At last it’s December, a month when central and Southern Arizonans can finally turn off the air conditioning for good and revel in the glorious, 70 degree weather. Our beautiful desert beckons, and we respond in droves. Just in time, in keeping with this season of renewal and hope, there is good news to be […]
Cheers to land trusts
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: speeding renewable projects on tribal lands
Recent efforts to speed the process of approving surface leases on tribal lands have moved slower than a Mojave Desert tortoise. But regulations proposed by the Interior Department Monday could help tribes more quickly gain Bureau of Indian Affairs approval for renewable energy, residential, or business leases on some of the 56 million acres of […]
Posted inWotr
The end is near — the end of 2011
To claim that the ancient Mayan culture of Mexico and Central America developed a nuanced conception of time is like saying the modern stock market is a complicated financial instrument. The Mayan calendars cover a multi-faceted collection of linear and cyclical measurements that go back almost 3,000 years as well as forward in time — […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Can an old mine become a work of art?
As I wander past a scrawled “NO TRESSPASSING: SHOTGUN ENFORCED” sign, I can’t help but recoil and glance around. I am, after all, on private property, and instinct is instinct. My safety at this particular mining site, however, is assured: I’m with a bunch of internationally acclaimed artists and a slew of locals. Even the […]
Posted inGoat
Travel planning theatrics
Currently, Koch’s ranch is split by a slim Bureau of Land Management parcel. That parcel contains a public access road into the Gunnison National Forest. In return for eliminating this forest access, and gaining a few other parcels in the same area (totaling about 1800 acres), Koch is offering the federal government a pair of […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
“Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl”
THE NATION “Wear a condom now, save the spotted owl,” reads one of the labels on a condom distributed by the Center for Biological Diversity, the feisty and litigious conservation nonprofit that has offices throughout the West. While other environmental groups dodge the sticky issue of over-population, the center — run by Kierán Suckling — […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West: Adobe sunrise
On a cold morning two days after Thanksgiving, I drove up into the ‘dobes north of Delta, Colorado. Here is what I saw: Shards of glass, clay skeet and shotgun shells imbedded in the cracked soil, the site where the locals hold thousands of shoot-outs in the apparent wasteland. As the first sun of the […]
Posted inWotr
A ski town contributes mightily to paleontology
One morning last July, as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper looked on, scientists supervised the hoisting of a 10,000-pound cast of a Columbia mammoth skeleton — rocks included — onto a flatbed truck for shipment to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. After 60 days of intense digging, the scientists and scores of volunteers attracted […]
Posted inRange
Helping prepare the West for harder, drier times
They don’t call it the Wild West for nothing. From crippling droughts to raging fires, the region is no stranger to natural disasters. But will it be able to weather the storm ahead? And natural disasters aren’t the only way climate change is leaving its mark in the West. Rising temperatures are allowing pests like the […]
Posted inGoat
Don’t drink the (benzene) water
In 2005, Louis Meeks’ water well in Pavillion, Wyo., which had reliably supplied his family for decades, suddenly turned brown and filmy, and smelled like gasoline. When he tried to drill a new domestic well, water, steam and natural gas exploded some 200 feet into the air. Meeks and some of his neighbors, whose well water […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The Southwest’s population and housing booms bite the dust
If you want to see the dried-up husk of the New West’s latest incarnation, just go to Maricopa, Ariz., and visit one of the half-built suburbs on its fringe. You’ll see earth scraped bare and a tumbleweed or two, and even a few ghosts: The phantoms of streets mapped but never built, lots subdivided but […]
Posted inGoat
Making memories, one stock tank at a time
This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home are plenty stuffed with the traditional trappings: board games, gravy boats, hungry pups making cute under the table, food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when I’m home […]
Posted inRange
Success stories fail to materialize in Indian country
Last December hundreds of American Indian and Alaska Native leaders traveled to Washington, D.C. for the second White House Tribal Nations Conference. I wrote at the time: “When President Obama reached the podium at the Interior Department last week nearly every person in a seat lifted a cell phone to take a picture. Row after […]
Posted inWotr
A frantic lion meets the border wall
I recently moved from Sasabe, Ariz., a tiny town located next to the border wall dividing the United States from Mexico. The wall was built of bars 15 feet tall and looked like a long prison cell. It ran four miles east until it hit an arroyo on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and […]
Posted inGoat
Mining claim markers kill thousands of Nevada birds
From the unintended consequences department comes a sad tale of dying birds in Nevada mining country. Across the Silver State, hundreds of thousands of plastic pipes used to mark mining claims kill untold thousands of birds, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Birds fly into the pipes looking for a place to nest and, unable […]
Posted inRange
Another try for wilderness
Browns Canyon in central Colorado is again getting promoted for wilderness designation. It was one of 18 areas in nine Western states identified in a recent report by the federal Bureau of Land Management with “significant local support for Congressional protection.” The area sits six miles south of Buena Vista, and even if it’s called […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western Watersheds’ collateral damage
You presented Laird Lucas as a dedicated and talented environmental lawyer fighting big corporations and corrupt government (HCN, 10/31/11, “The people v. the agency”). That makes his close association with Western Watersheds Project (WWP) puzzling. For 10 years, I have volunteered to represent environmental ethics on a cooperative management team for a family-owned and -operated […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Western game wardens go after poachers
A thick autumn snowfall still carpeted the ground when Colorado district wildlife manager Tom Knowles got the tip that put him on the trail of the “Missouri boys.” The informant, a hunter named Michael Xavier, said that three men who had licenses only for cow elk had killed at least one bull elk in Rio […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The burial of Elouise Cobell
Elouise Cobell filed her class action suit in 1996 and originally thought it would take only three years to resolve the issues. She joined Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder in making the settlement announcement. Tami A. Heilemann-DOI On Oct. 22, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blacktail Ranch where she and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Parsing ‘Pristine’
The thing that bothered me most about Emma Marris’ essay was the suggestion toward the end that we should “look to the future and create more nature instead of clinging to disappearing scraps of seemingly untouched land” (HCN, 10/6/2011, “The mirage of the pristine”). How exactly does she propose that we go about creating nature? […]