Up at Jerry Benson’s native seed farm in central Washington, during harvest season, workers walk through fields sticking tiny vacuums up into what looks like a crop of bridal veils. Those veils, made out of a tulle-like netting, keep Benson’s precious phlox seeds — which tend to explode out of their seed cases — from […]
Native plant growers face many challenges
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Great Basin scientists unleash new weapons to fight invasive cheatgrass
This guy is lovely!” ecologist Beth Leger exclaims, falling to her knees. A tiny, energetic woman in her mid-30s, Leger hovers, bee-like, over a teensy grass with blue-green blades. It is, she tells me, a “cute” native called Poa secunda. It’s early May, and Leger, graduate student Owen Baughman and I are crouched on Peavine […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Pallid’s PR problem
For a large, ancient and extremely endangered species, the pallid sturgeon receives remarkably little respect. The fish is nobody’s poster child. Unlike trout and salmon, it has no real champions among environmental groups; it occasionally gets passing mention, but little direct advocacy, and few are actively engaged in the recovery effort. Pallids spend their entire […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Grand Canyon floods and native fish
The last time the Colorado River plunged unhindered through the Grand Canyon, swollen by snowmelt to 126,000 cubic-feet per second, was in 1957. Glen Canyon Dam rose soon after, delivering cheap hydropower and reliable water to cities, farms and industry. For native fish, the transformation was debilitating. Most of the river’s sediment — which built […]
Posted inRange
Enviros worry about Utah tar sands water pollution
By David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News The debate over whether oil sands mining should be allowed in Utah inched forward this week when an environmental group and the company that wants to open the mine both filed papers responding to a judge’s recent ruling on whether water resources will be adequately protected. Administrative Law Judge Sandra Allen ruled […]
Posted inGoat
It’s a hardrock life
South of Ouray, Colorado, dozens of abandoned gold and silver mines litter the valley below Red Mountain’s pyrite-stained slopes. Tourists clog the pullouts of US 550, the highway running through the mineral-rich San Juan Mountains, to gawk at the weathered wooden head frame of the Yankee Girl mine and the eggshell tailing piles beneath it, […]
Posted inWotr
Does taking our kids into the wild make us dangerous parents?
It began even before the kids were born, more than 20 years ago. Marypat finally got pregnant after years of miscarriages. We were halfway through winter in a cabin hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement, halfway through a 14-month canoe expedition, alone, vulnerable and perfectly content. The advice we got, from family, from friends, […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Gathering strength from the Continental Divide
The Continental Divide of my childhood rises up the moment I spy the fractured, uplifted horizon formed by the Rocky Mountains. Ahead lies Longs Peak, and the log cabin my family has rented for the summer. Ahead lie weeks full of freedom and possibility. Left behind, so close to Missouri it barely qualifies as Kansas: […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bloodsuckers in California
THE SOUTHWEST & CALIFORNIA It’s been hot lately. Damned hot. Phoenix, Ariz., Palm Springs, Calif., and other Western torrid zones posted temperatures of more than 100 degrees every day during the first two weeks of August. Death Valley’s high exceeded 115 degrees on 14 out of those 14 days, and on one occasion reached 126 […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t look for the frontier in Alaska
Alaska. The word tumbles out like a wild stream, carrying a cascade of images: grizzly bears, glaciers, vast mountains, Native villages. It’s the Alaska we believe in, an American Eden for lovers of wilderness. But as change sweeps the state, the veneer is cracking. In the southeastern panhandle, the famed Inside Passage bordering British Columbia, […]
Posted inGoat
Home rule
School kids in Colorado have to walk at least 1,000 feet from the playground to reach the nearest medical marijuana dispensary. But if they want to clamber around on the closest oil and gas well instead of trying to scrounge crumbs of THC-laced brownies spilled on the sidewalk, they have to stroll only about a […]
Posted inGoat
Is Lake Powell really shrinking?
The West is heating and drying up so much that the whole place could burst into flames at any second. At least, that’s the way it seems, reading the news these days. Every day it’s another item about the catastrophic, unprecedented drought and the “new normal” of months of consecutive 90+ degree highs in places […]
Posted inRange
Antibacterial soaps in the backcountry
I try not to be one of those people who buy into every alarmist headline about how common products will poison me. Over the years, consumer safety scares have come and gone with predictable regularity. Eggs were forbidden cholesterol-bombs for a while. Caffeine was blamed for just about every possible malady, and then (at least partially) exonerated. And […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Watching land swaps in Idaho and the West
For Western Pacific Timber and its then-President and CEO Tim Blixseth, the spring of 2006 promised big business. The company had recently purchased 39,371 acres in the Clearwater National Forest in the Upper Lochsa, on the Idaho-Montana border. The Lewis and Clark trail winds through here, and the rivers and woods are home to threatened […]
Posted inRange
Pesticides and salmon: It ain’t about the fish
Ask folks what is the most pressing environmental issue facing America and they’re most likely to say: Water. Protect the water. So shame on Beltway lobbyists taking apart the legal framework we’ve built to protect our water and the species that depend on it. After all, those species include human beings. See the photo here? […]
Posted inGoat
How do you tell an invasive species from a natural colonizer?
By now, you’ve probably heard of the 66-foot-long, 7-foot-tall, 188-ton “tsunami dock” that washed ashore near Newport, Ore., this summer – perhaps the most dramatic chunk of debris to reach the West Coast in the aftermath of last year’s tsunami in Japan. You’ve probably heard that state workers sliced it up like a giant block […]
Posted inGoat
Finding true north
Two weeks ago, I traveled to Alaska for likely the same reasons most people visit: To experience the American landscape as I imagine it once was, as a place where you can’t walk five yards in the forest without spying scat of predator or prey, where fish crowd the rivers and eagles wing overhead enjoying […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Cracking the ozone code in Utah’s gas fields
Updated 9/4/2012 On a bright February morning, a curiously adorned cargo van crept down a dirt road in northeastern Utah’s Uintah Basin. A steel pole with a jumble of funnels strapped to its tip rose from the roof’s rear, and the vehicle moved so slowly that its speed didn’t even register — a good thing, […]
Posted inGoat
Conventioneering
The Democrats didn’t throw environmentalists many bones at their convention this week — at least not any with much meat on them. Yet it was striking how even bland, unspecific statements about the environment drew stark contrasts between the parties. Take a few lines from Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s speech, who is not a […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
In rural California, a Liberian family finds an agricultural refuge
On a historic 50-acre ranch in Northern California, Cynnomih Tarlesson and her nine children drop watermelon seeds into the ground. Behind them, her father, Roosevelt, uses a tractor to churn up the dirt for tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant — along with some lesser-known crops, like the Tarlesson-named ‘Billy Goat Pepper,’ from the family’s native West […]