughter?
Opinion on the recent opening of two slaughterhouses: why horsemeat isn’t such a radical idea.
Posted inGoat
A data junkie’s look back at the West in 2013
’Tis the season of cheer and light and of gorging ourselves and then getting in life-threatening sledding accidents. And, of course, it’s also the season of looking back on the year that has been and futilely trying to learn from all the stupid mistakes we made. Yes, it’s Year-in-Review time. My colleague, Sarah Gilman, wrapped […]
Posted inArticles
Bison roundup at Rocky Mountain Arsenal refuge
At least 20 animals were removed from the herd to let habitat recover.
Posted inGoat
The Wilderness Act at 50: In 2014, what makes a place wild?
In December 1960, the iconic Western author Wallace Stegner wrote a letter to a University of California, Berkeley researcher in support of what would become the Wilderness Act. Wilderness is important, he wrote, because it “was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is […]
Posted inGoat
California Energy Commission says no to desert solar plant that could kill birds
It came as a shock last spring, at least to me, when BrightSource Energy decided to suspend its Hidden Hills Solar project near Pahrump, Nev. For starters, I had a story going to press whose conclusions were somewhat tied to the looming specter of Hidden Hills, a large concentrating solar “power tower” project which would […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Obama’s most effective environmental action?
Utah and other states like the new EPA regulations on vehicle emissions.
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The Latest: Southern Colorado protected from proposed Army base expansion
BackstoryWhen Fort Carson proposed expanding its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in 2003, nearby ranchers worried. The 235,000-acre training ground, in southeastern Colorado, was slated to grow to more than 650,000 acres, and though the U.S. Army promised to work with “willing sellers,” locals feared land seizure through eminent domain, as happened in the 1980s when […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Vital Signs, a book by Juan Delgado and Thomas McGovern
Vital Signs Juan Delgado and Thomas McGovern, 128 pages, paperback: $18.95.Heyday and the Inlandia Institute, 2013. San Bernardino, Calif., has a reputation for poverty and crime, but poet Juan Delgado and photographer Thomas McGovern offer a vibrant view of the city’s working-class Latino neighborhoods in their new book, Vital Signs. The people of this urban […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The true story of the Apaches
In the article on the efforts of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe to build a casino in southwestern New Mexico, Jeff Haozous is quoted as saying that there were no remnant populations of Chiricahua or Warm Springs Apaches left in southwestern New Mexico after Geronimo’s surrender in 1886 (“Whose Apache Homelands?” HCN, 10/14/13). This statement […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
The peace broker
Common Ground on Hostile Turf: Stories from an Environmental MediatorLucy Moore216 pages, softcover: $19.99.Island Press, 2013. Most of us have attended public meetings where emotions run uncomfortably high. Each side is firmly, sometimes even fiercely, entrenched; voices are raised, tempers frayed. People hurl verbal grenades at each other, refusing to concede an inch. Actual communication […]