Richard Pak pilots an old green Land Rover along the gravel roads of Barrow, Alaska, as he does most every day. It’s June, but the air is raw and the sky is the color of impending snow, like ash poured into milk. He indicates a spot where a polar bear recently wandered up from the […]
Barrow, Alaska: an unlikely boomtown
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
In praise of prose
“The Global West” was well researched and beautifully written (HCN, 7/25/11). I hope the Atlantic and New Yorker crowd took notice, as the last three paragraphs of Thompson’s article could easily have qualified for their precious space. Also, thanks to the researchers who pulled together the astonishing inventory of extra-national participants in the exploitation of […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Give us your bears and your energy
Chinese demand is also bad news for wildlife (HCN, 7/25/11). In Africa, thousands of Chinese are building railroads, highways and other projects while illegally exporting ivory. Elephants are being butchered in the thousands to meet this demand. In Russia, the Chinese will pay $50,000 for one dead, rare Siberian tiger. Apparently, they value tiger parts […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Cleaner, shmeaner
First, I commend HCN on the excellent article, “The Global West,” which skillfully presents how energy markets are affecting resource extraction in the West (HCN, 7/25/11). I’m going to get as many of my friends and family members to read it as I can. That said, it drove me nuts to read this in one […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
A plunderer is a plunderer
Kudos to Jonathan Thompson for bringing attention to the growing plunder of Western resources by multinational corporations (HCN, 7/25/11). Not only are rare minerals being extracted at a record rate, more importantly, irreplaceable wilderness areas are being devastated in the process. And what about those American corporations that shamelessly violate and destroy our precious public […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
A bad bargain
Your article “Fumigant fight” points out that, “without an effective replacement (for methyl bromide), growers could face lower yields, costing an estimated $100 million per year” (HCN, 7/25/11). However, the purchase and application of methyl iodide is not free. Farmers are interested in net profitability, not merely revenues. Perhaps, the real negative impact on pre-tax […]
Posted inAugust 22, 2011: Looking for Balance in Navajoland
Not dead yet
“The timber industry, battered by environmental regulations and unfavorable economics, was wheezing a death rattle: In the two decades after the hippies arrived, logging in the county declined by 60 percent.” This is a bit of a pet peeve, I admit, but the timber industry in Humboldt county is not “dead.” It still contributes around […]
Posted inRange
Religious Intolerance Plays Role in Presidential Politics
Judge a person by his character, not his race, color or creed. It seems Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — could use a booster shot on this topic, at least when it comes to the issue of Mormons, or members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Two men with LDS roots, Mitt Romney […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Ground truthing the “Peaceable Kingdom”
Last night I lay awake in bed listening to the sound of little claws scrabbling inside the walls of our house. Because the sheetrock acts as a drumhead, amplifying sounds within the wall, the scratching is disturbingly loud. It sounds as if there is an angry ferret in the wall, which is how I know […]
Posted inGoat
Reporter’s notebook: How to snag a grizzly
“Salmon carcass, cattle blood and time. In a barrel.” That’s the rank concoction that biologists in Washington state are using to coax rare carnivores in for a candid photo shoot, and to snag a few precious hairs. “Burns the nostrils,” says Aja Woodrow, a biological technician with the US Forest Service, wincing as he pours […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Ganjanomics: bringing Humboldt’s shadow economy into the light
One evening last October, I met with Anna Hamilton in the Northern California town of Garberville. A singer-songwriter with a barbwire voice, Hamilton is known locally for her radio show, Rant and Rave, Lock and Load and Shoot Your Mouth Off — which, it turns out, is a pretty good description of her approach to […]
Posted inGoat
Livid over livestock
Just 18 months ago, ranchers effectively defeated a voluntary federal program to trace disease among their livestock. Now U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are coming back to the traceability table with mandatory interstate livestock trade regulations they hope will kick disease out of the barn and are improved enough to overcome rancher resistance. The agriculture […]
Posted inRange
Know your H2O: The review
Editor’s note: David Zetland, is a senior water economist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who trained in California. We cross-post occasional content from his blog, Aguanomics, here on the Range. The Surfrider Foundation sent me this 20 minute video. I liked most of it but had some comments (below). Watch the video and see if […]
Posted inGoat
Gutter Trash
On August 1, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage officially charged Arne Fuglvog, a veteran commercial fisherman and the fisheries aide to U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, with the crime of poaching wild Alaskan fish. His crimes led to an eventual charge and sentencing for misdemeanor violation of the Lacey Act, which protects wildlife, fish, […]
Posted inWotr
Live and let live
Lion attacks have been in the news lately, but there’s one story I’ll never forget. It was in the Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner last year, and featured a hunter who’d shot an “angry” mountain lion while out hunting mule deer. Investigators from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources determined that the hunter had acted in self-defense […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Guns and Arizona congressmen, airplane blowouts
COLORADO On hot summer days at the Aspen Airport, private planes from all over the world crowd the tarmac. For some reason, the pilot of an eight-seater Citation X decided that the afternoon of July 1 was the perfect time to gun the engines and do a high-powered “gauge test.” Unfortunately, the pilot failed to […]
Posted inRange
Rural unemployment slightly better in Interior West and Plains than elsewhere
By Bill Bishop, the Daily Yonder (click to view larger) Unemployment in rural counties turned up sharply in June, cracking nine percent for the first time since March. The rural unemployment rates rose from 8.7% in May to 9.2% in June. Unemployment in rural America remains lower than in urban counties or in the nation […]
Posted inGoat
Haze be gone
When I started researching regional haze rules a few months back, a source warned me that I was wading into the Clean Air Act’s wonkiest, most technically complicated depths. I remember her asking me something like: “Are you sure you want to go there?” Which is to say, you’d be forgiven if you paid little […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Re-watering Nevada’s dying Walker Lake
Nevada is the nation’s driest state, and Mineral County is as parched as any place in it. Past the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow, it’s sagebrush and alkali dust, sun-bleached skies free of clouds. So as a boy, Glenn Bunch, who grew up in Hawthorne, the county seat, spent as much time as he could at […]