We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
Posted inWotr
Winter: an encore edition
On April 21, a surprise snowstorm blew into western Montana. Small by any standards, it was one of those peaceful, quiet snows, without any wind, as if Mother Nature was feeling nostalgic and had ordered it up out of a Robert Frost poem. I say “surprise” because I was working inside that day; at 3:00 […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
The coming Hairpocalypse
COLORADO It’s been a century or so since anyone definitely saw a North American river otter in Boulder, Colo., so the town’s wildlife staffers were excited recently when a motion-activated camera showed one of the animals — very much alive — on the banks of Boulder Creek, reports the Boulder Daily Camera. For some minutes, […]
Posted inGoat
Drones are not just for killing
I like drones. There, I said it, and in doing so I have made myself a pariah to many of my liberal friends. Because to them, a drone is a sinister, cowardly killing machine, buzzing around the skies of Pakistan sans pilot, just waiting to rain death from the sky. It is horrible. But then, […]
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A fine day in the classroom
My daughter, Maria, teaches third grade in the border town of Deming, N.M., where every child in the school qualifies for free breakfast and lunch, test scores are chronically low, and science is a neglected subject. Eager to help out, I discover the Mastodon Matrix Project, which is run by the Museum of the Earth. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A new collaboration has Idaho ranchers and the BLM fighting fire together
On a hot day in August 2011, lightning sparked a fire in the rocky bluffs outside Glenns Ferry, Idaho. With the Bureau of Land Management’s fire crews tied up on the other 16 or so fires burning in the area, a few local ranchers, some of whom had grazing allotments on the land, rushed in […]
Posted inGoat
Big Data colonizes the West
For evidence that a new kind of information economy has come to the West, look not to San Francisco or Seattle, but south-central Wyoming. On the outskirts of Cheyenne, an Air Force town of 60,000 residents, Microsoft is building a massive, $158 million data center, a high-tech warehouse packed with computer servers that will store […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado likely to adopt tough new rural renewable energy requirements
Updated 5/16/13 This is “a direct assault on rural Colorado,” Rep. Brian DelGrosso, R-Loveland, fumed at Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers last week. From the strength of his rhetoric, you might think wealthy Front Range cities had proposed phasing out production agriculture or even banning all guns. In reality, though, DelGrosso was piling scorn on a policy […]
Posted inWotr
Frontier anxiety for the 21st century
Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the frontier experience — the opportunity for unlimited expansion into “uninhabited” lands — shaped the country’s entrepreneurial spirit. Turner’s essay took on added significance because three years earlier, the Census Bureau had declared the frontier closed. The line that separated […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Seeking balance in Oregon’s timber country
“Now, that is an old-growth tree!” shouts Jerry Franklin on a September day in the hills above Roseburg, Ore. A mammoth Douglas fir towers 10 stories above, dwarfing everything around it. Sunlight filters down through the thick canopy to a group of about 20 University of Washington students. “You can really see who the veterans […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the hill: Trapping the bees
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert, published the first Monday of each month. Several years ago, at just this time of year, I had to go back East for a few months of work. When I returned home to the […]
Posted inGoat
Navajos double-down on coal
Coal is always a hot topic on the Colorado Plateau, home to many of the mines and power plants that feed electricity-hungry Southwestern cities hundreds of miles away. But in the past few weeks, black gold has been in the news even more than normal as the Navajo Nation has weighed a new lease for […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Seeking Ben Kennedy: a quest to find a mysterious Montana philanthropist
Ben Kennedy didn’t talk a lot. He was never a family man. He liked having a beer or a cup of tea with his soup and seldom got around to bathing. He died essentially alone, a man without means and with few close friends. He was born in 1922 in rural Belt, Mont., about 100 […]
Posted inGoat
Arizona’s impending solar war
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 those solar radiation maps, and there are plenty of places to put solar panels, from fallow alfalfa fields to parking lots and canals, where photovoltaic arrays can generate power […]
Posted inGoat
(Still) getting the lead out
Lead is banned in paint, gasoline, dishes, and children’s toys, and now California is looking at removing the largest unregulated source of the neurotoxin by also banning lead ammunition. One motivation is to generally protect wildlife and human health, but some see it as a way to improve the prospects of California condors; lead poisoning […]
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The public-land legacy of Max Baucus
When Montana Sen. Max Baucus announced last week that he would not seek a seventh term in 2014, Montanans instantly began debating his legacy. After nearly 35 years in the Senate and four in the House, Baucus’ reputation as a conservative Democrat who straddled party lines is well established, and his mediocre lifetime score of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A goat walks into a bar…
MONTANA A pygmy goat walks into a bar on a Sunday afternoon — and no, this isn’t the setup to one of those jokes; this really happened in Butte, Mont. The little goat seemed to enjoy the outing until a public-health-conscious patron called the police, who came and took the animal to a shelter. As […]
Posted inGoat
Boundary water disputes
Imagine discovering that the clear, rushing water of the river in your remote neck-of-the-woods is contaminated with nitrates, sulfates, and selenium — a toxic heavy metal that causes deformities in fish. Then, to complicate things, imagine that the source of the pollution is upstream in another, neighboring country with its own leaders and environmental laws. […]
Posted inGoat
Mixed messages on methane
There was a time when environmentalists were all googly-eyed about natural gas, primarily because the cleaner-burning fossil fuel was far more climate-friendly than coal – or so it seemed. The Sierra Club and Chesapeake Energy even became allies in the fight to phase out coal. But as tales of tainted water and polluted air emerged […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The Forest Service battles placer mining with an obscure law
On a clear day last October in northern Idaho, Forest Service geologist Clint Hughes panned for gold on the North Fork Clearwater River. The area attracted gold prospectors in the 1860s, but these days, the river, which flows through a wild stretch of country near the Montana border, is popular with campers and anglers. Hughes […]