Hundreds of urban planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs and policymakers danced around this question last week as they convened on Portland for the second annual Ecodistricts Summit. Hosted by the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), the event complements a maturing experiment to make five of the Oregon metropolis’s neighborhoods into “Ecodistricts,” neighborhoods designed to be more […]
Where should green planning efforts come from?
Posted inRange
California state parks funding measure fails
Dominated by the Sierra Club, California’s “Environmental Establishment” operates politically largely as a subsidiary of the Democratic Party. This fact plays heavily in what sorts of environmental initiatives this establishment chooses to put on the California ballot. This year, the state’s environmental establishment put Proposition 21 on the ballot. It proposed a surcharge on vehicle […]
Posted inRange
We, the American people, are united by our divisions
All election night the message was about how the people have spoken with a clear voice and returned Republicans to power. In Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul called it the “Tea Party tidal wave.” Or the soon-to-be Speaker of the House, John Boehner, said “it’s clear tonight who the real winners are, that’s the American […]
Posted inWotr
Hoover Dam: marvel and folly
Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Hoover Dam — then called Boulder Dam — “a marvel of the 20th century.” But I predict that when the dam turns 100 in 2035, no one will be celebrating what now appears to be a 20th century folly. The third decade of the 20th century and the […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Us and them vs. all the rest
Ethnic diversity strengthened early Butte, Montana – and still can.
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
False moderates?
Your article is correct in stating: “The most hard-line right-wingers didn’t do very well in Wyoming’s Republican primary.” But that result wasn’t terribly indicative of the political leanings of most Republican voters in Wyoming. Rather, it’s a commonly accepted fact among both Democrats and Republicans that Dems switched parties to vote for Matt Mead in […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
Tamarisk takedown
This is incredibly short-sighted thinking on these environmentalists’ part, in my opinion (HCN, 10/10/11). It’s called the southwestern willow flycatcher, not the tamarisk flycatcher. This is a bird that needs willows and insects to survive. Part of the reason tamarisk is so invasive is that almost nothing can eat it. Releasing the beetle means two […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
‘Please stay in the kiddie pool’
It was one small group who blew the rock in the Salt River Canyon (HCN, 10/10/25). The guy who lit the fuse was too incompetent to get himself or his customers past an irreplaceable, completely natural challenge. It broke my heart, even though my rafting is defined by the inner tube. No one has a […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
Guide, not gospel
Eureka! As I read the article “Once More Unto the Breach” and glanced at the bookcase behind me, it hit me — I had most of (Michael Kelsey’s) books (HCN, 10/10/11)! But I had never connected the dots. The first, Guide to the World’s Mountains, had steered my climbing itineraries overseas, and ultimately led me […]
Posted inNovember 8, 2010: Dr. No
The river (too) wild
We wouldn’t want to engineer every river, but rivers are transient, anyway (HCN, 10/10/25). Making one rapid consistent with the rest of the run makes sense. As a climber, I’m a little tired of the argument that placing enough bolts on a route to prevent someone dying is “dumbing it down.” I’ve seen people die […]
Posted inGoat
Oh deer
For the last 10 years, Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc. — an environmental and statistical consulting group — has been studying the mule deer that winter on the Pinedale Anticline. Over the first four years of the study, But the latest data, just released in a new report [pdf], makes those increases look like a temporary […]
Posted inRange
River course restored after recovery diversion
The Arkansas River is back on course after a diversion last week to recover the body of Kimberly Appelson, a 23-year-old Breckenridge woman who fell out of a raft on July 11 and had been missing ever since. It happened two miles north of Buena Vista at a spot known as Frog Rock Rapids. Beneath […]
Posted inBlog
Buying “green” in the rural West
I recently took a little unscientific field trip to a Walmart Supercenter near my home in Mesa, Arizona. I chose Walmart partly because of its prices but also because it is widely available in rural areas in the West, where shopping choices are often limited. My “research” questions: Would the prices for ‘greener’ products be […]
Posted inRange
Of grizzlies and tortoises
The towering grizzly bear and diminutive desert tortoise have something in common, and it’s not good: both animals are struggling for survival. “The population of grizzlies in the continental United States was 50,000 at time of Lewis and Clark, and it’s down to 1600 animals today for some of the same reasons the desert tortoise […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
What to do with the dead?
MONTANA The funniest picture in Montana Magazine’s profile of coffin-maker Willy von Bracht shows him and an assistant putting the cover on a casket painted to look exactly like a giant box of Marlboro cigarettes. This was a “personal project” of von Bracht, whose lively sense of humor informs his business, Sweet Earth Caskets and […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
‘The last word is action’
Boulder clean-energy activist sees declining coal supply as a boon
Posted inWotr
Voting at the dump
In my bluish precinct in thoroughly red Idaho, we vote at the dump. We troop to a doublewide manufactured home that serves as the landfill office, out by the edge of the Caribou National Forest. “Saves the middleman,” my late husband liked to say. Our whole county makes a blue showing in most elections, thanks […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A house like a buffalo
A carpenter muses on dismantling and recycling tumbledown buildings
Posted inWotr
When voting, listen to the grass
When I say I’m from the High Plains, people often tell me how bored they were on their last drive through eastern Colorado or Kansas. I agree. The Plains are boring now that most of the land has been farmed into a drab patchwork of corn, soybeans and wheat. But no land was ever as […]