It’s been a bad press week for dams. Last Saturday the Lake Delhi dam gave way, and the previous Tuesday the Tempe Town Lake dam literally exploded. The former disaster involved heavy rains swamping a 1920s-era dam on the Maquoketa River, while the latter resulted from a giant rubber bladder popping on the Salt River. […]
Thinking broadly about dams in the West
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
In Utah, the more things change, the more they stay the same
No one can accurately predict the future, whether it’s the effects of climate change or the flow of the Colorado River. But it’s always interesting to speculate. Here in San Juan County, Utah, it appeared there might be some progress in the decades-old debate over which public lands should be protected as wilderness. Republican Sen. […]
Posted inGoat
Encounters with the Ex-Secretary
In two appearances at the Aspen Environment Forum this week, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and ex-Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt seemed to revel in the impolitic. Offshore drilling is an “unregulated frontier culture full of cowboy operators,” he said during a panel discussion with Shell VP Libby Cheney, Consortium for Ocean Leadership president Robert […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
A river again?
Obama’s EPA extends protection to L.A.’s urban watershed
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Leasing lag?
During the past two years, the Bureau of Land Management has been offering less land for oil and gas leasing in Wyoming. The trend is due largely to market conditions — a reflection of low current and future oil and gas prices — but energy experts also cite a surplus in non-producing acreage, an increase […]
Posted inGoat
One tough trout
Here’s the bad news: No fish has ever made it off the endangered species list without going extinct. And the good news: the Apache trout, an Arizona native, may soon become the first. Soon, in this case, is a relative term. The trout’s imminent delisting has been reported since at least 2007, but before it […]
Posted inRange
A water economist’s hot links
Editor’s note: This link roundup comes from David Zetland, a water economist at the University of California, Berkeley. We will be cross-posting occasional posts and content from his blog, Aguanomics, here on the Range. David Zetland Speed Blogging for Tuesday, July 27, 2010 Hattips to RT and JWT Originally posted at Aguanomics.
Posted inWotr
Wolves: The debate is seldom rational
The wolf pot continues to boil in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Now, another state has been added to the stew. In Oregon, environmentalists are protesting the piecemeal removal of wolves from the Endangered Species list, hunters want less competition from wolves, and ranchers complain that wolves are killing their livestock. In eastern Oregon, where there […]
Posted inWotr
Dressing for success in the mosquito-ridden West
Rain in the West is always an occasion for celebration, and this year in South Dakota we’ve had a lot of moisture to celebrate. To complain about this would be against the code of the West; heck, the code doesn’t let us complain about stuff like broken arms or legs, either. Several neighbors casually mentioned […]
Posted inGoat
The Heart of the Beast
As a kid in northern Wyoming, I watched my dad dump a five-gallon bucket of Powder River Basin coal into the heater in our living room every winter night before bed. I’d lean against the stove in my jammies, enjoying its warmth while a blizzard rattled the chimney pipe. Though most Americans never hear coal […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Exercises in discretion
OREGONVincent Ruark was sitting at home with his two dogs in northern Oregon recently, not doing much of anything, when two Klickitat County officers knocked on his door. Aerial surveillance had spotted marijuana plants growing in his yard, they informed him, and they wanted permission to conduct a search. Taken by surprise and flustered, Ruark […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Vermillion surprise
BLM’s no-drilling decision in Colorado startles locals
Posted inRange
The meaning of marmot whistles
How about replacing Groundhog Day with a Feb. 2 Marmot Day?
Posted inGoat
It’s getting warmer in here – and drier
A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers a mixed picture of how climate change will affect Western water supplies. Some places will see more moisture, most will see less. For the majority of the region, sustainability of water resources is set to become a serious problem. The study was conducted by […]
Posted inGoat
We’ve got hot dates
Here at High Country News, we’re proud of the fact that we’ve got all of our stories from 1993 on available online, in a free searchable archive. But over the last few years, a bug worked its way into the system. You may have noticed that when you did a search, most older stories showed […]
Posted inJuly 19, 2010: The Ute Paradox
Case in point
Artifacts roadshow connects archaeologists to lost treasures
Posted inWotr
The atomic bomb and me
This year, the bomb and I became senior citizens. We were both born 65 years ago at nearly the same time in different parts of the West. Since then, nuclear reality has come to define everybody’s lives. But for me there’s even more of a connection, because of the radiation still lurking inside my body […]
Posted inWotr
The Gulf spill catastrophe can be a goad to do the right thing
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from BP’s disastrous oil spill, it’s how missed opportunities can come back to haunt you. One glaring example has received little attention, however. Back in 1965, Congress began funding land conservation through royalties from offshore oil and gas production, believing that the environmental cost of developing the outer continental […]
Posted inGoat
In defense of a rock
When I was in the fourth grade south of San Francisco, I squirted a glob of Elmers glue onto an index card, pressed a rock into it, and used a black felt tip pen to write a pretty cool sounding word beneath my specimen: Serpentine. Then, I added a brief description on the card in […]