Across the West, proposed high-stakes projects to tap new water supplies are generating well-deserved controversy. It’s well-deserved because these projects ignore cheaper alternatives that make a lot more sense in the long term. The building proposals also share extremely large price tags that place uncertain but likely onerous levels of financial burden on present and […]
Conserving water makes more sense than moving it around
Posted inGoat
The burning begins
It’s the beginning of April, and fire season in the West has started early, thanks to a warm, dry winter. The Lower North Fork fire south of Denver, Colo. is now about 90 percent contained; so far it’s burned more than 4,000 acres and killed three residents. The state’s Front Range is suffering through one […]
Posted inGoat
Snakes on a plain
Ever heard of The Orianne Society? I hadn’t either until I stumbled across their website recently while searching for “rattlesnakes” and “oil and gas development”. Founded in 2008, The Orianne Society is a relative newcomer to the wildlife conservation scene. Its mission: to conserve the world’s rare and imperiled reptiles and amphibians.
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: The leprechaun trap
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Rants from the Hill is now a podcast too! Check out our first episode, an audio performance of this essay, here. Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or through Feedburner for use in another podcast […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Dwindling elk herds and the end of new coal plants?
With beautiful, unseasonably warm weather this week, the West’s normally hungry news watchers had trouble keeping our eyes on the computer screens and away from the fruit trees blooming outside. Rallying our strengths, we found birds and elk did not fare well in Western news this week. Our cheer at the climate-conscious news coming from Environmental Protection […]
Posted inWotr
How to heat-proof your garden
Across the Midwest, New England and Canada, high-temperature records are being broken by the thousands — 3,350 of them between March 12-18 alone. Meteorologists are scrambling to find anything comparable to weather that has been described as “summer in March.” Two days before the official end of winter, temperatures of 94 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Traveling Arizona Highways, in your dreams and on the ground
Even as a kid, I recognized an obsession when I saw one. My father’s began late in the Eisenhower years when he got his first subscription to Arizona Highways. A rural route mailman in northern Illinois, he used to rise at 4 a.m. and be home by 1 p.m. As soon as each month’s issue […]
Posted inArticles
Rantcast: The leprechaun trap
In April’s Rantcast, also available in written form at our community blog, the Range, Mike mistakenly thinks a garden gnome is a good Mother’s Day gift, and then creates an elaborate leprechaun trap with his two daughters. If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy West of 100, our mid-month podcast covering nature and […]
Posted inGoat
Exchanging for public good
A 20-acre parcel of Forest Service land has been managed with special use permits at the base of Mammoth Mountain since 1954. It’s more a forest of development than a forest of conifers and aspen. There are two ski lifts, a snowmobile and snowcat rental service, parking lots, the Mammoth Mountain Inn and a hokey […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Montana’s hard core school bus drivers
COLORADOThe city of Grand Junction, in western Colorado, just loves controversy, or so you would think from reading the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. First, there was the flap over a high school student who refused to sing an Urdu song because its lyrics translated into an Islamic hymn; then there were the members of the […]
Posted inWotr
Fracking is the big new gun
New technologies are riderless horses. They have a mind of their own and go where they want. Someone invents the personal computer, and 40 years later you spend hours each day surfing the Internet. Travel agents disappear, software engineers are born. Outside Las Vegas, soldiers sit in darkened rooms piloting drones with joysticks, raining hellfire […]
Posted inArticles
The sound of silence
There are few places left in the world where you can experience the sounds of nature uninterrupted by planes, cars, off-road vehicles. Scientists are now working to quantify the impact of all that noise on the natural world, and to monitor how soundscapes — the collection of sounds in a landscape made by critters, wind, […]
Posted inRange
Should a Washington utility prop up a polluting Montana power plant?
By Jennifer Langston, Sightline.org Attention Puget Sound Energy customers: Don’t feel bad if you missed the connection between your electricity bills and today’s headlines about reducing air pollution in scenic Montana. It’s not obvious. But news that the federal government wants owners of the Colstrip coal plant to invest in expensive new equipment to reduce […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
Loggers give unique Oregon ponderosa pine a lifeline
On a gray February afternoon, rain falls in huge drops on Chuck Volz’s 65-acre property near Springfield, Ore. It drips from the brim of his faded camouflage baseball cap and rolls off his tan jacket as he walks down a muddy path crisscrossed by deer hoofprints. He stops at a young ponderosa pine and frowns: […]
Posted inGoat
Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
Posted inGoat
Is that MRSA in your porkchop?
I’ve not written much about antibiotic use (or overuse) in livestock facilities. It always seemed like one of those perennial important-yet-not-going-anywhere topics where a group of concerned scientists write research-based, impassioned letters to the federal Food and Drug Administration listing all the potential consequences, but the agency never takes action. Which is not to say […]
Posted inRange
Being “green” doesn’t make you a radical
I’m far from the first to notice the increasing popularity of the phrase “radical environmentalist” and its close cousin “environmental extremist” in political discourse lately, but I’m getting darn sick of it. Rick Santorum’s “phony theology” dust-up in February was a prominent national example; as I’m sure you remember, he accused President Obama of adhering to […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2012: Water Warrior
A Colorado newspaperman fights for his valley’s water
Updated 3/20/12 Out east of Pueblo, Colo., where juniper, sage and bitterbrush melt into the wide-open shortgrass prairie, towns with names like Manzanola, Ordway, Rocky Ford, Swink and La Junta dot the Lower Arkansas River Valley. These were the kinds of agricultural settlements celebrated by William Ellison Smythe, an early-20th-century champion of filling the West […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: field changes, from football to strawberries
For avid news hounds, this week saw some shake-ups, showing us that we can be ever surprised. Let’s start with the important stuff. TEBOW TRADED FROM THE DENVER BRONCOS! The West will lose Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow, whose “polarizing skill set” brought us some of the most memorable football moments of 2011. Thus, Tebowmania heads eastward, […]