We’ve had national parks on the brain a lot lately as we slogged through 16 days of federal shutdown. It’s been an economic burden to gateway communities and a frustration to tourists. But a depressingly dysfunctional government isn’t the only thing plaguing our parks. A new study shows that airborne nitrogen pollution is fundamentally changing the […]
Nitrogen pollution at critical levels in dozens of national parks
Posted inGoat
The shutdown is over but its impacts linger
The shutdown is over. Federal employees are going back to work, with back pay. Journalists and data geeks can access information on census.gov and usgs.gov. Tourists are once again able to see national parks. And the National Zoo’s Panda Cam – praise be! – has returned to the air. Maybe we can just chalk all […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
A new Apache homeland in New Mexico?
An Okie Apache fights his kin to build a casino and bring his people home.
Posted inGoat
Oil spill, eagles and fracking: the news you missed during the shutdown
The staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was welcomed to work yesterday by a “coffee cake bite”-bearing Joe Biden, and a grinning administrator so thrilled to have her employees back on the job she jumped up and down as they entered the building. There wasn’t, I expect, a lot of jumping and grinning happening […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Dispatch from Twiggley Island: an essay
Neighbors band together to survive after the Colorado floods.
Posted inGoat
Pipelines aren’t the only way to ship oil – rail’s on the rise
What do melting sea ice, fiery train wrecks and the Bakken oil boom have in common? No, they’re not part of the latest Hollywood blockbuster – although if I came across a trailer showing George Clooney as a roughneck leaping from a flaming train onto an ice floe with an angry polar bear, you better […]
Posted inGoat
Painkiller prescriptions skyrocket, endangering veterans
Ricky Green was 43 when he accidentally overdosed on pain medication for a lingering back injury from the first Gulf War. He died in his sleep in September 2011. Just a month earlier, he had asked his Veterans Affairs doctors to decrease the dose of three painkillers he was taking, but the physicians told him […]
Posted inWotr
Stand up for wildland firefighters
There’s a practical way to show respect for wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line for us.
Posted inGoat
Don’t blame rangers for closed public lands
We’re now on Day 15 of the shutdown. The consequences of suspending so many of the government’s daily operations continue to ripple outward (a few of the odder side effects: new beers can’t be approved; Alaskan fishermen can’t catch crabs; furloughed federal workers are growing #shutdownbeards). The closures have, of course, affected access to the […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
KDNK Radio and Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock on Front Range floods
September’s massive flood devastated the front range town of Lyons, and recovery efforts there and in other affected communities are ongoing – even as a partial government shutdown threatened to pull National Guard members from essential work repairing roads and bridges. For the latest edition of Sounds of the High Country, KDNK’s Eric Skalac talks […]
Posted inGoat
States pay to re-open national parks and fuel anti-feds fire
Last Thursday, the complaints of business owners and restaurant workers in national park gateway towns around the West hit home when my boyfriend’s parents, who were about to embark on the Southwestern leg of their once-in-a-lifetime cross-country road trip, realized the shutdown had foiled their entire itinerary for the region. Instead of snapping pictures from […]
Posted inWotr
In the land of getting nothing done
A delegation of outdoor recreationists go to D.C. to lobby for climate action — and walk into the congressional shutdown.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Lessons from the flooded Front Range
Learning to live with the inevitable.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Tribal casinos don’t like competition
The Northern Edge Navajo Casino sits on an otherwise empty chunk of desert alongside northern New Mexico’s San Juan River, just inside the Navajo Nation’s borders. It’s a perfect place for a casino, right across the river from Farmington, N.M., home to hundreds of energy-field workers with cash burning holes in the pockets of their […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
Tortoise treatise, critiqued
Emily Green’s Aug. 5 article “Mojave Squeeze,” states that, in 2008, “California’s habitat conservation plans (were) superseded by a new ‘Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan.’ ” In fact, the DRECP has not superseded anything; a draft environmental impact statement has yet to be released. Ms. Green failed to note that the final biological opinion for […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The world of the speed artist
The FlamethrowersRachel Kushner400 pages, hardcover: $26.99.Scribner, 2013. Reno, the 22-year-old protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, makes her first appearance as she flies across Nevada on her way to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s. “The land was drained of color and specificity,” she observes. “The faster I went, the more connected […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The mysterious reappearance of the white-bottomed bee
A Western species that crashed in the 1990s may be making a comeback in Washington and Colorado.
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The fungus among us
West Nile virus, valley fever, hantavirus: Over the past decade, the West has seen an increase in some rare but scary illnesses. According to a September study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the U.S. places 11th globally for incidents of plague. Scientists also recently discovered that a deadly tropical fungus, which […]
Posted inOctober 14, 2013: The New Geronimo?
The drill rig next door
The Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah has air-quality problems just like those mentioned in Erie, Colo (“Front Range drilldown,” HCN, 9/2/13). In the Uinta Basin, the natural gas industry loses 6 to 12 percent of its product from leaky installations and flaring. Methane is about the strongest of the greenhouse gases, and shouldn’t be released. […]