“Buy this book and read it on the plane (!)” This was David’s advice to me for our upcoming expedition to Alaska’s Harding Icefield, sent with a link to Glacier Mountaineering: An Illustrated Guide to Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue. I am no stranger to mountains, having grown up in Colorado and spent several seasons […]
The blue window
Posted inWotr
Clinging to coal on the reservation is looking backward
“Courageous,” “an opportunity,” “a venture into a new era,” “a vision for the future.” To hear glowing words like these from some leaders of the Navajo Nation, you might think the tribe had decided to head boldly into renewable energy or some other modern economic model. But no, the officials were describing the tribe’s desire […]
Posted inGoat
So long, San Onofre (in like 700 million years)
In the winter of 2005, I took a tour of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, a two-gigawatt power plant near San Clemente, Calif., 70 miles south of where I live. I was willing to entertain, if only for the sake of a story, that nuclear power offered a solution to impending climate catastrophe, as […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Conservation goals in Jackson Hole collide with a need for worker housing
Jackson, Wyoming As I roam around this resort town in April to meet conservationists who battle affordable housing projects, I’m struck by a tongue-in-cheek take on the argument in the Jackson Hole Daily. Smack on the front page is a photo of a pair of geese facing off against two ospreys over possession of a […]
Posted inGoat
What’s eating the snowpack?
The water gods created haves and have-nots this year, and nowhere more dramatically than in Colorado. In March, after another dry winter, the whole state was biting its nails. Then: Snowpacalypse! An unusually stormy April built up the snowpack in most of northern Colorado to just about average. In the southern part of the state, […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Arctic ship logs help scientists reconstruct climatic history
May they whose Lot this Log to keepBe worthy of the Task completeAnd never leave a sentence outWhich should occur the voyage about — Inscription on the cover of a 19th century ship’s logbook The morning of April 19, 1875, dawned cool and foggy in San Francisco Harbor. Aboard the United States Coast and Geodetic […]
Posted inGoat
Tribes battle austerity with energy development
The Albuquerque ambience, as we rolled into town to cover a tribal energy conference, was tinted with doom. It was 7:30 on a June evening, and the car thermometer read 99 degrees. To the north, a massive plume of smoke rose up from the newly ignited Jaroso fire, joining the plumes of the Tres Lagunas […]
Posted inWotr
Hard choices for an uncertain future
Stepping onto the stage of the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colo., his biceps bulging after chopping vegetables six hours a day for 21 months while in prison, Tim DeChristopher got a standing ovation for an act of insurrection. DeChristopher became the public face of climate-change activism in 2008 with an audacious act of principled […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Shooting yourself in the foot–literally
COLORADO AND THE WEST The western Colorado town of Nucla only has about 730 residents, but its council is eager to tell them how to live — only in the name of freedom, of course, and to protect the Second Amendment. Recently, that meant telling residents that they must own a gun. There were loopholes: […]
Posted inGoat
Cow stomp: using cattle to reclaim mine land
In Coal Basin — a narrow drainage that meets the Crystal River at Redstone, Colo.– roads wind high into snow-capped peaks. In the early 1900s, and again starting in the 1950s, miners pried coal from these mountains, easing 100-ton loads down the switchbacks. Now the mineshafts are closed, but the tangle of roads, along with […]
Posted inGoat
Big Brother’s big data is coming to Utah
Last year, with a great deal of prescience, Wired magazine published James Bamford’s long form story describing Bluffdale, Utah where “Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors,” and where, off of Beef Hollow Road, construction was underway on a building five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. The building, which Bamford describes […]
Posted inWotr
Wild, free and out of control
“In my world, everyone’s a pony, and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies.” So proclaims cat-like creature Katie in the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. Sharing Katie’s world are feral-horse support groups — whose members number in the millions — and NBC, which regularly recycles their fantasies. For example, on May […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Is the Violence Against Women Act a chance for tribes to reinforce their sovereignty?
Victims’ advocates joined legislators at the North Dakota Capitol in Bismarck on March 26, to discuss the recently reauthorized Violence Against Women Act. The meeting began on a celebratory note: The federal law restored to tribal courts the right to prosecute non-Indians for abusing or assaulting Native American women on Indian land — something the […]
Posted inWotr
It’s too soon to end Arizona’s solar incentives
There may be no better place on the planet to generate solar electricity than Arizona. The entire state shows up as a big red stain on solar radiation maps, and the state’s numerous canals, fallow fields, zombie subdivisions and parking lots — not to mention its nearly 3 million rooftops — are like a big blank […]
Posted inGoat
The United States of Energy
I’m kind of a map geek. I hang them in the bathroom and study the names of small Colorado towns while brushing my teeth. Meals frequently turn into geography bees thanks to the world map tacked above the table (quick—name three countries that border Afghanistan). But how do you map something that’s basically invisible? That’s […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Wyoming digs its 10 billionth ton of coal
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wyoming digs its 10 billionth ton of coal.
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Wildfire’s silver lining
Boulder County, on Colorado’s urban Front Range, mostly missed the building boom that hit the prairies to its east a decade ago. Any land that wasn’t protected as open space was already developed. (The county has one of the most densely developed wildland-urban interfaces in the country.) What was left was pricey and strictly regulated. […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
What about race?
One word that was strangely missing from your excellent article on the conservative politics of northern Idaho was “race” (“Right-wing Migration,” HCN, 5/13/13). I have no hard data on this, but I’d guess that the increasing diversity in Southern California is a major reason a lot of right-wingers from Orange County moved to a mostly […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
The latest: Channel Island foxes rebound
BackstorySouthern California’s Channel Islands are home to cat-sized foxes (Urocyon littoralis) found nowhere else in the world. After DDT killed off the islands’ native bald eagles in the 1950s, golden eagles moved in, preying primarily on feral piglets but snatching up tiny foxes, too. Disease further shrunk fox populations. When the foxes were listed as […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
The latest: A worrying amphibian decline
BackstoryScientists have known for years that frogs and toads are in rough shape. Nearly a third of all amphibian species face extinction — including the boreal toad, once common in high mountains around the West (“Toads on high,” HCN, 8/22/11). Climate change, habitat loss and disease are all factors in the decline; chytrid fungus, which […]