Drive the back roads of Delta County, Colorado, these days and you have a good chance of spotting a bald eagle atop some old cottonwood tree, or sometimes on the ground in a pasture of cows, tearing into some nutrient rich afterbirth. Baldies show up every winter here, and seem to be increasing in numbers. […]
The Visual West – Image 1
Posted inRange
Taking storms in stride
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means something like “joy in the sorrow of others.” And I confess that it sometimes strikes me. But that’s not quite how I felt after watching accounts of the big blizzard at the end of 2010 in the Northeast that paralyzed cities, disrupted transportation and stranded […]
Posted inGoat
The best of the Top 10s
Here at HCN, we’ve scoured the Internet to bring you some of the most noteworthy Top Ten lists of the year, for your edification and amusement. In no particular order, and mostly from Western media outlets: Come across any good Top 10 lists to share? Or do you have your own? Post ’em below (as […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
A long journey home
California tribe wants to bring back salmon from New Zealand
Posted inBlog
Extracting the West
As another year begins, extractive industries continue to mine the West for opportunity, even when the economic activity they promise has little to do with the American West. Now it’s increasingly clear that battles that seem localized to the West have far-reaching impacts. The West has long been treated as a transitional zone, as if […]
Posted inBlog
Not so simple living
What was your first exposure to ideas of environmental justice? Mine, I’m ashamed to say, was very low-key: I saw a bumper sticker. It was affixed to a co-worker’s car, back in the early 1980s, and it said, “Live Simply, That Others May Simply Live.” I was in college at the time, in a town […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
Teaching Whitney to cook
Environmental awareness can be learned in the kitchen
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tougher than most
WYOMING Surely she was exaggerating, but maybe not. Republican Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s lone congressional representative, insisted that she knew people in her state who would actually choose death over taxes — resolving to quit dialysis or other live-saving treatments — “in order to die so their estates won’t be taxed” if the Bush-era tax breaks […]
Posted inRange
HCN reader photo – goats!
This week’s reader photo of foraging goats in Alpine, Wyoming, must have been a fun early Christmas present for photographer Daryl L. Hunter, who took it on Christmas Eve. Submit your photos to our Flickr pool; we post one a week.
Posted inBlog
Not in my backyard?
The New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson gave the NIMBY question some thought in a story and blog post this week profiling the political tug of war between anti-uranium milling NIMBYs in Telluride, Colo., and those who live in Naturita, Nucla and nearby towns around Colorado’s Paradox Valley. Many residents in those towns see the […]
Posted inRange
National Geographic and water lobbyists release advertorial
Editor’s note: David Zetland, a Western water economist, offers an insider’s perspective into water politics and economics. We will be cross-posting occasional posts and content from his blog, Aguanomics, here on the Range. A few weeks ago, water blogger aquadoc mentioned that the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) was co-publishing a magazine with the […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2010: California Dreamin'
Sportsmen protest New Mexico antelope hunting system
Program gets poor marks from local hunters
Posted inGoat
2010: The year that was
Back when I was a High Country News intern, one of our contributing editors gave me and my comrades this bit of wisdom about our profession: Environmental news doesn’t break, it oozes. Looking back at HCN‘s year-in-stories, this truism resonates. The intractable issues that have defined our region for years — whether people and wolves can peacefully coexist in the […]
Posted inRange
Colorado ski industry wary of wolverine
By David Frey, 12-28-10 In October 1998, the Two Elk ski lodge atop the Vail ski area erupted in flames so big witnesses said it looked like a volcano. In the highly-publicized eco-terrorist attack, the secretive Earth Liberation Front struck against Vail Associates for its plan to expand the ski area into what was considered […]
Posted inWotr
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of protecting huge swaths of land
Alaska conservation act was innovative step
Posted inArticles
High Country Views, Big solar marches on
This fall, the federal government began putting serious muscle behind solar energy development on public land in the Southwest. In the past few months alone, the Interior Department has given the nod to nine large-scale solar farms in California and Nevada. The feds have had good intentions to kick-start renewable energy development on public land […]