I’m a fairly outspoken environmentalist, so what was I doing having dinner recently in Grand Junction, Colo., with retired executives from ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the world? Well, it was kind of a reunion, since Exxon and I go back to the early 1980s, a time when I was teaching fourth grade in […]
Black Sunday, 30 years later
Posted inRange
Disney’s Unlikely Heroine: The Huntress
For decades, Disney cartoons have reliably produced two stereotypes: brutish, cruel hunters and dizzy, passive princesses. But, holy daughters of Diana, times have changed. Maybe Disney’s anti-hunter bias is just the natural result of having a cast full of talking animals. But think about it: there’s Clayton, the evil hunter who nets Tarzan’s family of […]
Posted inArticles
Beyond the politics of no: Luther Propst and collaborative conservation
More than two decades ago, Luther Propst jumped away from a law career back East to found the Sonoran Institute in Tucson, Ariz. Since then, the nonprofit has helped dozens of Western communities — from Driggs, Idaho, to Rifle, Colo., to Tucson itself — grapple with growth while incorporating conservation goals into their plans for […]
Posted inGoat
Got rabies: skunks are top carrier in Colorado
Skunks get a bad rap. Of course, not every animal douses targets with rancid juice from their anal glands from 10 feet away, so perhaps it is deserved. In Colorado the striped mammals have recently earned a new form of notoriety that adds to their stinky status: They’ve jumped into the lead as the main […]
Posted inGoat
What’s up with conservation and the farm bill
On Thursday, the House Agriculture Committee released its version of the new farm bill, a ginormous piece of legislation passed every five years or so that doles out money not only to farmers, but to food stamp recipients, school lunch programs, and conservation efforts. The Senate passed its version in May. The House Ag Committee released […]
Posted inArticles
The West, in pictures
SAGE Magazine, a student-run environmental magazine at the Yale Forestry School, recently ran a photo essay of Western images submitted from students and people around the region. Here, we showcase a selection of these photos, which include beautiful wildlife photography and poignant illustrations of humans’ relationship to the natural world.
Posted inGoat
Critical habitat under scrutiny
Endangered leatherback sea turtles can thank the Endangered Species Act for the government’s decision to add a chunk of ocean on the West Coast to their protected habitat earlier this year. In January, the feds expanded the graceful sea dweller’s critical habit to 41,914 salty square miles off California, Oregon and Washington. The leatherback is […]
Posted inRange
Seeing the (overcrowded) forest for the trees
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I was wandering around Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) last week, absorbing the cooling sight of snowfields and the 30-degree temperature drop earned by more than doubling my elevation from Boulder. On my way along Trail Ridge Road, I stopped at the Farview Curve overlook on the west […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service faces a test in Arizona
Arizona’s flammable ponderosa pine forests stretch from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon above the Mogollon Rim to the White Mountains in the east. Most of that land — glory country for recreationists, as well as the watershed for the Grand Canyon, the Phoenix area and many nearby towns — lies within four national […]
Posted inArticles
On the prowl with Oregon’s pygmy owls
On his first Father’s Day as a parent, John Deshler is in Portland’s Forest Park. When I called several days ago, he was checking on a northern pygmy-owl nest site, carrying 5-month Henley with him. “My baby’s been good luck,” Deshler says. “I don’t bring her out here very often, but we did find a […]
Posted inGoat
Grand Cacophony National Park?
Peace and quiet can be hard to come by at the Grand Canyon. When I camped among the ponderosa pines just outside the park gates last summer, my nightly soundtrack was a chorus of Jeep-towing RVs, the baritone rumble of Harleys and Guns N’ Roses wafting from a nearby campsite. These sounds could be the […]
Posted inWotr
Watch out for those fake Canadians
I’ve spent much of my life roaming the wild backcountry of northern Montana on hunting, fishing and backpacking trips. Although I’ve had a few humbling encounters with grizzlies, lightning and avalanches, for the most part I’ve always felt reasonably safe and secure. I never ran into any suicide bombers or terrorists and never dreamed I […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Tracking Ice Age people in Oregon
Wind-whipped rainclouds formed a low ceiling over the oceanic buttes and basins of south-central Oregon. The usually sundrenched sage darkened in the weather as I walked, my hood pulled up against the grass-bending tug of the northwest breeze. The air smelled richer than it usually does on the dry side of the Cascades, the sagebrush […]
Posted inGoat
A revision to our energy future
Last week, environmentalists settled an agreement with federal agencies over a Bush-era energy management plan, and a U.S. District Court in San Francisco is set to sign off on the agreement. Plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, had sued federal agencies over a proposed energy pipeline and power network, part of the Energy Policy […]
Posted inWotr
“Tiananmen Sid” shakes up a small town
A version of this essay originally appeared on the science blog, the Last Word on Nothing. My rural western Colorado town of Paonia, population 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the USA. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence from the federal government. We’re gossipy and private, inclusive […]
Posted inGoat
New podcast: Sun Tunnels, hitchhiking, the modern hobo
As loyal HCN readers know by now, we recently published our first-ever special travel issue, taking you to Montana’s lonely, overlooked but still spectacular eastern plains, time-traveling with Craig Childs in south-central Oregon, and to dams, nuclear test sites, renewable energy installations, and oil-themed cafes. The podcast is full of great ear candy: Journalist Scott Carrier […]
Posted inGoat
Getting serious about fresh water with Jay Famiglietti
Editor’s note: High Country News will occasionally cross post items from Chance of Rain, a blog by Emily Green, who writes frequently on water in California and the West. Her latest story for High Country News covered Los Angeles County Flood Control District’s bulldozing of old-growth oak forests. Unfortunately, Jay Famiglietti isn’t running for office, unfortunate because […]
Posted inArticles
Afield with a vegan gas man
“I probably don’t look like a typical oil and gas guy,” says Eric Sanford. Wearing clogs — his “driving shoes” — and a wide cloth belt that looks right out of the 1980s, he sure doesn’t. Sanford, 39, who jokingly describes himself as the “vegan son of Nebraska farmers,” grew up in a town of […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Three days in the Four Corners
The Four Corners country — the point where sage plains, mesas and desert canyons radiate out from the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah — is a land of friction. The cultures of the Ute, Apache and Navajo tribes rub up against the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. The ancient rudely bumps into the […]
Posted inWotr
Rural communities still have to fight off extremists
The fiery rhetoric that periodically consumes rural communities in the West is smoldering again. Some environmentalists berate those of us who try to collaborate to solve contentious public-lands issues; meanwhile, conspiracy theorists spread scary stories about the U.N. subverting our government through its “Agenda 21.” The discord has emerged in several communities dependant on natural […]