This time-lapse video shows how Brewer’s sparrows spread north from their winter habitat in the Southwest and Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert Grasslands to their summer range in the American West. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology produced the maps with computer models that used recorded sightings and habitat data to predict where the birds were likeliest to […]
Brewers sparrows on the move
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Diné activist protests wastewater-to-snow scheme
Fighting for the environment is just part of this Navajo’s cultural identity.
Posted inWotr
Don’t be afraid to use the term ‘sacred’
Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front deserves protection from drilling.
Posted inGoat
Why aren’t experimental floods helping native fish below Glen Canyon Dam?
Before Glen Canyon Dam tamed it in 1963, the Colorado River flowed red with mud, and the seasons ruled its temperature and flow. Today, the river is a vastly different ecosystem. Now, it’s the color of a tropical ocean because the dam holds back sediment, withering the beaches that river travelers love for camping. And […]
Posted inWotr
How can a court say a bear is ‘not natural’?
Questioning a recent court decision after a black bear killed a young boy in Utah.
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
The right-wing heiress who changed course in the desert
Looking back on Bazy Tankersley: publisher, rancher and conservationist.
Posted inGoat
Energy update: renewables, coal and gas by the numbers
About a year ago, many of us in energy news land were busy scribbling out coal’s eulogy. Natural gas and renewable energy were slowly taking over the electricity fuel mix, putting coal — our favorite cheap electricity generator for generations — against the rope. It was only a matter of time before natural gas, its […]
Posted inWotr
Colorado’s ‘Berlin Wall for wildlife’ should get an animal crossing
Supporters hope to try out a revolutionary design on I-70.
Posted inGoat
As Rim Fire scorches Yosemite, Forest Service cuts restoration funding
It started small enough, on Aug. 17 – a 200-acre blaze burning towards a place called Jawbone Ridge from a north-facing slope in the rugged Clavey River canyon, west of California’s Yosemite National Park. The area was isolated, and no structures were immediately threatened. By the 19th, local news sites were reporting 2,500 acres burned […]
Posted inGoat
Watch the who’s who of Montana’s dinosaur wars
The most recent issue of High Country News features a story about one-of-a-kind fossils that were unearthed in Montana and have stirred controversy in the scientific community. Reporter Montana Hodges tells the spellbinding narrative of the fossil hunters, commercial dealers, museum curators and professors of paleontology involved in the scuffle over the pair of skeletons […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Dinosaur Wars
Startling, one-of-a-kind fossils are unearthed in Montana – and shunned by scientists.
Posted inGoat
Woman breaks an all-time fastest Pacific Crest Trail record
On August 9, The Seattle Timespublished a story titled “‘I couldn’t give up:’ Grueling hike for man on a mission,” about vegan hiker Josh Garrett, a 30-year-old fitness coach from Santa Monica, Calif., who broke the speed record for hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Josh hiked with sponsorship (and PR help) from Whole Foods CEO […]
Posted inGoat
Interdisciplinary science programs are important but often get less support
As spring rolled into campus each year, students at my northern Indiana college would soak up the warmth on blankets outside, surrounded by textbooks and notes. The books on my blanket covered subjects from public policy and economics to chemistry and land management; I never could choose between biology and anthropology. Luckily for me, a […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
A California Hotshot photographs his life fighting wildfires
Get a rare peek into what it’s like at the fireline.
Posted inGoat
Colorado agencies move water to help a rare bird adapt to climate change
There’s a hiking and biking trail near Gunnison, Colo. called “Sea of Sage.” The name conjures an accurate picture of how the area’s ecosystem looks to most people. But healthy sagebrush habitat is really more diverse than that – even the Gunnison sage grouse, a rare relative of the greater sage grouse, can’t survive on […]
Posted inGoat
New tech to trace fracking fluid could mean more accountability
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency comes under fire for abandoning studies that linked contaminated water to hydraulic fracturing, and oil and gas companies consider how to fix their public image around the issue, states are trying to figure out how much transparency to demand from the industry. Meanwhile, researchers are racing to find the […]
Posted inWotr
It is not okay for cats to kill all the neighborhood birds.
I’m living next to a killer named Frankie. He’s black-and-white and sweet as cats go; he’s also a menace that nobody talks much about, though feral and free-roaming housecats like Frankie have become a tragic problem all over the world. Every year in America, cats, many of them well-fed pets, kill about 12.3 billion mammals […]
Posted inGoat
Deregulation talk shakes up Arizona energy scene
The Arizona energy fight that everyone’s been yapping about lately is the effort by the state’s largest investor-owned utility, Arizona Public Service, to tweak state regulations regarding how the utility compensates homeowners for energy they produce from rooftop solar panels. That show – over the decidedly un-sexy-sounding issue of net metering – has a wacky […]
Posted inAugust 19, 2013: Dinosaur Wars
Severe drought forces a moment of truth for the Klamath
Irrigation shutoffs in the river’s upper basin may finally help move a historic water deal on the Oregon-California border.
Posted inGoat
First settlement reached in Utah’s contentious road claims
If you’ve spent much time wandering around the rural West, especially in southern Utah, you may have come across an extensive network of highways. You might not have recognized them as such, though — these “highways,” in many cases, are nothing more than cow paths, faint two-tracks, and sandy washes. But an antique Western law […]