It’s always seemed like a good idea to have chickens, especially if you live in a rural area. They turn compost into eggs. In the fall, they fill the freezer full of healthy meat at a reasonable price. They provide feathers for my dad’s fly-tying and my daughter’s hair. They eat the grasshoppers and fertilize […]
When the bear comes too close to home
Posted inWotr
Pulling an Everett Ruess
After six months without a job, I wonder how I will support myself. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, mummified inside a contorted blanket, my dog hunched over my right hip in the posture of a turkey vulture. In the dark it’s hard to tell if he’s watching over me or […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping the West … in air polluters
If you happen to glance over the fantastic air pollution investigation jointly released by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity this week (along with a handful of other cooperating media outlets that did regional stories), you might think to yourself: “Thank (insert deity here) I don’t live in the Midwest, East or […]
Posted inGoat
High-speed rail has high costs, but so do other options
When the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its revised business plan last week, headlines in the state and nation screamed gleefully about the project’s ballooning costs. “More grim news on $99 billion high-speed rail plan, as showdown looms,” lowed the Mercury News. “High-speed rail costs balloon to nearly $100B,” reveled the gotcha-happy investigative outfit California […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Utah’s ancient Lake Bonneville holds clues to the West’s changing climate
A curious horizontal line runs across the range — a notch cut into the mountains like a railroad bed, visible from many miles away. It snakes around every gully and ridge, 600 feet above the playa where the Donners hauled their wagons. Floating Island Mountain, visible to the east above a perpetual mirage, also shows […]
Posted inRange
In the rush for uranium, cooler heads prevail — for now
Updated 11/7/2011 By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Greens got what seemed like a rare bit of good news when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) last week released their Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Northern Arizona Proposed Withdrawal. The report looks at the potential impacts of removing federal lands near the Grand Canyon […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: ESA sees another day
The U.S. Supreme Court just waived its chance to rule on a constitutional challenge to the Endangered Species Act, the sixth time it’s refused to hear cases that might limit the bedrock law. The fish, endemic to the state, is two to three inches in length and resides in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta’s […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
BLM experiments with camouflage to hide renewable power structures
On a late summer day, Bureau of Land Management visual resource specialist Sherry Roche lugged a 50-pound plywood panel from a white pickup onto the bare hillside of Hubbard Mesa near Rifle, Colo. Others lashed it to the ground with climbing rope, then stepped back to see if its specially engineered pattern of pixels faded […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Guns, wolves, and graves
ARIZONA Raffle prizes run the gamut, but in Tucson recently, one particular offering seemed oddly off-kilter, to say the least. To raise money for the Pima County Republicans, party members aimed to sell 125 raffle tickets for $10 each, with the lucky winner receiving a Glock pistol — “the same brand of gun used in […]
Posted inGoat
Bugs in the plan
Despite the opposition of myriad conservation organizations, lawmakers, activists, and celebrities like Darryl Hannah, the Keystone XL pipeline has seemed well on its way to federal approval. Where star power has failed, however, an inch-long, carrion-dependent beetle might succeed. TransCanada conducted surveys on the beetle in 2009 and 2010, but they also trapped and moved […]
Posted inWotr
Military’s fly-by-night scheme raises lots of questions
Imagine how it would feel: You’re asleep in bed at midnight, when suddenly, the roar of a fighter plane flying just a few hundred feet above your head wakes you up with a bang. But not to worry, the plane is one of ours. Our military’s pilots simply need to practice their skill at flying […]
Posted inRange
At Drake’s Bay, real heroes have long term vision
Politicians rarely think beyond the next election and corporate leaders beyond the quarterly report – but National Park rangers make America stronger when they think about generations to come. A case in point is playing out today on the coast of California at Pt. Reyes National Seashore, a modern twist on an old story. That […]
Posted inGoat
A fatal fungus, revealed
The death toll continues to mount in Eastern caves: Since the winter of 2007, when bat behavior turned erratic in upstate New York and state wildlife officials discovered thousands of bats dead in a cave near Albany, their noses smudged with a curious white substance, a million more have succumbed to a disease called white […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lawyer Laird Lucas on how and why he fights for the West
Laird Lucas, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Advocates for the West, entered an Idaho courtroom last spring to examine a witness. As he prepared to take over from a junior colleague, the judge adjourned for the day. “You mean I had to put on a suit for nothing?” Lucas griped. In his Boise […]
Posted inArticles
Presidential candidates are missing the Western issues
What if the Western Republican Leadership Conference sponsored a debate in the West for Republican presidential candidates, with audience members all from the West, and they never got around to talking about Western issues? That’s pretty much what happened on Oct. 18 in Las Vegas in a contenders’ debate co-sponsored by CNN, which also broadcast […]
Posted inRange
Nibbled to death by neighbors: the future of public lands?
Editor’s note: Sharon Friedman blogs on forest policy at “A New Century of Forest Planning” and will be posting occasionally on the Range blog. Some of the “public lands issues” that you usually don’t hear much about in the press are what we call “lands” issues. These have to do with infringements on public land […]
Posted inGoat
Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
Posted inRange
Locavorism seems harder in the desert West
It’s been a few years now since I read Barbara Kingsolver’s popular book Animal Vegetable Miracle, which chronicles her family’s yearlong experiment with locavorism (spouse Steven Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver contributed sidebars and are listed as co-authors). I’ve been thinking about it again recently, though. While not the first or the last to discuss […]
Posted inGoat
Coal consolidation
A just-announced federal plan to merge the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement into the much-larger Bureau of Land Management is drawing mixed reactions. Some environmental groups wonder if changing the agency’s bureaucratic home will end its long-running coziness with industry. Yet critics of the proposal view it as one more attempt from the […]
Posted inGoat
Boulder’s energy future on the ballot
Glossy propaganda has been piling up in my mailbox for months in the lead up to Election Day in Boulder, Colo. Next to a frowney-faced electrical outlet, an ad warns of rate hikes and other terrors: “Municipalization means serious risks to rates and our community’s energy goals.” The slick, full-color fliers come from the Boulder Smart Energy Coalition, […]