By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House With a highly anticipated majority, the Sportsmen’s Act of 2012 passed the Senate this week. No, wait, it totally didn’t. The high profile bill (S. 3525), which was authored and championed by Jon Tester (D-MT) would, among other things, increase access to public lands for hunters and anglers. It was […]
Senate calls a foul on Sportsmen’s Act
Posted inGoat
A monumental danger
Southern Arizona’s national monuments have the uneasy reputation of being good places to smuggle drugs and immigrants. Bureau of Land Management law enforcement rangers routinely find trash bags of marijuana stashed beneath mesquite and paloverde trees, piles of muddy, discarded clothes and Dumpsters-worth of empty water bottles, painted black to make them less visible in […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Seattle-based artist paints portraits of a melting world
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing Maria Coryell-Martin wants us to dance the horizon. We are in the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park, beneath a hunk of orange steel (The Eagle, by Alexander Calder), but she is looking past the art, […]
Posted inWotr
Utah’s SkiLink closes off public land
Some 80 groups and companies that want public land to remain open to the public have signed a petition to stop a Canadian developer from building a gondola to hook together two ski resorts near Salt Lake City. Traversing about 30 acres of what is now Wasatch National Forest, the gondola would benefit the Talisker […]
Posted inGoat
Gas guzzlers
If you’ve been feeling the pinch at the gas pumps, and wondering how drivers in other states are faring, you might be interested in a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. It looks at what portion of their wallets drivers across the nation empty at the pumps, as well as how states are […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Western Colorado wingnuts?
COLORADO: Hey, nice rack! Courtesy Dennis Slifer NORTH DAKOTA A woman named Donna recently called Fargo, N.D., radio station Y94 to air a problem so bizarre, the station’s hosts were almost speechless. Her complaint? Deer-crossing signs placed along busy highways were “irresponsible” because they simply encouraged the animals to cross there, and that was why […]
Posted inWotr
A rancher must sell out after losing a court case against a gas company
It was a hot day in the summer of 2009, and Dow Rippy was out on his four-wheeler in western Colorado, checking on his cows. As he drove, tracing the southern edge of his property, Rippy followed the route of a gas pipeline that the Houston-based gas company, SG Interests, was building across the ranch. […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
China and coal
THE WEST Now that China’s decided to build one coal-fired power plant every week, corporations like Goldman Sachs have become highly interested in helping the country find black rocks to burn. The Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana produces what seems an inexhaustible amount, but there’s a hitch (isn’t there always?): The coal would have […]
Posted inGoat
The bark beetle feedback loop
Trees, you might say, are nature’s ultimate do-gooders. A compound in the bark of Pacific yew trees fights cancer. Dead trees become nurse logs, nurturing forests’ next generation of fungi and vegetation. In the ocean, rotting leaves boost the growth of plankton, fortifying the foundation of the sea’s food chain. Living leaves scrub the air of […]
Posted inGoat
Cementing demand for coal
Those who are fighting to keep coal in the ground, and the dirty byproducts of burning it out of the air, must at times feel like they’re playing whack-a-mole. Every time they score a victory, the industry finds a way around it. That’s exactly what’s happening in the southwestern corner of Colorado, where a coal […]
Posted inGoat
Of water and dust
In all the hullabaloo of the Thanksgiving holiday, you might have missed a couple of important developments concerning water use while you were brining a bird or chopping cranberries. Here’s a summary, describing a deal on the Colorado River, and a ruling about California’s Owens Lake. In 2006, the seven states that share water from […]
Posted inGoat
Money and climate
Ah, money. During one of the biggest shopping times of the year, after spending Thanksgiving morning rolling stacks of coins with the kids, my thoughts turn to it, naturally. Or maybe unnaturally; what was mostly on my mind was the high cost of doing something to slow climate change. Specifically, I was thinking about carbon […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Tilting the balance of power
Ten years ago, I gathered with 22 other undergraduates on the shady side of a prefab building, sheltered from the glare of a Death Valley autumn day. We were there to talk with activists from the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, who had recently won a 7,750-acre reservation, only a small fraction of it in the national […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
The truths that matter: A review of Truth Like the Sun
In Truth Like the Sun, Washington novelist Jim Lynch straddles two Seattles: the little-known Western town in the 1960s, on the brink of exploding into a world-class city, and the modern Seattle of four decades later, at the height of the dot-com boom. He braids these incarnations of the city into an intricate narrative of […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Taking it to extremes: A review of Salt to Summit
Daniel Arnold breathes new life into the fabled Wild West as he takes readers on a journey of extremes in Salt to Summit: A Vagabond Journey from Death Valley to Mount Whitney. Arnold blends history and adventure recounting his expedition from Badwater Basin in Death Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney. With a distance […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Protecting the forests, and maybe the deserts, too
At an emotional press conference in Jackson a few weeks ago, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead expounded on his love for Wyoming, recalling how his family taught him to revere “the beauty … the open space, the clean air, the wildlife, the recreational opportunity” found in the state’s mountain forests. He reminisced about the trips that […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Political paradox
Jonathan Thompson’s brilliant article, “Red State Rising,” shines some much-needed light on the paradox of politics in Utah, where government officials routinely manage economic growth and funnel subsidies to businesses — even while professing to hate big government and love free markets (HCN, 10/29/12). In putting a human face on this story, though, Thompson went […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Keep the political stories coming
I was disappointed in the Nov. 12 letter, “Enough (political stories) already,” which berated HCN for covering “electoral politics.” All politics are “electoral politics.” This year, it has been unusually disgusting, and, yes, divisive, thanks to ideologues and Big Money. The answer is to fix the system, not to encourage ignorance. If HCN is to […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Extra! Extra! Beer in Utah!
Congratulations on the excellent article, “Red State Rising” (HCN, 10/29/12). It was great to see a positive story about Utah. The Air Force moved me here 36 years ago, and for many of those years the state received more than its share of negative stories, usually focused on the failure of business and government leadership to […]
Posted inNovember 26, 2012: Casting for Common Ground
Cowtowing to ranchers
While this article was informative and generally balanced, it only hinted at the intensity of cattle grazing and how it compares to the wild horse population (“Nowhere to Run,” HCN, 11/12/12). The BLM factsheet on grazing states that in 2011, BLM lands were authorized to support 8.3 million animal unit months (AUMs). The BLM estimates […]