By Clark Williams Derry, Sightline.org While I was looking for some other information, I ran across the most recent coal consumption stats from the US Energy Information Administration. And from all indications it’s been a very strange, very bad year for the Transalta coal-fired power plant in Centralia, WA. Take a look: The bars represent consumption […]
Why Washington’s only coal-fired power plant is having a bad year
Posted inWotr
Great hope, great fear
Last month, three little girls, ages 8, 5 and 2, and their mother, were killed in a Wyoming flash flood that washed away their van. It was the kind of torrential downpour climatologists predict will increase as the planet warms. Their father survived. He alone can speak of the horror of trying to save his […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bear-fighting poodles and Muslim dust storms
WASHINGTON Size mattered not a whit during a backyard encounter in the town of Kirkland, in northwest Washington, that pitted a “yapping teacup poodle” against a 200-pound black bear, reports The Week magazine. The tiny dog acted so ferocious that the bear climbed a tree, leaped into an adjoining yard and hightailed it back to […]
Posted inRange
Some places are as good as gold
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House “Wilderness, wilderness . . . We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.” Ah, nothing like a little […]
Posted inGoat
A shift in the gas debate?
When, at the direction of President Obama, the Department of Energy appointed a panel to come up with recommendations to improve the safety of natural gas development, environmentalists didn’t expect much. Watchdog groups worried the panel was weighted to favor industry. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group called for its chair, John Deutch, to step down […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Invasion of the feral pigs
Feral pigs are invading New Mexico and other Western states, but biologists are working hard to stop them.
Posted inRange
How federal budget cuts may hurt Indian Country
So far, most of the government”s austerity movement has been theoretical. We know the federal budget is shrinking, but the evidence of that has been slow to surface. Proposals to wipe out the Bureau of Indian Affairs (and replace it with what?) remain little more than spin. Kentucky Sen. Paul Rand’s bill, for example, has […]
Posted inGoat
Making room for flycatchers
The endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher may get an additional 1,300 river miles of critical habitat set aside for it in 6 Western states, according to a new proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The six-inch-long, olive and yellow bird nests in the dense vegetation along Southwestern waterways. In 2005, the agency set aside […]
Posted inGoat
Wilderness for ANWR?
After decades of wrangling over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a draft federal plan for the first time includes a “preliminary recommendation” to protect the disputed Arctic coastal plain as a designated wilderness area. Home to expansive caribou herds, musk ox, polar bears and grizzlies, the coastal plain holds an estimated 4 […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
The Taj Mahal, the pyramids – and HCN?
Sam Fox crossed visiting HCN off his personal “bucket list” when he came by our Paonia, Colo., office with Erin Drake. Sam pitched some cool story ideas and noted his successful track record — over the past decade he’s suggested other ideas that we’ve used for stories. The Fort Collins, Colo., duo chatted with Executive […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Relying on Navajo guides
Twenty-some years ago, I joined a gaggle of other semi-adventurous tourists in Canyon de Chelly National Monument on the Navajo Reservation. We climbed onto the open bed of a big “deuce and a half” — an old Army surplus two-and-a-half-ton truck — and took rudimentary seats. The driver shifted into gear, and six tires (on […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Idaho: The CAFO state?
In 2008, California voters granted egg-laying hens the right to enough space to lie down, stand up, and stretch their wings. Egg farmers warned that the measure would increase costs, forcing them to leave the state to compete. And Idaho hastened to woo the would-be émigrés. “(Poultry is) a really great industry to have around,” […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Down and out in the West
With all this talk of a possible double-dip recession, it’s disheartening to note that Western unemployment rates are still sky-high from the last economic crisis. Nevada leads the country for the 14th straight month, due to its almost complete reliance on the still-pretty-dilapidated housing, gaming and tourism industries.“Construction was a larger share of our economy […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
A life in the wild
Wolfer: A MemoirCarter Niemeyer374 pages, softcover: $17.99.BottleFly Press, 2010. Former federal trapper and shooter Carter Niemeyer, the author of the memoir Wolfer, seems an unlikely advocate for wolves and other predators. A “wolfer,” after all, is a person who kills wolves, a job with its genesis in the great wildlife extermination campaigns that are as […]
Posted inWotr
A new chance for Snake River salmon
With his Aug. 2 ruling that the federal government’s plan for salmon recovery once again fails to meet requirements of the law, U.S. District Court Judge James Redden has opened the door to a hopeful approach in efforts for recovery of wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. A better plan can be at […]
Posted inRange
In megaloads battle, has David slain Goliath again?
By Nick Gier, NewWest.net Is there not a cause? Let no man’s heart fail him. —David facing Goliath (Samuel 1:17) Right in the midst of their battle against ExxonMobil, residents along Idaho’s Highway 12 received an email from an unlikely but eminently appropriate source. An Israeli activist fighting gas exploration in the Elah Valley found […]
Posted inWotr
Hats off for a grand American senator, Mark O. Hatfield, 1922-2011
Some people called former Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, who died Aug. 7 at age 89, “Saint Mark,” for his outspoken Christian faith and his teetotaling habit. Mark O. Hatfield was a man of integrity, but a saint he wasn’t — and thank goodness for that. He was the kind of leader many of us wish […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Adventuring on Colorado’s big peaks
I rank them by altitude and tackle them one set at a time: the 200 highest, then the tricentennials. I’m told I was the first woman to climb Colorado’s 100 highest peaks; mathematical precision makes the task seem manageable. There are 638 mountains in the Colorado Rockies over 13,000 feet high. I’d climb them all, […]
Posted inGoat
EPA gets poor grade on keeping drinking water clean
The Environmental Protection Agency was recently reprimanded for its regulation of drinking water and the selection process it uses to select candidates for contaminant regulation. On the bright side, the agency is trying to ensure rural water systems pass muster. The Government Accountability Office just gave EPA officials a scolding for their inabilityto assess which […]