If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but […]
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
Posted inGoat
Save our gauges
In the spring of 2011, a big, fast-melting snowpack, along with ice-jammed rivers and persistent rain brought intense flooding to Montana. Miles City, in the southeastern part of the state, declared a flood disaster after part of its levee system eroded away, and the town’s stream gauge on the Yellowstone River measured the third highest […]
Posted inRange
It’s Endangered Species Day!
Today, the third Friday in May, is Endangered Species Day. Passed by a unanimously-supported Senate resolution several years ago, the holiday is intended to encourage us “…to become educated about and aware of threats to species, success stories in species recovery and the opportunity to promote species conservation worldwide.” The Endangered Species Act (ESA), which […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
In the field with a Montana couple hunting wolves
We’re hunting wolves on an Arctic December morning in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Ryan Counts and Becky Frey lead me along a hillside above a shelf of open grass and sage known as Decker Flats. The local hunter gossip pinpointed a pack in this area the final day of elk hunting season, […]
Posted inWotr
A lesson from a pig called Eddie
I love animals and always have, but I am also a meat eater. In my early 20s, I tried a short stint as a vegetarian, but jumped off the meat-free wagon after a happy encounter with bacon. At the time I felt a twinge of guilt, but the truth is I never gave vegetarianism a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Have a ponytail? Watch out for owls!
MONTANA AND COLORADO As the Missoulian puts it, “There’s rotten cellphone service, there’s nonexistent cellphone service, and then there’s what’s happening just a few miles east of Ovando.” Which is exactly nothing, because a 195-foot-tall cell phone tower near this tiny western Montana town has never connected a call to anybody. Clearview, a Florida-based company, […]
Posted inGoat
Wyoming’s pile of coal
This month, Wyoming coal companies will pull the 10 billionth ton of coal from the state’s ground, according to a recent estimate by the Wyoming State Geological Survey. If all that ancient metamorphosed swamp were put in a 100-foot high pile, it would stretch across a 12-by-12-mile square of prairie. WSGS based the 10-billion ton […]
Posted inGoat
The other Cannabis legalization story
There were obvious ways to avoid being drafted into combat during World War II: Be a woman. Or a man younger than 18. Or a man of prime age who was somehow “physically, mentally or morally” unfit. And then there were less apparent avenues. For instance: grow hemp. The government would not only allow you […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Of sense and salinity: A swim in the Great Salt Lake
Standing barefoot and swimsuited on a concrete boat ramp, I eyed the shimmering surface of the Great Salt Lake. On this June morning, clouds of brine flies roiled inches above the water: mouth level if you’re a swimmer. Worse, the brine shrimp had hatched, and their countless tiny bodies had turned the water — usually […]
Posted inRange
The danger of too much screentime, in and out of the woods
In an Earth Day podcast, new Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell expressed her concern over the growing divide between people and nature. She pointed to “screen time,” and to other distractions that keep kids, in particular, from exploring their outdoor environments and from developing a general curiosity about the natural world. Children and adolescents […]
Posted inWotr
It’s time to see exactly how the sausage gets made
This February in Salt Lake City, Amy Meyer stood on the street and used her cell phone to record what was happening outside a slaughterhouse. She then became the first person charged under one of the new so-called “ag-gag” laws. Six states currently have such Farm Protection laws, deliberately designed to stop video recording at […]
Posted inGoat
A win for Monsanto on GMO crops
As genetically-modified food crops speed inexorably across the land, the U.S. government is doing little more than occasionally tapping the brakes a bit. The Department of Agriculture gave one such tap last week, reported The New York Times, when it decided to delay the release of two engineered crops that could result in much higher […]
Posted inGoat
What’s killing bees?
Normally, the Colorado bee swarm hotline starts ringing in mid-April. By May 1, a call is coming in every other day. And by the 15th, “somebody opens up the bee floodgates and they start swarming like the devil,” says Beth Conrey, president of the Colorado Beekeepers Association, who fields the calls on her cell phone. […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Token protection?
It’s wonderful that people from many cultures in northern New Mexico recognized the economic benefits from heightened federal recognition of the Río Grande Gorge near Taos. National monuments are powerful economic drivers, and we welcome President Obama’s action. Yet the language of the Río Grande del Norte proclamation offers little additional environmental protection beyond status […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The trouble with original claims
I am excited about the Río Grande del Norte National Monument. However, I work for one of the tribes in New Mexico, and given my familiarity with Native issues, I always find the position of the Hispanic community in New Mexico to be rather hypocritical. When they state that they have a claim to the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The Latest: Pumping Arizona’s rivers dry?
BackstoryLast July, Arizona’s state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year — despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West’s healthiest desert rivers. Environmentalists appealed the decision; so did the Bureau of Land […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
The artist and his patron: A review of “The Inventor and the Tycoon”
The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving PicturesEdward Ball447 pages, hardcover: $29.95.Doubleday, 2013. Leland Stanford appeared to have it all: As president of the Big Four Associates, who built the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, the tycoon became one of 19th century San Francisco’s most influential entrepreneurs, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Sacrifice zones: A regrettable inevitability
I earn my living protecting undeveloped natural ecosystems and restoring degraded landscapes, and I visit Western deserts as frequently as I can. So I sympathize with the residents and stewards of the Mojave Desert confronted by the reality of industrial energy development profiled in Judith Lewis Mernit’s “Sacrificial Land” (HCN, 4/15/13). However, these people’s complaints, […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Reflected glory
We are delighted to announce that Boston-based journalist Lisa Song (an HCN intern in 2010) has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, along with her InsideClimate News colleagues Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer. They received journalism’s premier award for “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.” “The story […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
Put the public before profits
If California’s three largest utilities are owned by investors who expect a return (Sacrificial Land, HCN 4/15/13), then we need to devise a way to buy out or replace those investors with public-owned cooperatives. Putting solar panels on rooftops in our cities seems more practical than transporting electricity from remote areas via power lines. I […]