I having been using Tim Egan’ s book The Big Burn about the fires of 1910 that changed fire policy in the United States in my public land policy class this semester. A key part of his book is about the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, its Chief Gifford Pinchot, and the forest […]
(Re)naming mountains
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
We’re listening
Below are some of the comments you sent us on the most recent reader survey. Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think. We’ve been reading all your survey responses, and thinking about how we can keep HCN on your “essential reading” list. I have learned more from HCN about the […]
Posted inBlog
Special Treatment for Ag
Farmers and ranchers across the West like to complain about the Endangered Species Act. To hear them and their Farm Bureau lobbyists talk, you would expect that the ESA has put nearly every western farmer and rancher into the poor house. Verifiable cases of farmers or ranchers actually being put out of business by the […]
Posted inRange
La Niña winter expected
The weather experts who look at the big picture say we’re facing a “La Niña winter” this time around. For the West, this means it will be wet in the north and dry in the south. But the moisture won’t arrive for a while. The La Niña pattern includes relatively warm, dry days well into […]
Posted inGoat
Shale games
Between 1.2 and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil sit in shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. For years oil companies have been looking for a commercially viable way to unlock all that petroleum, to no avail. “No matter how high the price of crude oil went,” Hal Clifford reported for HCN in 2002, “shale […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
Taming the River Wild
Proposals to make rapids safer raise raft of questions
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Them! and Us
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Some of you may be fortunate—or perhaps unfortunate—enough to recall the 1954 science fiction film Them!, which, much like Earth First!, had the audacity to include the exclamation point in its title. A classic […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Fighting the logic of fire
A writer reassesses her love for the West.
Posted inGoat
Fortification or sacrifice?
The Fortification elk herd, which lives in what some call “the wildest country remaining in the Powder River Basin,” is one of the only plains elk populations in the continental US. After reintroduction to the Fortification Creek watershed of northeast Wyoming in the 1950s the herd now numbers around 250 animals. Hunters covet licenses for […]
Posted inRange
350 Miles Through Utah: A Pilgrimage for Hope
Editor’s Note: Utahns Jamie and Ryan Pleume are walking 350 miles across Utah to raise awareness about climate change. They started their journey today. We will be posting periodic updates from their journey on this blog. “Hope is an action not an emotion.” A rabbi spoke these words in the sweltering heat, standing on a […]
Posted inWotr
The way it is for some people
Recently, I returned from a second visit to my dentist, who works “en el otro lado” – the other side. I live in Arizona, so that means across the border, in Mexico. Emilia Saenz is a fine dentist, but her assistant, Jose, a gracious young man, is even finer, as far as I’m concerned. That’s […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
The birds and the bee(tle)s
The end of a controversial tamarisk biocontrol program may be good news for habitat
Posted inHeard Around the West
Fire and brimstone
COLORADO There’s no doubt that the college town of Boulder has grown all too familiar with fire, thanks in part to those young people — and there are some 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Colorado — who have a developed a strange tradition: They ignite couches in front yards or in […]
Posted inRange
Western states seem typical in new study
When it comes to economic performance and financial management, states in the West are fairly typical. Or so says a study whose results were recently published on the Atlantic magazine’s website. Factors considered ranged from violent crime rates and median income to employment trends. To quote from the article, “well-run states have a great deal […]
Posted inArticles
In defense of wood heat
Why not burn trees where they’ll do some good — in your woodstove?
Posted inBlog
News of a parched West continues to flow
How many times must it be written that in the West, the story is water, and how many times must the story of the West’s dependence on the Colorado River for its water be told? Many readers probably know by now, but it bears repeating. The current running beneath many environmental justice stories is water. […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
‘The music of men’s lives’
Work SongIvan Doig288 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Riverhead Books, 2010. “My train journey had brought me across the Montana everyone thinks of, mile upon hypnotic mile of rolling prairie with snowcapped peaks in the distance, and here, as sudden and surprising as a lost city of legendary times, was a metropolis of nowhere. …” In his latest […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Once More Unto The Breach
Into Utah’s Black Hole with guidebook author Michael Kelsey