If you took a survey to determine the most unpopular insect in the Rocky Mountains, the answer might well be not the disease-carrying wood tick, but the mountain pine beetle. Actually, it wouldn’t even be close, because the tick is an eight-legged arachnid, like a spider, rather than a six-legged insect. And it’s the pine […]
Forests will recover from pine beetle
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Arizona’s Fossil Creek gets restored — and loved to death
Deep in Arizona’s Mazatzal Mountains, there’s a 16-mile-long undulating channel of emerald-green travertine. Clear 75-degree water bubbles from the ground and flows down it at a steady 45 cubic feet per second. It’s home to a thriving native fish population, rare and endangered aquatic and terrestrial creatures, and towering canopies of cottonwood, ash and sycamore […]
Posted inGoat
Exploring rural communities, food and environment
With this week’s release of its Atlas of Small Town and Rural America, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given citizens a nifty tool to explore data on the lesser-populated parts of the country. The interactive atlas provides a nice mix of statistics, combining numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, […]
Posted inGoat
Even Tea Partiers are Conservationists
New Mexico’s new governor, Republican Susana Martinez, may have gotten right down to business last month by putting a hold on a rule that would require large polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But if new data on Western public opinion is accurate, then it wasn’t the state’s voters who gave her that mandate. According […]
Posted inRange
Tim DeChristopher, fossil fuels, and civil disobedience
For the past few weeks, I have been learning how to sing. I’ve gathered with members of the Unitarian Church, social activists, and climate activists to learn the some of the old protest songs that buoyed up the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement. I won’t lie. It’s a little awkward […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
On the lam
WYOMING There’s nothing like a bunch of bad yaks to get the Cowboy State’s Legislature riled up. Woolly wanderers, these particular yaks have never been content to graze the grass growing solely on the “Yak Daddy Ranch” owned by John and Laura DeMetteis. The big guys routinely seek out other pastures and crash through fences […]
Posted inBlog
The price of “green” home improvement
Many Arizonans like to talk big about resenting federal intrusion and giveaways, but one recent giveaway appears to have been quite popular. While definitive statistics on installations in the Phoenix area are unavailable, an observer will certainly notice a good number of homes — especially in aging mid-century neighborhoods like mine — sporting efficient new […]
Posted inGoat
Crow Tribe to vote on water compact
Federal settlement could fund reservation infrastructure improvements.
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
How my thoughts on wolves have changed
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA The wolves that periodically venture into the valley behind my home are blood-thirsty killers. That’s what I admire about them. They evolved to near perfection in their ecological niche, and they are lucky. They are not forced to contemplate whether their lifestyle serves nature well. People, well: People are different. Our greatest evolutionary […]
Posted inRange
Rocks on the road
The main highway into my town has just reopened after it was closed by a rockslide for most of last week, but I didn’t notice much disruption. Salida, Colo., was about as busy as it ever is during February. The rocks slid down a cliff at about 5 p.m. on Feb. 14, about a mile […]
Posted inGoat
Missing the subdivisions for the trees
At first it’s hard to tell what we’re looking at. The tiny plane bumps and bounces through turbulence that warns of an incoming winter storm, repeatedly bucking my too-tall self (despite tight seatbelt) into the low ceiling and knocking the lens of my camera against the window. Beyond the smeared glass, rolling mountains spread eastward […]
Posted inRange
What is ‘Plan B’ for tribes during a government shutdown?
Is there a Plan B? That is the question tribes, Indian organizations and government agencies should be asking — and answering because it looks more and more likely there will be a federal government shutdown early next month. Why is this a concern now? Congress did not pass a budget for this fiscal year. Instead, […]
Posted inRange
The deficit may enable reform of Farm Bill Conservation Programs
I have previously written for the HCN blogs about the “waste, fraud and abuse” which successive USDA Inspector General Reports and Congressional hearings have documented. Prior to that, in a letter to HCN editors, I pointed out pervasive abuse in implementation of the $50 million Klamath EQIP program established by the 2002 Farm Bill. Klamath […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
A cheap vacation that got out of hand
THE WEST John Daggett, one of the West’s iconic characters, died recently at age 82, though his amazing feat of body-surfing the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon 56 years ago will no doubt live forever. Back in April 1955, Daggett and his friend, Bill Beer, both 20-something Southern Californians, got the crazy idea of […]
Posted inWotr
Let me tell you about a real winter
One day last week it was cold — really cold — but not quite record-breaking. The weatherman reported that the record for the day was set back in 1979: 31 degrees below zero. I checked my old ranch notebook, and yes, 1979 was quite a winter. We’d kept the cattle on the range in Wyoming […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Unpacking health hazards in fracking’s chemical cocktail
Meet the Master Well Formula — the chemical cocktail that Encana Corp. will use to hydraulically fracture every natural gas well it drills in Wyoming’s Jonah Field. Drillers mix 11,800 gallons of this solution with over a million gallons of water and a heavy dose of sand, inject it underground to release gas deposits, and […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Poisonous language on both sides of the fence
The shooting slaughter in Tucson Jan. 8 and the subsequent national debate about the tone and effect of our political rhetoric came home to roost in San Juan County recently. The media reported that several “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters, threatening members of the environmental group Great Old Broads for Wilderness had been discovered by […]
Posted inFebruary 21, 2011: Palin, politics, and predator control
Palin, politics, and Alaska predator control
On the day we fly to Game Management Unit 16, the sun is shining and the air is crisp and the mountains glint from their summits. Out the side window of the Alaska Wildlife Trooper Supercub, 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, also known as Denali, gleams through a ribbon of cumulous. Up front, past Sgt. Mark Agnew’s […]