By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I have a file on my desktop called “Cool Ideas.” It’s filled with news items on practical steps Westerners are taking to address climate change. I collected them over this election year while the issue drew platitudes and punch-lines from the candidates but little meaningful discussion on the national […]
Turning climate change talk to action
Posted inGoat
The future of campaign spending
Imagine you’re one of the 40,000 people in America with a net worth of over $30 million. That’s enough to have some spare cash to play with. Why not use it to influence politics? Come on. You know you want to. Yet, you’re faced with a problem. According to analyses by the Center for Responsive […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Is there a way through the West’s bitter wild horse wars?
On a sunny spring day, T.J. Holmes creeps up a dusty arroyo in southwestern Colorado. The 41-year-old former journalist and mountain-bike champ wears beat-up jeans, her blonde curls unfurling from a sun-bleached visor and a big gun slung over one shoulder. The chalky hills of Disappointment Valley look as if they deserve their name. This […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Goodbye, listeners
We hope the seven episodes of West of 100 we’ve produced this year have stimulated your curiosity and warmed your ears. Unfortunately, we’ve decided to discontinue the podcast. We’ve concluded that our small staff can better serve our audience by concentrating our resources on conducting the best in-depth reporting on the American West that you […]
Posted inGoat
Computerized canyon
The Grand Canyon is already a public spectacle, with good reason. Every time I’ve visited I’ve been humbled by the frisson of insignificance I feel when peering into its vast orange depths. Ashamedly, I’ve only done the Canyon-lite tour – driven slowly around the car-accessible parts of the south rim, stopping at the viewing points […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
What are a bunch of hipsters doing in Green River, Utah?
Updated 11/14/12 At 3 on a Friday afternoon, Armando Rios and Ashley Ross are distributing fliers for tonight’s art show. Rios sports an ironic Burt Reynolds mustache and purple button-down. Ross, in her tight black leggings and long dark bangs, looks like she stepped out of a coffee shop in the Mission. But this isn’t […]
Posted inGoat
Much ado about mutton
Peeking inside the freezer at Paonia, Colo.’s local meat market, you’d never know wholesale lamb prices are nearly at an all-time low. A pound of lamb chops costs $16.48; ground lamb is $10.14. But at the other end of the supply chain, ranchers are bringing in less than 90 cents a pound, far below what […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
National Park air fresheners
ALASKA – Denny Akeya, a native of the St. Lawrence Island village of Savoonga, wears his opinion on his chest. Courtesy Loren Holmes, Alaska Dispatch THE WEST Marketers can sell anything, it seems, even metaphors. You can now buy an air freshener that mimics not the true scent of a national park, which might be a noxious […]
Posted inGoat
The water project that wouldn’t die
Driving down a highway, somewhere this side of the New Mexico line, I see a house surrounded by rusted out farm implements. I see a field, churned up and parched under another bright blue October sky. I see a dam being built. A dam!? Yes, a dam. The era of huge Western water projects has […]
Posted inGoat
A pro-tax revolt?
Dear voter, This is a test of your reading comprehension: “Without increasing any tax rate or imposing any new tax, shall Delta County be authorized to collect, retain, and use all revenues derived from impact fees on new development on and after January 1, 2013, as a voter approved revenue change under Article X, Section […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
What scientists are learning from wildfire in New Mexico
New Mexico’s Gila National Forest is an ideal place to study wildfire scars. Ponderosa pines on the western cliffs have blackened bark at their bases. On the eastern range, frequent burns keep the grass treeless and nutrient-enriched, so that it stretches for miles like a thick green hide. From a small plane in July, I […]
Posted inWotr
Planting the millionth tree
The Arbor Day Foundation sent me a Tree Survey a few months ago. At least it called itself a survey, but it turned out to be more of a pitch for donations in the form of a questionnaire. Still, I decided to finish reading the thing before I tossed it in the wood burner with […]
Posted inGoat
The Nevada surprise
For the last 12 years, Nevada has had but three Representatives in the U.S. House: Two from the southern Clark County cities where 70 percent of Nevada lives and works, and another representing everybody else — all of rural Nevada from Elko in the far northwest to Pahrump on the state’s Western border with California. […]
Posted inGoat
From coal mine to clean energy
At first glance, the man greeting visitors last Friday at the start of the gravel road leading to Elk Creek mine, a coal mine in Colorado’s North Fork Valley, might have been mistaken for a miner. His bright orange vest and black hardhat looked the part. But both items lacked the black dust that settles […]
Posted inWotr
Remembering George McGovern as the elections pass
As the 2012 election recedes into the background, it’s still time to play the post-election game called “What did it really mean?” or, in the case of this election, “What did we get for $2.6 billion?” Pundits on the yak-yak circuit got the jump on the game when the election was quickly called for President […]
Posted inRange
Sportsmen given credit in Montana’s Dem governor win
Although not as highly watched as Montana’s seat in the US Senate, sportsmen are also being given partial credit for tipping the scales toward the Democratic victor, Steve Bullock, over Republican Rick Hill in the 2012 race for Montana Governor. A Lee newspapers analysis quoted Bullock campaign manager Kevin O’Brien, as he passed around the […]
Posted inGoat
A Western obstructionist gets obstructed
Updated 9:49 a.m., 11/12/12 James Inhofe, a 77-year-old senator from Oklahoma, a grown man with no history of mental illness, claims to have uncovered divine logic that refutes the science of global warming. He has sanguinely decoded the rubric among verses in the first book of the world’s most famous text — the Bible. Here […]
Posted inNovember 12, 2012: Nowhere to run
Utah’s utopia, unfulfilled
I found Jonathan Thompson’s article on Utah’s split personality between its politics and economic policies interesting and informative (“Red State Rising,” HCN, 10/29/12). Especially insightful is his observation about the economic disparity between the Wasatch Front and the rest of the state’s communities. If one checks the most recent annual data published by the U.S. Commerce Department, you […]