The summer of 1994 was a nasty one for fires in Washington’s Chelan County, cradled in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. Dozens of blazes, including a disastrous one in Icicle Canyon, tore through the drought-stricken forests in late July. Almost a million gallons of fire retardant were dropped on that county, and some of […]
Bigger fires and evolving threats force changes in the Northwest Forest Plan
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Parched lives in a parched land: A review of the Ordinary Truth
The Ordinary TruthJana Richman375 pages, softcover: $16.95.Torrey House Press, 2012. Traditionally, springs and wells are centers of life around which people gather and sometimes form communities. In Utah author Jana Richman’s second novel, The Ordinary Truth, metropolitan claims to desert waters unsettle a small town and pit one family’s members against each other. Shifting between […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Necessary evil: a review of Boom, Bust, Boom
Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, The Metal That Runs The WorldBill Carter274 pages, hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2012. Arizona is known for the five C’s — cattle, cotton, climate, citrus and the king of them all, copper. Bill Carter’s book Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World is more […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Just the facts, ma’am
I was very disappointed with your travel issue (HCN, 3/18/13). The trees of Bernal Heights, a kayaking adventure to Alaska, gambling on the rez, volunteer tourism, secret getaways of the BLM groupie — it read more like a tourist tabloid for the West rather than the newspaper that I expect to inform me of the big […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Historic Northwest Forest Plan needs a careful overhaul
It’s hard to imagine anything like it happening today: An American president and members of his Cabinet fly into a Western city to broker a deal over the use of public lands. With a small group of stakeholders, they quickly craft a scientifically defensible plan that serves as the regional decision-making framework for another generation. […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Hispanic leaders spearheaded the Río Grande del Norte National Monument
In early April, Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, R, began pushing a bill that would limit presidential authority to designate new national monuments by forcing proposals to undergo environmental review first. The draft law is among a slew of similar measures House Republicans are working on in response to Obama’s March 25 creation of five new […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
Contemplating the future
In the last few months, I think that you have increased the quality and timeliness of your articles. This latest cover story is proof in the pudding (“Sacrificial Land,” HCN, 4/15/13). Not only did Judith Lewis Mernit cover what is going on in the Mojave Desert — a complicated subject — but she also included […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
A review of Passage to Wonderland
Passage to Wonderland. Michael A. Amundson, 208 pages, hardcover: $35. University Press of Colorado, 2012. In 1903, photographer Joseph Stimson rode in a horse-drawn buggy along a new 50-mile route leading from Cody, Wyo., to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. He stopped periodically to take pictures for a display at the 1904 World’s […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping your way to better health
There’s a new tool in California that can tell you how dirty your neighborhood is compared to the rest of the state. It’s called Cal EnviroScreen, and zip codes with the worst ozone, particulate matter, diesel exhaust and other contamination are shaded a deep indigo on a state map, where as the cleanest are white […]
Posted inGoat
Could California lead the West on regulating fracking?
Until relatively recently, California didn’t often come up in discussions about booming oil and gas development. Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado have been much more at the forefront of the media fray, joined by New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Dakota in the last decade. But ever since a pair of unsuccessful gold prospectors first […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
River home: an essay on life on the Arkansas River
Dad didn’t like it when I moved here. Nine years before, I’d left Texas. Now here I was, leaving Colorado Springs for a town with 1 percent of its population and, Dad believed, 1 percent of its opportunities, if that. There are three of us kids, and I’m the nearest to his heart — and […]
Posted inRange
Two tales of one river
As Earth Day passed with little fanfare this week, news was mixed for the Colorado River. American Rivers, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy organization, released its annual list of the nation’s most endangered waterways. Half of them are in the West, and the Colorado has the dubious distinction of landing the number one spot. The group […]
Posted inWotr
Snow, no longer so white
The recent online series, Trip, features Swiss free-skiers Nicolas and Loris Falquet skiing through snow colored with yellow, blue and umber dyes, all apparently non-polluting. It’s beautiful, slow-motion cinematography that captures the complexity of snow, with vivid contrasts between storm layers, cornices, powder and slabs. It’s also a timely metaphor, because the color of snow […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Billionaires for energy conservation
MONTANA “If Montana residents can scrape it up, they can eat it,” said The Associated Press, about a roadkill-salvage bill signed by the governor April 4. “It really is a sin to waste good meat,” is how Democratic state Sen. Larry Jent of Bozeman put it. Elk, deer, antelope and moose are all fair game […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change, not terrorists, is the real threat to the power grid
Early in the morning on April 16, someone fired shots at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose, Calif. A transformer bank was the primary victim, and it ended up losing thousands of gallons of oil. The secondary victim was the electrical grid: The power company urged residents to cut back on their […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Aspen, Colo. environmental community split over small hydro
Last summer’s Fourth of July parade in the resort town of Aspen, Colo., was apple-pie middle America. There were Rotarians and librarians, prancing horses and dirt bikers. The mayor passed out flags. Cheers erupted as veterans passed, their signs like bookmarks in American history from World War II to Afghanistan. Then came some unusual floats: […]
Posted inGoat
Pumping the San Pedro dry?
Arizona’s San Pedro River has been called the most studied river in the world, attracting scientists, birders, and anyone wanting to observe the region’s healthiest desert river. But all that research doesn’t seem to have affected an April decision by the Arizona Department of Water Resources to approve groundwater pumping that could deplete the river’s […]
Posted inWotr
Look! Shooting stars!
My favorite Oregon wildflowers are called shooting stars, delicate darts whose blossoms with their sharp-pointed anthers and swept-back magenta petals seem to hurtle toward the soft spring earth from their height of six inches or so. These are among the first flowers to appear in our oak woodlands, long before the oaks themselves show any […]
Posted inRange
Uranium is no good for the Navajo
A recent post on the High Country News website advocates the position that the Navajo Nation should eventually drop its 2005 uranium ban so that it can get a better deal on uranium development, which the author, Jonathan Thompson, sees as inevitable. The post holds up the example of the Ute Tribe as an example […]
Posted inGoat
High-tech canary in the copper mine
On the night of April 10, 165 million tons of rock — equivalent in volume to 735,000 school buses — ripped down the northeast face of Kennecott Utah Copper’s Bingham Canyon mine near Salt Lake City, damaging giant shoveling machines, haul trucks and other mining equipment. The cascade of earth swept away roads and left […]