Lovers of wild open spaces in northwest Colorado recently received some long-awaited great news. The Bureau of Land Management’s Little Snake Field Office announced that it would close 77,000 acres of the magnificent Vermillion Basin to oil and gas development. The agency’s decision came as a result of a well-publicized public process. Nonetheless, Moffat County […]
A wild area gets a reprieve
Posted inGoat
Grazing takes the heat
Climate change. Severe wildfires. Invasive species. A booming human population. The Bureau of Land Management identifies these as four key threats to Western public lands. Stick conventional and renewable energy development, endangered species protection, and recreation in the mix, and there’s less room each year for a past widespread use of public lands: livestock grazing. […]
Posted inRange
Do Indian Country voters have the president’s back?
By any objective measure Barack Obama has been the most engaged and effective president on American Indian issues since at least since Richard Nixon. You could even make the case that Obama is better than Nixon because there has been so much successful legislation and Executive Branch action in less than two years. A quick […]
Posted inGoat
Telemocracy #4
As if you needed more evidence. It is now undeniably clear: John Hickenlooper is Satan, and hates America. As I mentioned in the first installment of Telemocracy, the negative campaign ad is a proud American tradition. Since John Hickenlooper – Denver mayor and current Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado – apparently has no respect for the American Way, […]
Posted inArticles
“Curious about the human condition”
A conversation with Western writer Philip Fradkin
Posted inWotr
The problem of Western water is not what you think
The dirty little secret about Western water is that water conservation is a hoax, or at best a waste of time. When we conserve water by using less, we don’t save it for the health of the watershed or put it aside in any way; we simply make it available for someone else to consume, […]
Posted inBlog
Radioactive Justice
Lately I’ve been trying to keep up with the debate about uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region. I’m sorry to admit that like many people I’m not well-versed in the physical properties of uranium or radioactivity in general, so my first impulse when approaching this subject is a sort of vague, knee-jerk fear. As […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Milk and cookies
ARIZONA A McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix learned a valuable lesson recently, but only after an assistant manager ordered a breastfeeding mother — and her 6-month-old baby — to leave. The lesson: Don’t mess with moms! As TV reporters flocked to the restaurant, dozens of nursing mothers converged inside it to protest what they called discrimination, […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
The Second Second City
A native Chicagoan who now lives in Montana discovers New Chicago, Mont.
Posted inGoat
Full frackin’ disclosure
New regulations in Wyoming requiring gas companies to disclose chemicals used in fracking go a long way toward addressing a rising chorus of health and environmental concerns. But, like a wholesome, Wyoming first date, it’s just a start, and they don’t go all the way. Drillers have long contended that the chemical cocktails they use […]
Posted inGoat
More surprises flow from Ruby Pipeline
Last month the HCN magazine ran a story on the furor over a conservation deal meant to keep two environmental groups from suing to stop construction of the Ruby Pipeline, a 675-mile-long natural gas pipe stretching from Opal, Wyo., to Malin, Ore. Western Watersheds Project and the Oregon Natural Desert Association opposed fragmentation and destruction […]
Posted inBlog
Taking action on hunger
Stimulus money might have a chance to stimulate appetites with a series of new grants in New Mexico. New data on poverty and food access suggest, though, it might not be enough to quiet hunger in the West’s most food insecure state or elsewhere in the region. First, the encouraging news. In August, New Mexico […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2010: Migration
What was and what is
Joan Kane’s work aims to bridge the gap between past and present
Posted inRange
Native discovery could save important fish
The scientific discovery of an ancient stress hormone by a tribal member could lead to the survival of the most ancient of the native fish in the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific lamprey, an eel like fish that evolved more than 500 million years ago. David Close, Ph.D. is a Cayuse and a member of the […]
Posted inWotr
Live fee or die
We grumbled, but paid the nearly 50 percent fee increase for registering our motor vehicle in Colorado. And we also paid the registration fee for our camp trailer, which had nearly doubled. I felt as helpless as Jack in the Beanstalk, when he hid under a bucket listening to a giant stomp around shouting, “FEE-FI-FO-FUM.” […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Guests in the house of fire
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. For once, fire has remained absent from our home landscape this summer. Winter was so long and wet as to have repressed fire season, and it seems strange that our home mountain, valley, and […]
Posted inWotr
Love wilderness? Thank a veteran
Some of the environmental movement’s greatest heroes were also heroes of World War II
Posted inHeard Around the West
Unseemly business
IDAHOFor a long time, a southern Idaho farmer didn’t know it, but there was another crop growing in his cornfields — 300 marijuana plants, valued at $628,000. Azcentral.com says the plants were grown from seed and later transplanted to the farmer’s field, apparently a not uncommon practice. OREGONDon’t even think about selling lemonade in Multnomah […]
Posted inWotr
Some neighbors behave like boors
Every year, they break into hundreds of homes on the northwest shores of Lake Tahoe in California, and once inside, they leave destruction in their wake — not to mention piles of poop. Homeowners, frantic to protect their castles, employ elaborate schemes to thwart these powerful animals. They buy mechanical dogs that bark at anything […]
Posted inWotr
I liked it better when being born here was enough
If the 14th Amendment is repealed, how do we know we’re citizens at all?