In the fall of 2009, billionaire Ed Roski Jr. went to the California Legislature looking for a deal. Roski wanted to build a football stadium in the Los Angeles suburb City of Industry, but the California Environmental Quality Act was getting in his way, and Roski thought lawmakers should exempt his project from the act. […]
Environmental bargaining chips
Posted inRange
A stand against racing in Colorado National Monument
I hold with Wallace Stegner that “national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, the 95-year old park system reflects us at our best rather than our worst.” The purpose of the national parks (and really, it is a system of diverse natural cultural recreational and historic areas) have always […]
Posted inArticles
How the Civil War shaped the West
Tomorrow is the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons began firing on Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, near Charleston, S.C., in what most historians regard as the first battle of America’s bloodiest conflict — one that killed more soldiers than all the rest of […]
Posted inGoat
Sea lions to the slaughter?
Every spring, hungry California sea lions rendezvous in the Columbia River at the base of the Bonneville Dam for an endangered salmon smorgasbord. After swimming 140 miles up river to the dam, some 100 sea lions munched over 6,000 salmon at the dam last year, about 2 percent of salmon and steelhead runs going through […]
Posted inWotr
The way the West was can be seen again
Back when I was a boy, we used to roll our eyes at tiresome coots who would begin reminiscences with “Back when I was a boy…” Today, as my 50s draw toward a close, I somehow find myself with a lot more sympathy for old-timers. I admit that recollections can be boring. And yet, as […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West – Image 11
Spring storms have kept the mountains in Western Colorado clad in winter white into early April, but they have not deterred the apricot trees in the valley below to burst out in flower. These blossoms adorn an old, gnarled specimen behind the High Country News office.
Posted inArticles
Photographer Sharon Stewart on the acequia tradition
This April, as the communal irrigation ditches known as acequias run with spring melt and farmers carve new furrows into their fields, many northern New Mexico villages will celebrate their annual homecoming. This is the time of the limpia –– the cleaning of the acequia, when water-rights holders and their families gather to haul rocks, […]
Posted inBlog
Fish and Wildlife Service denies an Indian her feathers
Marine Sisk-Franco has been a Winnemem Wintu Indian for all of her years, and the Northern California tribe’s way of life is all she knows. She’s the daughter of the tribe’s chief and their headman, she’s danced and sung at their ceremonies, and, in 2006, she bravely endured racial taunts and threats from drunken power […]
Posted inGoat
On Navajo Nation, Power Authority slips away
On April 8, a week after Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly testified before Congress on the immense energy potential in Indian Country, the Nation’s energy development enterprise, Dine Power Authority, will shut its doors, laying-off all but two of its staff. In operation since 1985, the DPA has yet to lift one major electric energy […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bear opens bear-proof locker
CALIFORNIA The black bears that call Yosemite National Park home are legendary for their smarts. They’ve honed efficient methods of ripping the doors off minivans, and they can skillfully yank open refrigerators. That’s why campers at the park must remove all food and other bear attractants and put them in “bear-proof” lockers that are so […]
Posted inWotr
LEDs ought to be leading the way
How many cities does it take for Western utilities to change a light bulb? Federal Department of Energy research shows that light-emitting diode streetlights — called LEDs by just about everybody — can reduce energy use by 12 percent when used in place of conventional high-pressure sodium lighting above high-speed roads. LEDs also can save […]
Posted inRange
Dam removal and salmon science
Pacific salmon face grim times. The plight of Canada’s Fraser River sockeye has fixated fishers, scientists, and the state for decades. Concern has grown since the 1990s as annual runs went from bad to frightening, but then last summer’s run was bafflingly great. The Canadian government federal government in Ottawa formed the Cohen Commission in […]
Posted inGoat
Idaho eases the way for factory farms
Idaho counties have fought hard in the past for the right to regulate mega-animal operations; Gooding County, which has some of the highest concentrations of dairies in the state, won a lawsuit in the Idaho Supreme Court in Feb. 2010 upholding its ability to regulate water and the number of animals per acre. But the […]
Posted inRange
Keeping the wild in National Wildlife Refuges
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House I’ve never thought much about this country’s National Wildlife Refuges (NWR). With the exception of controversial ones like the “drill, baby, drill” Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they’re stealthy public lands that don’t get the airtime our national parks and monuments do. It wasn’t until recently, when I learned […]
Posted inArticles
Peter McBride on photographing the contentious Colorado River
International photographer and Colorado native Peter McBride spent the past three years making images of the Colorado River. His work has been turned into several magazine articles, a book, a museum exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and a short film. Here, he talks about what has become of the Colorado River […]
Posted inGoat
Out like a lion, in like a wildfire
Back in December, when temperatures at HCN-HQ in Paonia plummeted regularly into face-shattering freezingness and the high country softened under pillows, featherbeds, jumpy-castles of snow, it was easy to imagine Colorado’s immediate future rife with moisture. Maybe even a mild spring on the high plains, piled with wildflowers and lushly green around the edges and […]
Posted inWotr
The lesson of earthquake and tsunami: never forget
The most important image from the disaster that rocked Japan last month might be one that was never captured by anyone’s camera. It has to be conjured up from words: The mayor of a town on the Sanriku coast north of Sendai races to the top of the three-story city hall to escape the tsunami […]
Posted inBlog
Using Japan to discuss energy at home
I noticed this week that I’ve been writing and thinking about energy almost constantly. Obviously I’m not the only non-expert who has become obsessed with this subject, but it is interesting to me how something that used to seem so technical and dispassionate now churns the emotions so powerfully. Perhaps it is the very mysteries […]
Posted inGoat
Eagle Mountain: Still Not Safe From Los Angeles Garbage
Environmentalists and activists touted it as a victory last week when the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would not hear Kaiser Eagle Mountain v. National Parks Conservation Association et al, the decades-old legal battle over a landfill slated for a spit of land on the southern boundary of Joshua Tree National Park. But after reading […]
Posted inRange
Agriculture by the numbers
Every five years the US Department of Agriculture publishes the US Census of Agriculture. The most current census is for 2007 and was published in 2009. I have previously written here about one aspect of the census – the first ever survey of native farmers and ranchers. Recently I had occasion to use the Census […]