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: […]
Aspen, Colo. environmental community split over small hydro
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 […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Sacrificial Land: Will renewable energy devour the Mojave Desert?
Over breakfast at the Crowbar Café in Shoshone, Calif., Brian Brown explains to me how he makes a living. Shoshone is a town of 31 in the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border; Brown runs his own business here, the China Ranch Date Farm. In the late summer, he strips offshoots from unproductive palm trees […]
Posted inGoat
In the ozone
In 2005, smog levels in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin surprised even the scientists who study one of smog’s primary components, ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is typically a summertime air pollution problem in traffic-ridden urban areas, like L.A., Salt Lake City and Denver. But in sparsely populated Sublette County, ozone that winter was […]
Posted inGoat
The companies behind the curtain
Ever since the Bureau of Land Management announced more than a year ago that some 30,000 acres surrounding the towns of Colorado’s North Fork Valley like a necklace had been nominated for oil and gas development, wild rumors have flown about who did the nominating. (Nominating leases prompts the BLM to review whether the parcels are […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
California’s carbon market may succeed where others have failed
Most weekdays, a long line of rail cars delivers thick slabs of steel to a factory about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. Deep in the bowels of California Steel Industries, the slabs are toasted until they glow white-hot and then rolled into thin sheets used to make shipping containers, metal roofing and car wheels. […]
Posted inWotr
Wild horses: Too much of a good thing
I grew up with a dozen horses on Colorado’s eastern plains. In winter I busted hay bales to feed them, and, under a star-strewn sky, chopped holes in iced-over water tanks so the animals could drink. I’ve always believed that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. But not […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Do spoons make you fat?
UTAH If you want to watch the latest death-defying sport in the red-rock outback of southeastern Utah, check out “World’s largest rope swing” on YouTube, which has racked up more than 17 million views, according to TheSalt Lake Tribune. The video shows roped climbers leaping off the top of an arch and then swinging back […]
Posted inGoat
The river and the drought
“We’re geniuses!” bellowed my good friend, G, as we embarked on a rafting tour of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The temperature was nearing 80 under a cloudless sky, only a slight breeze blew upriver and the water was unusually clear. The ranger had just told us we’d have the place pretty much […]
Posted inRange
Real bears get a helping hand from Hollywood
It’s a long way from the cold, rainy valleys of northwestern Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to the bright lights of Hollywood. But they are both bear country, in very different ways. Hollywood is about myths — taking old myths and digging them deeper. Grafting on new, odd branches to existing myths. Hollywood plays to the mythology […]
Posted inGoat
Black-backed woodpeckers and severe fire
A charred forest is an eerie place, even years after a wildfire. I discovered this last summer while backpacking through Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Dead trunks creaked as they swayed in the wind, their branches clacking against each other like bones. We moved quickly, as if walking past an avalanche-prone slope. Had we […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Are whale watchers taking a toll on Puget Sound’s orcas?
Some orcas won’t tolerate being tagged, but a few, Candice Emmons says, are willing to play ball — like K33, who on a gray September day is swimming high and slow in Puget Sound. Emmons, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist, angles her boat at the big male, who almost seems to like the […]
Posted inWotr
The Hopi and eagle share a long relationship
Understanding another religion is no easy business. Americans nowadays often fool ourselves that religions can be put on or off like a suit of clothes, and that our own world-view is not religious unless we say so. We — especially secular humanists — also claim superiority for our idea of “nature,” an abstract space separate […]
Posted inWotr
Citing religious freedom is no excuse
Among the “cool facts” about golden eagles listed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is this: “Members of the Hopi tribe remove nestlings, raise them in captivity, and sacrifice them.” “Cool” is not a word the Eagle Defense Network and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) would use. For the last 12 years, they’ve frightened […]
Posted inGoat
Changing of the guard at the Department of Interior
Monday was Sally Jewell‘s first day on the job as the nation’s new Secretary of Interior. She replaces Ken Salazar, Obama’s first-term choice. The second woman ever to serve as the head of Interior (Gale Norton, considered a nemesis of conservationists, was the first), Jewell is now in charge of 70,000 employees and 500 million […]
Posted inRange
Pipeline paradox
Despite many high-profile protests and acts of civil disobedience focused on the adverse effects of extracting and burning the fossil fuels the Keystone XL pipeline would transport, Americans have curious, if not contradictory, views of climate and the pipeline. The KXL, if constructed by TransCanada, would move up to 830,000 barrels per day of tar sands (which […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Deconstructing environmentalists’ opposition to renewable energy
KDNK, a public radio station in Carbondale, Colo., regularly interviews High Country News writers and editors, in a feature they call “Sounds of the High Country.” Here, KDNK’s Nelson Harvey talk with High Country News associate editor Sarah Gilman about why some environmentalists are divided about the appropriate way to address climate change. Thumbnail image courtesy […]