Conservation is about balance: balancing the wants of today with the needs of tomorrow; balancing freedom with responsibility; balancing human’s power to harness nature, with respecting nature’s force and wisdom. Last week, the Center for American Progress pointed out in a report one place where the Obama Administration is out of balance: protecting the best, […]
Obama should look to New Mexico for conservation legacy
Posted inGoat
Too much, or not enough?
With shale oil deposits bigger than the Bakken sitting beneath its fertile soil—and oil companies that are eager to get their hands on it—Central California is poised to become the site of the country’s newest energy boom. Last month, the state auctioned off 18,000 acres of leases in southern Monterey County. A week later, California’s […]
Posted inArticles
Photographing migrant foragers
Eirik Johnson’s photographs document the life and landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives. He’s been featured on National Public Radio and in Orion and Audubon Magazine, among others. Johnson’s series of images on the region’s logging industry, Sawdust Mountain, was recently published by the Aperture Foundation. High Country News assistant designer Andrew Cullen, […]
Posted inGoat
Native women fail to find justice
Updated 11:28 a.m. Jan 11, 2013 In 2005, two Native American women in Oklahoma were kidnapped, blindfolded, and raped by three non-native men. Because they were blindfolded, they didn’t know if they were assaulted on state, federal, or tribal land. And, due to a tragic gap in the justice system, the location of the crime […]
Posted inWotr
Dead whales do tell tales
Just as 2012 was ending, a dead fin whale washed up on a beach in Malibu, Calif. A rare emissary from the ocean as well as an endangered species, it gave people in the area several things to consider. The first was the sheer wonder of whales. Fin whales are the second-largest animal on Earth, […]
Posted inGoat
BLM okays controversial Nevada water pipeline
Maybe the Bureau of Land Management thought they could dodge two decades of Nevada water controversy by releasing a crucial decision just two days after Christmas. Last week’s approval of a water pipeline “right of way” puts the Southern Nevada Water Authority — who hailed the decision as a “milestone” — one step closer to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A coyote chorus
NEW MEXICO Coyotes roam freely throughout New Mexico, but finding a family of five hanging out in an Albuquerque churchyard surprised Ruth Wilson, who lives across the street and enjoys watching them. The church is in a busy part of town and so whenever police or ambulance sirens sound off — which they do several […]
Posted inGoat
There ain’t no app for that
It feels weird to write about this in a blog — a purely digital format. Hell, the fact that I’m typing this on a computer makes me feel like a full-on techno-weenie. That’s because the subject of this little article, a guy named Dean Coombs, puts out a newspaper every week without the benefit of […]
Posted inGoat
The climate conversation
You are a High Country News reader, and thus, unlikely to be a subscriber to People magazine. But try as you might to stay above the pop culture fray, you’ve probably heard by now: Princess Kate is pregnant. She craves lavender shortbread. She is not, it turns out, too thin to be pregnant, though the […]
Posted inArticles
You can’t keep a cow from water (or Jon Marvel from grazing issues)
In September, the Western Watersheds Project announced that it was seeking a successor to Jon Marvel, its founder and executive director. Marvel, who lives in Hailey, Idaho, began his campaign to end public lands grazing back in the early 1990s, following a dispute with a neighboring rancher whose cattle bedded down on Marvel’s property and […]
Posted inGoat
A royal(ty) mess
If a U.S. company sells coal overseas, should it pay royalties based on the price of that coal if it was sold domestically, or on the actual price it is sold for overseas? Mining companies have been paying royalties based on the first price, that of domestically-sold coal. That’s never been much of an issue, […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: A prospect from the singing mountain
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert, published the first Monday of each month. Damned ancient Mayans. In anticipation of the end of the world on December 21, I put off my Christmas shopping, blew off my deadline for this Rant, […]
Posted inGoat
A bridge to nowhere?
Early into the new year, researchers measuring methane leaks from natural gas fields in Utah found that far more of the climate-forcing gas was being emitted than they thought (methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat). Preliminary results from that research, in the Uinta Basin, show that 9 percent of […]
Posted inArticles
In Montana, Dark Money Helped Democrats Hold a Key Senate Seat
In the waning days of Montana’s hotly contested Senate race, a small outfit called Montana Hunters and Anglers, launched by liberal activists, tried something drastic.It didn’t buy ads supporting the incumbent Democrat, Sen. Jon Tester. Instead, it put up radio and TV commercials that urged voters to choose the third-party candidate, libertarian DanCox, describing Cox as […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Fighting development in floodplains
HAMILTON, WASHINGTON Karin Vail’s modest white house near Washington’s Skagit River seemed like a perfect choice when she bought it 22 years ago. She looked forward to raising her family on its spacious one-and-a-half acres. Now, however, she just wants out. Vail, a resolute woman in her mid- 40s with long, curly red hair, stands […]
Posted inWotr
There are too many unwanted backyard horses
I was sitting in a comfortable chair one evening, reading a vintage book about the Old West, when I happened to glance out the window to see a horse cropping the grass along my driveway. I don’t own a horse. I don’t want a horse. Too many of my neighbors own horses, only to let […]
Posted inGoat
The wild and not so gun-loving West
On many a summer evening in the small, former mining town of Silverton, Colo., the staccato sound of gunshots echoes through the otherwise quiet streets. Follow the shots and you’ll come across a cast of stereotypical Old West characters riddling one another with bullets, as folks no doubt did once upon a time in these […]
Posted inWotr
Let’s hear it for a bipartisan-minded Republican
Imagine a Republican leader who racked up the following achievements: He fought smog by regulating vehicle emissions, kept dams from choking free-flowing rivers, set aside big chunks of wild backcountry for permanent protection, and supported a strong treaty to prevent harmful gases from mucking up the atmosphere. Democratic operatives might just invite this candidate to […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Deer assaults
CALIFORNIA There’s no doubt about it, says Connie Jenkins: A deer suddenly assaulted her small Honda while she was driving along a winding canyon to her home high above Malibu. Yet the suggestion in a letter from an expeditor for Farmers Insurance that she seek damages from the “third party” — which in this case […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Reviving Custer: Re-enactment and revision at the Little Bighorn
Rick Williams always bore an uncanny likeness to George Armstrong Custer. It was the nose, beakish and narrow, and the plush, platinum mustache. This was fortunate for a Civil War re-enactor. One day in 2002, a tailor outfitted Williams in a red tie and Union general’s coat. “It was scary,” he recalls. “Everyone was saying, […]