I am a friend and colleague of Elizabeth (“Liz”) Birnbaum, who recently managed the Minerals Management Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior. She left her position several weeks into the BP spill in the Gulf. The reporting on her sometimes claims or implies that she lacks sufficient commitment to environmental protection or safety. […]
The wrong head rolled
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
The worst manmade wildfires
Editor’s note for “The Fiery Touch”
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
The wealthy shouldn’t whine
In regards to the article “Health studies gas up,” I am frustrated at Ms. Waldholz’s lack of perspective (HCN, 6/21/10). While I agree wholeheartedly with all the measures to safeguard the public health and the health of the environment discussed in this article, I can’t help getting upset by who is doing the complaining: wealthy […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
The Fiery Touch
Wildfire arsonists burn forests, grasslands and houses — and kill people. Now one faces the death penalty.
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Summer Visitors
Along with cherries and apricots, summer always brings a bountiful crop of visitors to our offices in Paonia, Colo. Author and photographer Dave Showalter came by on a Western Slope trip from his home in Arvada, Colo. He’s working on a conservation book depicting the beauty of the West’s sagebrush ecosystem and the many threats […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Some notable arson wildfire cases in the West
Sidebar to “The Fiery Touch”
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Private equity not prudent for tribes
“The Ute Paradox” was well-written and thoroughly researched (HCN, 7/19/10). However, I have devoted 22 years of my working life to the Southern Utes’ success, and must respectfully disagree with some of Jonathan Thompson’s conclusions. The article states that “Mr. Jurrius … brought capital from a huge private equity firm with which the tribe was […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Of rivers, boats and baseball umpires
Another Waythe River Has:Taut True Talesfrom the NorthwestRobin Cody208 pages, softcover: $18.95.Oregon State University Press, 2010. Robin Cody inspired me to buy a kayak. A confirmed landlubber, it didn’t occur to me to become familiar with my local waterways until I read Cody’s eclectic collection of essays, Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Hula on the hill
“When I first found out about the Cool Water Hula (in 2000), I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of,” says Tom Malloy, a tall, brawny ex-football player who now works as reclamation manager for the Butte-Silver Bow County Planning Department. “This time, I’m gonna dance in it.” The Cool Water Hula […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Discovery and recovery in a Mojave casino town
Going Through GhostsMary Sojourner296 pages, softcover: $25.University of Nevada Press, 2010. Shadows inhabit every corner of Mary Sojourner’s newest novel, Going Through Ghosts — spirits of ancestors and deceased friends, fragments of characters’ souls. The settings — casino coffee shops, riverside benches, buses — are places a Westerner will recognize as haunts of the lonely […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
Asbestos all around us
Libby is the most unsung of environmental disasters (HCN, 6/21/10). People know (or knew) about Love Canal and even Times Beach and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but no one has heard of Libby; and yet the exposures continue, as your “Data” stated. I have done work for the federal Department of Health and Human […]
Posted inGoat
Telemocracy #1
Greetings, earthlings, and other denizens of the West. This is the first installment of what will be an ongoing High Country News roundup of Western campaign commercials. I have scoured the interwebs, and picked out a few that are particularly great in their own special ways. In today’s episode, “If you can’t say something nice, put it […]
Posted inBlog
Growth, economics and justice
As I fretted over what to write in my debut post for A Just West, my mind kept returning to a controversy I used to follow in my first two professional journalism jobs. At both the Pacific Coast Business Times and the Ventura County Reporter, I covered the story of truck traffic from rock aggregate mines in the Los Padres National […]
Posted inAugust 2, 2010: The Fiery Touch
The drift dweller
Colorado scientists track the ubiquitous mountain snow mold
Posted inRange
Over the River controversy continues
The Bulgarian-born artist Christo specializes in gigantic installations — like wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin, or arranging hundreds of fabric gates in New York City’s Central Park. For the past decade or so, he’s had plans to return to Colorado with “Over the River.” (His first Colorado project, an immense curtain in Rifle Gap, was about […]
Posted inRange
Thinking broadly about dams in the West
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. […]
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 […]