Driving through southwestern New Mexico this summer, I passed one of the area’s wolf-proof school bus stops. I’d heard about the enclosures for years and couldn’t resist pulling off Highway 180 onto State Road 32 to check one out in person. More recently, the cages have been featured in a new documentary film, “Wolves in […]
New anti-wolf, anti-fed film features “wolf cages” to protect kids
Posted inWotr
A uranium mining proposal threatens water supplies
This South Dakota project claims technology will trump nature.
Posted inGoat
The long and winding (and dangerous) road: Car crashes and the rural West
It was almost a normal drive home. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in the Colorado Rockies, I’ve completed variations on the same 4.5-or-so-hour route dozens of times on my way down to the plains and my hometown, Boulder, Colo., without major incident: Highway 24 from Leadville to I-70; Highway 82 from Aspen to […]
Posted inGoat
Pro-coal arguments win the day at Denver EPA hearing on CO2 regulations
At 5 a.m. on Oct. 30, coal miners and residents of Moffat County, Colorado, gathered at a McDonald’s in Craig for a pancake breakfast before boarding buses to Denver chartered by Peabody Coal. They were headed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s listening tour, in which the agency travels around the country seeking input on […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Towering Cell Phone Trees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. For a couple of years back in the 1970s, when I was a little kid, my family had an artificial Christmas tree that I thought was incredibly cool. It was fun to put together, […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
Cutting class: Alaskan villages struggle to keep schools open
In 15 years, 32 schools have closed because they have fewer than 10 students.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
New Hope for the Delta
During the worst drought in more than a century, the Colorado River may flow to the sea once more.
Posted inGoat
Americans are driving less, but Westerners still love their cars
Fellow Westerners: We are pathetic! Sure, we’ve got our redeeming qualities, I guess, but one of them is not our ability to mitigate the environmental impact of our commute. We Westerners are a tribe of steering-wheel-gripped, fossil-fuel-burning, trapped-in-a-tin-can-in-traffic creatures, guided along highways not by eyes and mind, but by the tinny, seductive voice of our […]
Posted inGoat
Will stricter emissions limits mean stranded assets for investors?
Forty-five of the world’s top oil and gas producers received a letter, released at the end of October, that must have come as something of a wake-up call. Seventy investors that control a total of $3 trillion of those companies’ assets sent off the missive with one question in mind: What’s going to happen to […]
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
O pioneer: A filmmaker explores how we find home in the West
L.A. transplant Vera Brunner-Sung’s first fictional work tackles displacement, transience and belonging in Montana.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
KDNK Radio speaks with reporter Krista Langlois
As Colorado voters consider a new education funding mechanism with Amendment, a decade-old law in Alaska is closing rural schools. On this episode of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK Radio’s collaboration with the High Country News, KDNK’s Eric Skalac talks to Krista Langlois. Past editions of Sounds of the High Country are at KDNK.org, […]
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Does reality TV change the reality of Alaska?
Four years ago, when I was 25, I went to Alaska to work as a wilderness guide. I bought my first pair of XtraTuf boots and my first set of head-to-toe rubber rain gear, and between seven-week trips in the backcountry, lived above a Laundromat that smelled perpetually of halibut. The first spring, my boyfriend […]
Posted inWotr
Boy Scout leadership needs higher standards
Do they fret too much about gays and not enough about some of their ill-trained youth leaders?
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NPS Director Jon Jarvis on shutdown rage and funding needs for the service
National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis had not come to Rubén Salazar Park in East Los Angeles on October 24 to talk about government shutdowns, Tea Partiers in Congress or the privatization of public lands. He had come instead to promote the park service’s American Latino Heritage initiative, a prototype of a new kind of […]
Posted inGoat
Why the farm bill’s crop insurance is a missed opportunity for reducing climate risk
This week, Congress is getting back to the big issues haunting the public, including the farm bill, which expired amid the government shutdown. Since the House and Senate have already passed two separate versions, select lawmakers are meeting today to try to reconcile their differences. The division between the two chambers centers on, you guessed […]
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A new history of redwoods, eucalypts, citrus and palms in California: Conversation with an author
Jared Farmer, Utah native and associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, released his third book this week: Trees in Paradise: A California History. The book traces the history of redwoods, eucalyptus, citrus and palms in the Golden State from 1848 to today. Farmer takes a unique approach […]
Posted inJune 25, 1982: A $40 million pork barrel
Light rail commuting: Beating the rush in Denver
The Denver metro’s transportation planners are banking on light rail to fix problems of traffic congestion and air pollution as the city continues to grow. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/14.13/download-entire-issue
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What’s at stake in this November’s off-year elections
Next week’s elections will come and go relatively peacefully. And for that we can be thankful. To simultaneously endure the hyperbolic screeching of political mailers and television ads, along with the federal government’s self-implosion, would have broken even the most committed of citizens. Then again, a high-stakes election season probably would’ve saved the federal government […]
Posted inGoat
Wonderful, gritty ‘Indian Relay’ documentary airs on PBS
If you have access to a TV on November 18, I recommend that you tune in for the nationwide debut of a new documentary about Indians in the West devoting themselves to a zany kind of horse racing. If you’re in Montana, catch the local debut on Montana PBS on October 31. They call their […]
Posted inWotr
Telluride voters will find sugar on the ballot
The pros and cons of banning sugary sodas in a mountain resort town of Colorado.