For many decades, the practice of lighting fires in wildlands to clear brush, improve browse, or to create jobs for fire crews was virtually a prerogative of rural living. For the most part, nobody got hurt and nobody went to jail. In the past decade, however, as a more urban-oriented population has spread into previously […]
Start a wildfire, go to jail – or worse
Posted inHeard Around the West
Wildlife-tracking drones
THE WEST Ah, technology, isn’t it wonderful? Drones aren’t just useful for targeting suspected terrorists in far-off countries; unmanned aircraft can also be used to photograph birds roosting on cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean. Or so thinks the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which plans to send a 6-pound drone with a 54-inch […]
Posted inGoat
Chinook salmon come home to Elwha River
Five months ago contractors ripped down the final remnants of the Elwha Dam, which along with its upstream counterpart, Glines Canyon Dam, has for a century been blocking the paths of salmon up the Elwha River, which winds through Washington State’s Olympic National Park and empties into the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast, all about drought
The latest edition of HCN‘s monthly podcast, West of 100, is now available for your listening pleasure, and it covers something that’s on everyone’s mind this summer: drought. As of August, more than half of the country was experiencing at least moderate drought — and in many places it was worse than that, with drought conditions that are […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Saving threatened Utah prairie dogs — on private property
When Curt Bagley learned he could get paid for the prairie dogs digging up his land, he had a change of heart toward the varmints he’d grown up shooting. On his family’s cattle ranch in Greenwich, Utah, they’d had to learn to live with the destructive rodents since 1973, when Utah prairie dogs were federally […]
Posted inArticles
West of 100: Droughts past, present and future
Of course, drought has always been a fact of Western life. But with the specter of climate change hanging over every extreme weather event these days, this year’s drought, and the dry years that have preceded it, have people wondering: Is this normal? Is this the new normal? So for this edition of West of […]
Posted inGoat
El regreso de la tortuga grande
Updated 8/19/12 The bolson tortoise was extinct. Or at least it was supposed to be. Then, in 1959, wildlife biologists stumbled upon an area in northern Mexico where the locals were watering chickens from the empty shells of “tortuga grande,” or the bolson tortoise. The small, resident population was enough to seed a revival of […]
Posted inGoat
Label Battle
When it comes to reading food labels I’m something of a pedant. I like my ingredients lists bold and short on complex-sounding chemicals. As a dedicated reader of wrappers, cartons and allergen warnings I’ve been watching California’s Proposition 37 with interest. If passed, the act would require food manufacturers to label genetically engineered food, both […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Troubled Taos, torn apart by a battle over historic Hispano land grants
Taos, New Mexico On a cloudless June day, Ernest Romero and I are parked on a ridge top in front of a home that gazes out over scenic northern New Mexico. The 2,200-square-foot adobe sits on three acres of piñon forest and is quintessentially Southwestern, with sand-colored walls complemented by sky-blue trim, wooden beams and […]
Posted inRange
Reviewing how native peoples will deal with climate change
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. Extreme weather events forced an awareness of urgent climate disruptions this year, with July 2012 being the hottest month on record – hotter even than the Dust Bowl’s July 1936.The science tells us climate changes would […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Love and tomatoes — a natural combination
When other women ask me how I proposed to my wife, the first thing I tell them is that Crissie doesn’t like diamonds. They look at me with either contempt or condescension — the former if they think I’m going to lecture them about African child armies, the latter if they think I’m fool enough […]
Posted inWotr
Even pests have a purpose
It’s a remarkable achievement: According to a census in April, the number of California condors, one of the largest and most endangered birds in the world, has reached 405, including both wild and captive birds. That’s the most condors to exist on the planet since recovery of the species began in the 1980s, when only […]
Posted inGoat
Romney energy plan more of the same
By now you probably have heard that Mitt Romney unveiled his energy plan this week. He calls it: “The Romney Plan For A Stronger Middle Class: ENERGY INDEPENDENCE.” So creative! He’s only the gazillionth politician since Nixon to tout energy independence. And he’s also the gazillionth to get it all wrong. If there were any […]
Posted inGoat
Why is Utah so weird?
I’m no neurologist, but I know that something suspicious happens to my brain late at night or around 3 p.m. at the office. Productivity plummets and I know I need to get away from the computer, but I can’t seem to turn it off. All I can do is wander further down the Intertube wormhole, […]
Posted inWotr
Hawk watching on the Mokelumne River
On a Friday evening in the middle of August there isn’t much traffic along Franklin Boulevard, an old agricultural road that now cuts through 20 miles of Sacramento, Calif., suburbs. We’re looking for birders along its half-mile length but don’t see anybody or even a parked car. When a farmer drives his pickup out of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Queen of the Old Timers
COLORADO: Gives “bare-back” riding a whole new meaning. Courtesy Cherie Morris NEW MEXICO Magdalena, a high-plateau town of about 1,000 people southwest of Albuquerque, N.M., once served as a center of mining for lead, zinc and silver in the 1880s, before it took on another role as a shipping center for cattle. The cowboying peak […]
Posted inGoat
The two-wheeled stimulus plan
On an overcast, unseasonably cool, late August morning, a roar, a cacophonous clatter of cowbells and a riot of horns and sirens rose up from the streets of downtown Durango, Colo., as the second annual USA Pro Cycling Challenge got its start. From there, the peleton — 126 riders, including some of the world’s best […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell on the U.S. as an Arctic nation
Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell isn’t what you’d expect of a man rising in the GOP’s ranks. He’s a conservationist who loves John McPhee and uses New Yorker cartoons about climate change in presentations about Arctic issues — and not mockingly. He’s also a staunch supporter of oil and gas development and a former pipeline […]
Posted inWotr
Just don’t call the condors wild
The success of the California condor captive breeding program is easily exaggerated. From the standpoint of the number of young birds that have been hatched — over 400 of them — there’s no question that it’s a stunning achievement. But beyond that, some observations are in order. In particular, it seems reasonable to question the […]
Posted inGoat
Everything you thought you knew about camping is wrong
If you’re a chick with a backcountry bent, you’ve probably heard more than once that packing off into the woods while it’s your time of the month is akin to chumming the water while swimming near great whites. Only with hungry bears. (Or maybe shark bears.) Indeed, bears have such super noses that we’ve all […]