In early October, the Interior Department gave its blessing to three solar energy projects in California’s sun-saturated Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley, and one in the Nevada desert. The approvals — the first ever on federal public land — came five years after the agency opened public deserts in the Southwest to solar development. A […]
Solar spree
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Hello, and goodbye
High Country News welcomes new assistant editor Cally Carswell. Cally has spent the last nine months here as a multimedia fellow after completing an internship; now, she’ll continue her excellent work reporting and writing stories, editing articles, and producing video and audio as a permanent staff member. Born in New Mexico but raised in Chicago, […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A raw-edged memoir
Raw Edges: A MemoirPhyllis Barber280 pages, hardcover: $26.95.University of Nevada Press, 2010. All memoirs risk provoking the reader’s question: What’s so important about your life, anyway? Why should we bother to read a whole book about it? Nevada author Phyllis Barber tries to answer that question in her second autobiography, Raw Edges: “While this search […]
Posted inBlog
Journo conference highlights Native American issues
Editors Note: This piece is cross posted from Mother Earth Journal, where reporter Terri Hansen writes about indigenous people and the environment. A drive from Portland’s emerald green landscape took me into the Columbia River Gorge and the reds, golds and browns of autumn in eastern Oregon and Washington, through the panhandle of Idaho then […]
Posted inGoat
Squeezing trees
The new data show forest carbon storage by region, with forests in the 11 Western states accounting for almost a third of the nation’s total. Forests in the West reach two extremes. Oregon, Washington, and southeast Alaska forests store the most carbon per acre of anywhere in the U.S., while those in Arizona, Nevada, New […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Microclimates, macro problem
Ideas for coping with climate change are becoming ever more creative. This summer, a group of Peruvian villagers began painting their local mountain peaks white. The glaciers that once covered the peaks have melted, taking with them the villagers’ water supply. In response, Peruvian inventor Eduardo Gold came up with a plan to slop a […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Love thy neighbor
ARIZONA You know times are tough in Phoenix when more than 15,000 people cram into McDonald’s restaurants to apply for one of 800 to 1,000 jobs, all of them part-time and most of them minimum wage. The Arizona Republic says the success of McDonald’s new McCafe line of smoothies and frappés has spurred the restaurant […]
Posted inBlog
Mining in the modern West
As I began writing this blog post, headlines were proclaiming the triumphant rescue of the thirty three Chilean miners who were trapped in the San Jose mine for seventy days. While the men are sure to experience after-effects of their traumatic ordeal in the weeks and months to come, they are far luckier than the […]
Posted inBlog
First nations continue tar sands pushback
George Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation – a tribal nation whose traditional homeland lies downstream from Canada’s Athabascan tar sands – articulated the devastating impacts of oil development on traditional peoples when he said, “if we don’t have land and we don’t have anywhere to carry out our traditional lifestyles, we lose who […]
Posted inRange
Dredging Western rivers for gold
An item in the October 11th edition’s “Heard around the West” reported on an influx of “gold miners” on Southern Oregon’s Rogue River. But the article did not explain why so many miners are on the Rogue now. The vast majority of these “miners” do not make a living mining. Rather they dredge in the […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Wyoming: A popular governor gets mysterious
Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal isn’t running for a third term, despite his belief that he could successfully challenge Wyoming’s term-limits law in court and translate his high approval ratings into another win in the ballot boxes. And he’s apparently decided that it’s no longer crucial to have a Democrat in the governor’s office as a […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Washington: Tea Party limbo #2
Washington is a coffee-drinking state; Starbucks is only one of the many java peddlers rooted in Seattle. Tea, however, at least of the political sort, is not catching on. So the fact that some of this year’s races appear to be ramped up on caffeine can probably be blamed on roasted, ground-up beans. HCN’s Guide […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Utah: A Sagebrush Rebel headed for D.C.
Utah’s most important election this year was held in the springtime, when angry right-wingers overthrew three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett in the Republican primary. Mike Lee, a lawyer who pushes high-profile Sagebrush Rebel cases, is now the Republican candidate for Senate. And given Utah’s history, Lee will almost certainly crush Democrat Sam Granato to win […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Stringing up the Western sheriff
Note: This is the editor’s note for our Western elections guide. The other elections stories are listed at the end. — The people were angry about a political system that seemed hopelessly corrupt. Waves of immigrants were flooding in and everything felt chaotic. The economy soared and plummeted, driven by naked greed, profiteering businesses, and […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Oregon: Tea Party limbo
It’s hard to imagine, in these Tea Party times, a guy with a political history like John Kitzhaber’s having a chance to win a major elected office. As a Democratic state senator in the ’80s, he authored Oregon’s government-funded health plan; later, as governor from 1995 to 2003, he expanded the plan, got more funding […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
New Mexico: Wolves, wilderness, drilling and Latinos
“Nothing is more attractive to a wolf than the sound of a crying baby,” said then-Rep. Steve Pearce, R, during a 2007 debate over one of his bills, which sought to kill funding for the federal Mexican wolf reintroduction program in southern New Mexico, Pearce’s district. More recently, Pearce expressed his views of land protection […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Nevada: A hairy ride for Harry
Two years ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must have felt on top of the world. He stood at the helm of a Democratically controlled Congress, and he and his state had just helped put a Democrat in the White House. Reid and his cohorts immediately set to work: They scotched the plan to bury […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Montana: Utility regs and clean energy up for grabs
When Democrat Dennis McDonald first decided to try to knock Denny Rehberg out of Montana’s sole seat in the House of Representatives, his chances appeared good. Montana’s Democrats had been on a roll since 2004, winning a Senate seat, the governor’s mansion and four other statewide offices. McDonald has a background in ranching — an […]