The state legislative universe is famously sluggish. Moves toward significant change tend to ooze at the pace of cold honey while lawmakers waste time bickering over bills that everyone knows won’t go anywhere. CEQA — which was inspired by the National Environmental Policy Act and itself inspired similar laws in other states — requires state […]
Economy vs. environment?
Posted inGoat
Gay Interior Dept. employees share their experiences
When I was preparing to move to the Four Corners town of Cortez, Colo., to take a job as a newspaper reporter, I did some background research to learn more about my future home. I’m well connected with the gay and lesbian community, so one of the first stories I heard was the tragic tale […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
Helping Hummingbirds with Citizen Science
At 6:30 on a Wednesday morning, the early August sun creeps over a rocky ridge at Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. Dense stands of Gambel oak, Utah serviceberry and rabbitbrush spring up from the grassy meadows around Morefield Campground. Birdsong and the whir of hummingbird wings mingle with human whispers in the chilly […]
Posted inGoat
Friday News Roundup: Wolf hunts and Wyoming refinery woes
Idaho and Montana’s wolf hunting seasons kicked off without much of a howl last week. This is the second year of hunting; the 2009-2010, was held after the Rocky Mountain gray wolf’s removal from the endangered species list. Idaho and Montana have wolf hunting seasons that last four and 10 months, respectively — part of […]
Posted inRange
The other Sept. 11 tragedy
Long before 2001, Sept. 11 marked the anniversary of a date when Americans going about their business were killed in cold blood by religious zealots. It was the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 near Cedar City, Utah. Just about everything except the date and location remain subject to dispute. Mormons had been persecuted in […]
Posted inWotr
The monastery of pure landscape
Years ago, I overheard some German motorists talking in the visitor center in Moab: “Yah, zis is ze first time ve are traveling in pure landscape!” Because I’d been to Germany as a high school student, I knew what they meant — no manicured fields and forests, few fences, human settlements few and far between, […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
Tribes use land conservancies to reclaim ancestral grounds
Two Border Patrol agents race up on ATVs, rifles across their backs, and demand to know what Louie Guassac is doing, walking near the California-Mexico border. “We own this land,” replies Guassac, a sturdy Kumeyaay Indian with a long black braid. It’s something his tribe hasn’t been able to say about this patch of desert […]
Posted inGoat
Industry Pot Calls Enviro Kettle Black
Environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are notorious targets for media label makers that live to pigeonhole with prose. But if the USFWS is the enviros’ legal whipping boy, then the Environmental Protection Agency is industry’s. A report released this week from the Government Accountability Office — a […]
Posted inWotr
Save the land by saving the rancher
The behavior of Congress might seem unusually erratic, but one thing can be confidently predicted: The Interior Appropriations bill for 2012 will contain the largest cuts in conservation funding in 40 years. Look for lots of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in environmental circles. For many reasons, though, I see this as a godsend for […]
Posted inGoat
Hummer Syndrome
A few months ago, while scouring Wyoming’s Powder River Basin for evidence that the West had gone global, I drove my little rental car into Gillette, a once humble little burg that has ridden a coal mining and methane boom to become one of the state’s biggest cities. I saw my share of strip malls […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Child abuse or good old-fashioned fun?
WYOMING There’s sad news about Buford, Wyo., a blip of a place halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie that’s home to one Don Sammons. He serves as the town’s “everything” man since he is its only resident. But after 20 years of running Buford’s trading post, liquor store, hardware and grocery store and — what really […]
Posted inGoat
Let it smog
“Mush from the wimp.” That’s how Paul Krugman summed up President Obama’s recent decision not to set tougher ozone standards, which would have helped force places like gas fields and cities nationwide to de-smog. In HCN‘s editorial bullpen, we too were scratching our heads when we heard the news last Friday. EPA scientists have recommended […]
Posted inRange
Environmental privilege
By now most of us have heard of “environmental racism,” which involves actions like putting toxic facilities in minority neighborhoods. The opposite, “environmental privilege” is explored in a book due out this month, The Slums of Aspen, Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden by David Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, both professors of sociology […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
California tribe competes with the state to restore its homeland
Updated 9/22/11 Everywhere she looks in Humbug Valley, Beverly Benner Ogle sees the past: On the banks of Yellow Creek, her Maidu Indian ancestors still dance in spring celebration. In the tall timothy grass, her grandmother, a girl again, plays with the children of white settlers. On a grassy knoll near towering pines, her mother […]
Posted inRange
Mega myths of the Keystone XL pipeline
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Among hundreds of protestors who spent three days in jail in Washington D.C. for publicly opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700-mile-long conduit planned to carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, was Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org. When he was released from the […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West: Last Flight of the Insects
Dozens of dragonflies zoom through my vegetable garden this time of year. Like hunchbacked sprites, they perch on the hog wire holding up the ever-heavier tomato plants, waiting for an unsuspecting fly or a particularly attractive mate to zip by. In the shallows of mountain lakes and irrigation ponds, blue damselflies, wings folded behind (unlike […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
We’re listening
Thank you for digging a little deeper than breaking environmental news, and adding some social aspect that ties it all together. HCN has gotten better with age. Please do not be so negative. I would appreciate balanced articles with happy endings. If all news is sad, I’ll stop reading it. Keep up the bad news! […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
The aftermath of violence: A review of The Color of Night
The Color of Night Madison Smartt Bell 208 pages, softcover: $15.Vintage Contemporaries, 2011. Dangerous, charismatic leaders with zealous followers haunt Western history, with Jim Jones, the California cult leader responsible for the 1978 Guyana suicides, at the top of the list. In The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell’s 13th novel, the leader is clearly […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
Reality fiction: a review of What You See in the Dark
What You See in the Dark: A NovelManuel Muñoz272 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. It’s 1959, and the shiny façade of America’s white culture is beginning to tarnish. Schools are being desegregated and black people are starting to march in the streets of the South. There’s an “unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans” in California […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
A day among junk connoisseurs
San Juan County, N.M., is dry and scrubby, dotted with pump jacks, two coal-fired power plants and an oil refinery. Energy may be the area’s mainstay, but underlying this economy, is another informal one based on the selling and trading of old car parts. The county is a haven for junk cars – and for […]