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 […]
Religious Intolerance Plays Role in Presidential Politics
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 […]
Posted inGoat
Surf and turf update
After two decades of restoration, roughly 1,700 gray wolves now roam the Northern Rockies. But constant court battles over their management led Congress to end federal protection in May, using a budget rider to sidestep the Endangered Species Act (see our May 30 story). Last week, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy unhappily upheld the rider, […]
Posted inRange
Lewis, Clark and Darwin
Charles Darwin wasn’t born until three years after the Lewis & Clark Expedition was over, but evolutionary science is shedding a new light on a question that has perplexed me and other history buffs about their epic journey. Here’s the question: Why were the Indians so friendly to Lewis & Clark? The answer might just […]
Posted inGoat
Air quality and all that gas
If you’ve been following the recent media blitz surrounding fracking — where water, chemicals and sand are pumped at high pressure down a well to help release oil or natural gas — you might think that concerns over the process are all about groundwater pollution. After all, thanks to the “Halliburton loophole,” the process is […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Yellowstone leak highlights a different kind of oil spill
As modern rivers go, the Yellowstone is relatively unadulterated. It’s the longest dam-free river in the U.S., rushing 692 miles from its headwaters in Wyoming’s Absaroka Mountains through Yellowstone National Park and Montana’s Paradise Valley and eastern plains, to its confluence with the Missouri. Cutthroat trout, vanished from much of their native range, still hold […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Welcome, new interns!
Two new interns have just joined our editorial department for six months of “journalism boot camp” here in Paonia, Colo. “I was the shy nerd in school,” says Kimberly Hirai of Boise, Idaho. When she and her brother ordered pizza as kids, they fought over who had to talk on the phone. She’s more outgoing […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Settlements prompt federal decisions on hundreds of endangered species
Updated 8/8/2011 The Arctic grayling, found only in the Missouri River Basin’s upper reaches, became an endangered species candidate in 1994, meaning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that it deserved federal protection but did not list it because other species took priority. The grayling has languished there ever since, along with more than […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Portraits of the frontier West: A review of Western Heritage
Western Heritage: A Selection of Wrangler Award-Winning ArticlesEdited by Paul Andrew Hutton305 pages, softcover: $19.95.University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Geronimo, Crazy Horse and the Texas Rangers all have dramatic cameos in Western Heritage, Paul Andrew Hutton’s anthology of award-winning essays. Since 1961, Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum has given its annual Wrangler […]
Posted inAugust 8, 2011: Ganjanomics
Economies of vice
Paonia, Colo., High Country News‘ hometown, is not an easy place to find work. As is true in many rural areas, young folks who want to stick around have few opportunities. The options are even fewer for those who can’t or don’t want to work in local coal mines. Through the warmer months, many string […]