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 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 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

Tribal recognition

When President Obama recently announced that the U.S. would finally endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN DRIP), he was immediately heaped with effusive praise from tribal and human rights groups alike. There have been unrelenting references to the Crow Nation giving Obama the Indian name, “One Who Helps People […]

Posted inGoat

Wilderness creates jobs too!

If you were to submit today’s Department of Interior press conference to a Facebook word ranking game, it would probably look something like this: JOBSECONOMYBILLIONDOLLARSWILDERNESS The conference, which took place at an REI store in Denver, was called to announce that the Bureau of Land Management would once again start taking inventory of lands in […]

Posted inBlog

California’s tribal harvesting imbroglio

Frankie Myers’s tribe, the Yuroks, have gathered and harvested everything from mussels to seaweed on the Northern California coast since “the beginning of time,” as he puts it. The myriad coastal resources are of important cultural value to many Pacific tribes, and recent studies have shown that pre-contact hunter-gatherers were extremely adept at harvesting in […]

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