For those of you who had hoped that the Obama administration would oversee the boldest conservation initiatives this country has seen since the days of Richard Milhous Nixon (who signed many of our country’s most important environmental laws), you can now cease hoping. The Great Recession, combined with a resurgent right wing that has exploited […]
Environmentalists may have to take what they can get
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Did the Park Service bow to pressure from Coca Cola on its bottle ban?
It was an ambitious plan: Ban the sale of individual plastic water bottles in the Grand Canyon to cut waste in the nation’s second-most visited national park. But in December 2010, just two weeks before the prohibition was to take effect, National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis postponed it indefinitely, citing impacts to concessionaires and […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
California chronicles: A review of New California Writing: 2011
New California Writing: 2011Gayle Wattawa, ed. 320 pages, softcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. Most anthologies possess a ready-made but sometimes narrow audience. Readers come to these single-subject, multi-authored books with an already established connection and desire to know more. What, then, does a book focused on California offer to those who live outside the Golden State? Plenty, […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Bearly hanging on in the North Cascades
The following two comments were posted at hcn.org in response to Nathan Rice’s feature story, “The Forgotten Grizzlies” (HCN, 11/14/11). “The forgotten grizzlies” seems to suggest two things: (1) More research would somehow improve the chance for the grizzly bear to come in to the North Cascades. (2) More money would somehow allow the introduction […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Inside the world of whitebarks
The climbers Whitebark pinecone-pickers are working in at least 19 national forests, three national parks and some wildlife refuges, as well as some Canadian forests, in the hope that the seeds they obtain can be used to grow whitebark pines that are resistant to white pine blister rust — and perhaps, if the research progresses […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
A ‘ragtag team’ of scientists, rangers and citizens works to save whitebarks
Our management of whitebark pine has a melancholy history, shaped by ignorance and mistakes as well as by the determination to rescue a species we have sent into a downward spiral. Foresters accidentally introduced white pine blister rust, an Asian fungous disease, to North America around 1900, by importing infected pine seedlings for tree plantations. […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
A celebration of Cascadia: A review of Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest
Open Spaces: Voices from the NorthwestPenny Harrison, ed. 252 pages, softcover: $22.50.University of Washington Press, 2011. I read Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest over two weeks, setting it down still open so that its pages made a neat tent on my coffee table, returning to it over morning coffee, between garden chores, after dinner […]
Posted inArticles
Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time
In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process. The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to […]
Posted inGoat
Friday News Roundup: Nuclear uncertainty
The American nuclear industry had some serious shade thrown its way in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster. Almost a year later, U.S. nuclear still can’t seem to catch a break. On Wednesday, Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, announced that the agency will likely face delays in renewing […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
When a bear drives a Prius
CALIFORNIA A black bear in Lake Tahoe broke into a Toyota Prius parked at a cabin and then “went into a rampage” when he realized he was trapped inside it, reports the Contra Costa Times. The animal kicked, bit and tore at the seats and the steering wheel, and finally managed to shift the car […]
Posted inGoat
Renting a riverbed
A land ownership case is in deep water, bringing property rights, public domain and commerce into question. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in PPL Montana vs. Montana yesterday, in a fight over who owns title to riverbeds in the state. In 2010, the Montana Supreme Court ruled the state held title to land beneath […]
Posted inWotr
The Forest Service discriminates against poor kids
The summer before last, I took a four-day hike through the backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in the Washington Cascades. I’m accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when, after miles of travel off the trail, I heard the voices of teenagers wafting toward me. I met the intrepid boys […]
Posted inGoat
The bright side of the Berkeley Pit
Updated Jan. 5, 2012 It is a dead place. Stitched with skeletal plants and sentinel tree trunks, riven by rills of cloudy, unspeakably polluted water, laid bare against a paste sky. There is no sense of space or time here; only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. […]
Posted inRange
Two Ronalds: Ron Paul and Ronald McDonald
In 1988, in the waning days of the Reagan Administration, I was a cub reporter in Boise, Idaho. I covered what the photo editor called in jest the “Ronald McDonald beat.” If Ronald McDonald made a public appearance, the editor slapped my skinny shoulders and said, “Go get ‘em, Scoop.” He rattled off the talking […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Hersh Saunders’ transformation from prosthodontist to kosher slaughterer
In a barn on his 400-acre ranch south of Pueblo, Colo., Hersh Saunders sharpens a long blunt-end knife called a halaf. A blue crocheted kippah, a Jewish skullcap, covers the bearded rabbi’s silver hair. Outside the barn, sheep graze and chickens peck near a small synagogue and rows of organic vegetables. Saunders has spent the […]
Posted inGoat
The Estonian connection: Or how I started worrying about oil shale
The last big oil shale* boom in the West busted on “Black Sunday” 1982. I was 11 years old, then, living in Western Colorado, and I can still remember my dad explaining the boom, the bust and the process necessary to get the “oil” out of the shale. Here’s a primer: Underground room and pillar […]
Posted inWotr
Home on the range
This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home usually include the traditional trappings of board games, gravy boats and hungry dogs making cute under the table, followed by food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when […]
Posted inRange
President Obama says Indian Country is at a turning point
Politicians are required to be optimistic. It’s the first tool in their bag. And a president of the United States is even more optimistic than most politicians. It’s what we expect from our leader. President Barack Obama beamed that message at the White House Tribal Nations conference last week. He told tribal leaders: “We’ve got […]
Posted inGoat
The age of disturbance
When my East Coast-based family rented a condo in Breckenridge, Colo. for our family vacation in June this year, my dad couldn’t stop exclaiming over the dead trees. Scores of lodgepole pines, killed by the bark beetle epidemic, lined pretty much every road we drove down or bike path we pedaled on. A recent report […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
A citizen activist forces New Mexico’s dairies to clean up their act
Jerry Nivens lives in a trailer in Caballo, N.M., 165 miles south of Albuquerque. A bulky Texas transplant who chain-smokes American Spirits, Nivens cares as deeply for his mesquite-speckled patch of ground as any rural New Mexican. He enjoys driving into the mountains, where he used to while away afternoons panning for gold. He goes […]