I first met Tom Bell over 40 years ago. He remains one of the most courageous men I’ve ever known and something of a hero to me (HCN, 8/30/10). Here is Wyoming, a state where the leading radio station daily broadcasts hours of Rush Limbaugh’s bombast to eager listeners. Here is a state that can field a viable […]
Even in Wyoming
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Give-’em-hell Bell
With his courage and fierce determination to save Western lands and wildlife, HCN founder and guiding muse Tom Bell is a true prophet (HCN, 8/30/10). A conservationist in the mold of Thoreau, Muir and Leopold, Bell deserves our respect and esteem for his noble fight against avaricious mining and ranching interests hell-bent on pursuing profit at […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
A Bell-wether for the young
In 1963, I was a youngster in a grade school science class, when an instructor demonstrated that fish required oxygen through an experiment that diminished the O2 content of a fishbowl till the goldfish passed out. The instructor noted the efficacy of the experiment but said that he worried about the state of the fish […]
Posted inGoat
The woodpecker and the owl
How is a black-backed woodpecker like a spotted owl? Well, if an environmental group has its way, the woodpecker will join the owl as a species whose protection changes forest management on a broad scale. The spotted owl, which depends on old-growth forests, was federally listed as threatened in 1990. Subsequently, logging across the Northwest […]
Posted inGoat
A Wyoming wonder
In 1999, we published a feature story that followed biologist Jonathan Proctor around the northern Great Plains as he tried to convince ranchers that prairie dogs are beneficial for their land. Proctor’s a tall guy, but his task was undoubtedly taller, if not colossally unrealistic. Affectionately termed “range rats” by some, prairie dogs are one […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Computer model slices and dices mountain climates
BLUE RIVER, OREGON On the face of a wind-swept cliff … At the bottom of a frost-prone hollow … Beneath the canopy of an old-growth tree … Oregon State University climatologist Chris Daly and his team have positioned their instruments in some oddball places here in central Oregon’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. “The World Meteorological […]
Posted inOctober 1, 2010: Dancing with Climate Change
Dancing with Climate Change
Alpine species try to adapt to a warming world
Posted inHeard Around the West
Tough job, but someone’s gotta do it
UTAH Baptizing stand-ins for dead people doesn’t seem like a hazardous activity, but Daniel Dastrup of Las Vegas recently sued The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for medical expenses after injuring his back performing about 200 baptisms on Aug. 25, 2007. Lowering volunteers into a pool all day apparently became arduous: “The then […]
Posted inGoat
Utahns tar the tar sands
Mining of tar sands in Alberta Canada has left a landscape of razed boreal forest dotted with pools of toxic wastewater. It also produced 1.49 million barrels of crude oil last year – every day. Now, the first-ever commercial tar sands mine proposed in the United States is facing its second legal challenge from Western […]
Posted inBlog
A tiny energy revolution
We’ve come to the point where community gardening is well understood – could community energy be far behind? Just as many people don’t know how their food reaches their plate, many aren’t plugged into where their power and heating originates. “We have been completely disconnected as consumers from our sources,” says John Sorenson, the executive […]
Posted inRange
Another angle on wolves
Chip Ward, who used to write for High Country News, has just published an informative piece on wolf recovery in Yellowstone — essentially calling it a success story that nobody appears to want to take credit for. One interesting angle: Wolves improve the water supply. How? When there are no wolves to worry about, elk […]
Posted inGoat
Who’s terrorizing who?
Attention citizens of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming: get ready for new neighbors in your skies as the U.S. Air Force plans to train pilots over far-reaching swaths of the West. The Air Force’s existing training areas, developed during the Cold War, are too small and flat to prepare pilots […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Finding treasure in the “Treasure State”
MONTANA Billings Gazette reporter Diane Cochran decided to personally test her state’s voter-initiated Medical Marijuana Act recently, timing exactly how long it took to get a doctor to recommend the use of pot. Eight minutes was the answer, courtesy of an Internet consultation, but according to the executive director of the pot-advocacy group, Montana Caregivers […]
Posted inRange
Can politicians overcome bias?
Editor’s note: David Zetland, a water economist who recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley 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. Can politicians overcome bias? I don’t know, but the ones in […]
Posted inWotr
Stealing the West, bone by bone
Early morning sunrise washed over the Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction as I headed for a boulder-strewn knoll. There, 110 years ago, paleontologist Elmer Riggs discovered a previously unknown dinosaur that we now call Brachiosaurus. When it was alive some 150 million years ago, the plant-eating dinosaur measured 75 feet or more from teeth […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2010: A Hell of an Anniversary
Doomster chorus
Note: This is a sidebar to a profile of the founder of High Country News and his increasingly pessimistic view of the future, headlined, “A Hell of an Anniversary.” — “… A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse-gas emissions (indicates) we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
The Western Lit Blues
I’m-a-gettin’ tired of living up to my fictional counterpart
Posted inArticles
High Country Views: Fire in the foothills
HCN’s podcast looks at the aftermath of Colorado’s most destructive wildfire
Posted inBlog
Environmentalism’s communications problem
On Sept. 22, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported the most recent development in an ongoing dispute over the future of the Boardman power plant, located in the north-central part of the state. To meet state environmental regulations for emissions, Portland General Electric – the utility that operates the plant – has to figure out what to […]