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 […]
Military’s fly-by-night scheme raises lots of questions
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, […]
Posted inRange
Occupation in the boondocks
It started with “Occupy Wall Street” on Sept. 17, and the movement has since spread to more than 1,000 cities in 82 countries. So it didn’t come as a major suprise that my town was home to an “Occupy Salida” protest early in the afternoon of Oct. 29. About 50 people showed up at the […]
Posted inGoat
Solar energy on public lands: The 80,000 have spoken
If the bumpy mountains that rise up between the California desert city of Twentynine Palms and the western flood plain of the Colorado River don’t look like anything else on this earth, it’s because they aren’t: The living things that flourish here can’t get a toehold anywhere else; once they’re gone from here, they’re gone […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Western voters love ballot initiatives — and sometimes make a mess
When Colorado voters go to the polls in November, they’ll consider Proposition 103, a ballot initiative that would raise taxes to help fund public education. It’s an attempt to fix some of the huge problems created by previous ballot measures that strangled education funding. It’s also a messy habit: For decades, Colorado voters have repeatedly […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Western scientists study the past to predict the future
High in the White Mountains of eastern California, far above the deserts of the Great Basin, stands the Methuselah Grove, a group of gnarly, thick-bellied bristlecone pines sculpted and polished by centuries of blowing snow. All of the trees are ancient, and one of them — the Forest Service won’t say which — is more […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Wanted: a few good board members
Wanted: A few good board membersThe High Country News Board of Directors and several staff members met in late September in Reno, Nev. They approved a new budget and discussed everything from HCN‘s editorial coverage and the new technologies shaping the media industry to the composition of the board itself; currently, it has 10 members […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
To die fighting: a review of Jesse’s Ghost: A Novel
Jesse’s Ghost: A NovelFrank Bergon224 pages, hardcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. “The story of how I came to kill my best friend keeps pressing on my brain like a bad dream so I can feel it, but I can’t remember it whole.” So begins Jesse’s Ghost, the account of a man’s attempt to understand a murder he […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Mapping the Hi-Line: A review of Honyocker Dreams
Honyocker Dreams: Montana MemoriesDavid Mogen227 pages, hardcover: $21.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Colorado writer David Mogen grew up along Montana’s Hi-Line, just below the Canadian border and east of the Rockies, as his father moved the family from one small town to the next. Honyocker Dreams begins with Mogen’s return to the Hi-Line many years […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Development near national parks impacts park ecology
Though many Western national parks are buffered by other public lands, housing development on their outskirts has been on the rise. Between the 1940s and 2000, the number of homes within 30 miles of national parks grew from 1.5 million to 6.6 million, according to a study which appeared in the Proceedings of the National […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Uranium — To mine or not to mine?
Though not as movie villain-worthy as its cousin plutonium, uranium, the naturally occurring element used to make nuclear weapons and fuel nuke plants, is just as contentious, as illustrated in this week’s headlines. On Wednesday, the Obama administration released a plan for a 20-year ban on uranium mining within a million acres of public land […]