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 […]
Road rage on the Front Range
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 […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Challenges pile up for avalanche mitigation on mountain highways
Backcountry skiers complicate slide control
Posted inGoat
A “New Era” for Indian Country?
“The Indian Nations can do the work–if the federal government will clear the way for us to exercise our liberty and thus make a new era and a more perfect union.” That was Jefferson Keel yesterday, President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), in his State of Indian Nations Address. His point, very […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Depth afield
Why is the Western image so appealing?
Posted inRange
When emotion drives the wolf debate, research suffers
By Steve Bunk, 1-27-11 All the information out there, informed and uninformed, surely has raised awareness that wolves are important to many of us, whether by their presence or absence. But how good are we at recognizing and using accurate information to shape our opinions? As a former science journalist, what’s become clear in the […]
Posted inGoat
Of beetles and borders
The mountain pine beetle’s red hand of death (see photo below) continues to plunder Rocky Mountain forests, according to a report released last week by the U.S. and Colorado forest services. The rampant pest chomped through another 400,000 acres of pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming last year, for a grand total of four million […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Llamas and coyotes and bears, oh my
THE WEST We’ve always relished the anecdote about the brand-new Wyoming congressman who made the mistake of bringing his border collie to Washington, D.C. Border collies originally hail from the English-Scottish borderlands, and they are super-smart and quintessentially alert: They live to round up animals, including ducks and people — virtually anything that moves if […]
Posted inRange
HCN reader photo – chariot racing!
This week’s stunning image comes from photographer Daryl Hunter. It’s from a horse-drawn chariot race (the horses pull a cutter) in Jackson, Wyo.
Posted inJanuary 24, 2011: Serendipity in the Desert
Small poultry farmers grapple with lack of slaughterhouses
Producers in Oregon and beyond can’t find places to butcher chickens
Posted inGoat
Sexual assault on the rez
Will the Obama administration’s efforts in Indian Country help end a decades-long epidemic of sexual violence and abuse against women on reservations? One can only hope that the momentum spurred by the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and the work of a new Department of Justice task force to streamline prosecution of violent […]