Western watermasters are the folks who make sure all water right holders on an irrigation system get a fair share of available water. Usually they like to maintain low profiles. That helps with a job which has potential to engender conflict, lawsuits and even violence. Watermaster Craig Wilson recently raised his profile when he spoke […]
Does the California constitution hold the key to solving the state’s “water crisis”?
Posted inGoat
Tricking beetles and protecting whitebark pine – a video
Whitebark pine are an important forage species for grizzly bear, as we — and others — have written. They’re also a species that writers and nature lovers seem to specially connect with; our own Ed Marston and Earthjustice’s Doug Honnold have written odes to them in these pages. Writer and photographer David Gonzales has founded […]
Posted inWotr
The woodpile and me
My husband claims not to believe in the “end times” and all that, but I’m not sure I trust his denials. How else, other than a firm belief in a coming apocalypse, to explain his obsession with firewood? Never mind that we live in Cortez, Colo., on the fringe of the desert, in a home […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
State and municipal governments fertilize local food craze
Over the last 80 years, federal policy has increasingly put small farmers at a disadvantage by massively subsidizing a centralized, industrial agriculture system that produces cheap food. Activists have spent decades pushing federal reforms, such as organic standards, with incremental success. Now, a surge of state and local government policies that promote local food and […]
Posted inBlog
Ethical metalsmiths
Around here, one sort of business seems to be surviving the Great Recession just fine: those “We Buy Gold!” places. Most seem to be sidelines of related outfits, such as independent jewelers and pawnshops, but I’ve also seen them cropping up in such surprising locations as tire repair shops and convenience stores. Another variant is […]
Posted inGoat
Another round against hardrock handouts
The frontier days are long gone, but hardrock mining companies still do business like it’s the Wild West, with big government handouts and few taxes on spoils reaped from public lands. Back in the day, generous subsidies were used to boost mining in remote parts of the West. Today many of those old-fangled policies, including […]
Posted inRange
Washington’s bill of (coal-free) health
By Jennifer Langston Under a bill introduced today, Washington State would stop burning dirty coal for electricity within its borders. But aside from healthier air and clearer views of Mt Rainier, would the state’s electricity customers notice any difference? Probably not. Washington’s only coal-fired power plant – located n Centralia and owned by the Canadian […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Is that a gun in your Speedo?
WYOMING When the city council of Cody, Wyo., met recently to update policies for the town’s recreation center, it did more than overhaul some rules for playing games. In response to a gun owner’s complaint, the council also voted unanimously to permit all firearms carried legally — whether concealed or carried openly on someone’s person, […]
Posted inWotr
Alien life, it turns out, is much closer than Mars
Driving out Highway 167 north of California’s salty Mono Lake, you whiz by a jeep trail that heads for a crescent shore known as Ten Mile Beach. Few people find it, fewer still swim there. Once the bottom of the lake, this wide beach was gradually exposed as Los Angeles diverted the lake’s tributaries, starting […]
Posted inGoat
Young, All-American, Deported
(David) Morales graduated from Granite Peaks High in South Salt Lake last spring with high grades and hopes. He wanted to become a Christian pastor and start Utah’s “biggest church.” … As a high school student, Morales raised money to help homeless teens. He volunteered as a Spanish interpreter at Woodrow Wilson Elementary during parent-teacher […]
Posted inRange
Road rage on the Front Range
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Momentum is building for the construction of a controversial, 10-mile toll road through a wildlife refuge outside of Denver. Embroiled in the road row are warring counties, a powerful mining company and one man obsessed with asphalt. Now that it seems the road may become a reality, the […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
California’s Hupa tribe wars over fish
On a mid-October afternoon at the bottom of a sheer canyon on Northern California’s Trinity River, a Hupa Indian named Amos Pole babies a jet boat against the rushing current. For the Hupas, this craggy chasm is a sort of psychic power spot. Dense stands of fir crowd down to the edge of the river, […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
Nice work, but …
Matt Jenkins did a great job describing the intricacies of the California water wars in the Delta (HCN, 12/20/10). But a few corrections: Jenkins said that two-thirds of the water used in the state is drafted from the Delta. Actually, only about 12 percent of the water used in California is taken from the Delta. […]
Posted inFebruary 7, 2011: Obama and the West
The world according to Disney
In recent reporting about the 2010 census, the government and media deliberately deceived the public about the U.S. population explosion. Sadly, “California Dreamin’ ” studiously ignored the same population elephant in the room (HCN, 12/20/10). Growth in the U.S. is at its slowest in decades, the government asserted with a straight face. While the nation’s […]
Posted inBlog
From science to action in environmental justice
On the east side of Houston, Texas is the Ship Channel, a narrow vein that gapes into the bay just north of the Gulf of Mexico. Through this waterway, freighters carry Western oil to sea. The banks are tangled with refineries, docks, pipelines, and rails. Fuel tanks stack the shore like poker chips, and when […]
Posted inGoat
Sittin’ pretty in energy country
There’s a whole lot of oil coming out of North Dakota these days — so much that pipelines can’t handle it all. This August, production in the Bakken Shale was 83 percent above 2008 levels, and the boom times aren’t expected to ebb anytime soon. One oil executive recently crowed that the Bakken’s recoverable reserves […]
Posted inWotr
Yes to wolves, but not so many
As a hunter, conservationist and also a supporter of wolves taking their rightful place in the West, I take issue with the position of most environmental groups on this matter. By just about every scientific metric, wolves have recovered in the Northern Rocky Mountains. At last count, we had a wolf population of 1,700 plus […]
Posted inRange
The buffer battle
Back in 2009, I reported on new research indicating that “pesticide cocktails” — mixtures of common agricultural pesticides, including common off-the-shelf herbicides, and so-called “inert” ingredients — are more deadly to salmon than they are when used separately. That finding came about as part of a larger effort by the US EPA, the National Marine […]
Posted inRange
The peculiar geography of tragedy
Within hours of the Jan. 8 shopping-mall shooting spree in Arizona, there was already a journalistic term for it: Tucson, as in “How can we prevent another Tucson?” Tucson is a city with 544,000 residents where lots of things happen besides 19 people getting wounded, six of them fatally. People live, work, play and worship […]
Posted inGoat
The Visual West — Image 4
Though the days are slowly lengthening, the orchards in Western Colorado still sleep under a blanket of snow. In this shot, two kids on the way home from school cut through a pear orchard outside Paonia, Colorado. Hard to imagine that in just a couple of months this scene will be awash in white petals […]